My son and I were driving home from school the other day when Gayle came on the radio, singing “ABCDE forget you.”
She doesn’t actually say “forget,” my son informed me. And she doesn’t say “broke-down car.” And she doesn’t say “stuff you call art.”
“Hang on,” he said. “I’ll play you the real one.”
I imagined Kidz Bop writers’ heads exploding.
I also imagined myself at roughly my son’s age, trying to understand why my mom didn’t want me listening to Madonna sing “Like a Virgin.” (I didn’t know what a virgin was, beyond a vague notion that it had something to do with baby Jesus and Christmas.)
I like this way better.
Parents have been scandalized by their kids’ music for roughly forever. The same year my mom was changing the station from Madonna, Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center was issuing its “Filthy Fifteen” list, featuring songs (including Madonna’s) they wanted banned from the radio. Senate hearings ensued. Parental advisory labels sprung forth. Hands were wrung.
And that was all two decades after “Puff, the Magic Dragon” had parents pulling out their fainting couches and three decades after Elvis’ hips sent the wrong kind of shivers down parental spines.
My friend and podcast partner John Duffy tells a story about his brother having to sneak a Partridge Family album into their house, lest it be confiscated by their pop music-hating parents.
I think we’re finally moving away from that era. And honestly? Not a moment too soon.
Of course there are exceptions, and of course there will always be families in which certain artists, lyrics, genres of music are forbidden (read: Kids have to enjoy them in secret).
But what I’m noticing more and more — with my own kids, their friends, my friends, families reacting to the music played in public, families learning TikTok dances together (I watched a lot of grandmas doing the Cardi B “Up” dance) — is kids and their parents setting large parts of their lives to the same soundtrack.
Music, instead of being a thing to hide or be ashamed of — or a thing to shame someone for liking — is a thing to share. A thing to enjoy together or roll your eyes at together or discuss together.
I think it’s partly why my son likes to tell me when the songs we’re hearing on the radio aren’t the “real” ones.
“I don’t know of a single better way to connect to your kids than to listen to their music, really listen, without judgment,” Duffy, who is also a family therapist, told me when I mentioned my music thoughts to him. “If you ask them what draws them to a particular song, sound or lyric, I suspect you’ll learn something about your child’s depth, thoughtfulness, their inner worlds that you have difficulty accessing any other way.”
That was definitely the case last spring when my son showed me the Lil Nas X video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” which includes the singer riding a stripper poll to hell and giving Satan a lap dance. (My mom thought the “Footloose” soundtrack was controversial.)
The Lil Nas X video led to such a fascinating discussion about gay pride and Christianity and refusing to conform and social media trolls and, to Duffy’s point, I’m really not sure how else we would have arrived at those topics so seamlessly if they weren’t handed to us on a (slightly explicit) platter.
I appreciate being let in on my kids’ worlds, even when I’m a little surprised at what goes on there.
“By showing you understand — again without judgment — you deepen your connection with your child,” Duffy said. “It’s the kind of connection that is invaluable, and can pay dividends when you need them.”
I also think it’s worth noting that a loosening of musical mores isn’t coinciding with the downfall of civilization.
The teen birth rate has been declining in the United States since 1991 and hit a record low in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Teens are waiting longer to initiate their first sexual encounter, and the percentage of young people who have sexual intercourse during high school has been dropping for decades.
Drug and alcohol use among U.S. teens dropped a record amount in 2021, according to an annual survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse that began in 1975. And the percentage of teens who said they “ever tried cigarette smoking” dropped from 70 to 24 between 1991 and 2019, and the percentage of teens who said they currently use cigarettes went from 27.5 in 1991 to 6 in 2019.
None of this is meant to imply that kids aren’t struggling, or that kids no longer find less-than-helpful ways to cope with those struggles. We’ve foisted an almost intolerable load onto their young shoulders, and now a pandemic to boot.
An antidote for all of it, though, for all of us, is connection. And music can be that connector. It can pave over some pretty rocky moments and open some really important windows into what our kids are hearing, feeling, fearing, loving.
It’s a gift when they let us in.
