Broken English is a truly remarkable album that deserves its place in the annuals of English history somewhere alongside Gropecunt Lane.
The first artist to use “cunt” with its more precise, anatomical meaning in mind was also the first woman on record to utter it in a pop song: the incomparable Marianne Faithfull, on her 1979 comeback masterpiece Broken English. The former ’60s folk darling and Rolling Stones associate had spent two years homeless in London, battling drug addiction; fusing punk, new wave, and reggae, Broken English was a frayed-nerve statement from a woman who had been through hell and back. Adapted from a Heathcote Williams poem, its final track, “Why D’Ya Do It?” tells the tale of a woman confronting her unfaithful lover: “Why d’ya do it, she screamed, after all we’ve said/ Every time I see your dick I see her cunt in my bed.”
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