RSS Feed
|
|||||
|
If you want to find out just how hopelessly outdated you are, go on a car trip with your teenager. There you are stuck inside a moving vehicle for hours on end and one of the first things you do is attempt to find a good radio station. After all you can only carry on a one-sided conversation so long and my son's and my range of allowable topics (He decides what is allowable and what isn't, and the list ain't that long), barely gets us out of the driveway!! You know the drill. I say how was school, he grunts back. I ask if anything interesting happened, he grunts back and there we are already out of the driveway. With approximately four more hours of travel time to go, the radio is our lifeline. Unable to slap on a pair of headphones while he is driving (my rule, not his), we tried to find a good radio station. "How about Country & Western" I suggested. Now if that classification seems right to you, then I'm afraid you are in the same ballpark as I am, and the name of the park is Geezerville! As my teenager pointed out "It's not called that anymore, it's just country and it should be called country pop anyway and it blows." Which if you don't have children, is no a compliment. I next learned that I could take all the classifications of music that I was used to and ditch them. No more Heavy Metal, Classical, (which we called Long Haired Music when I was a teenager, for some perfectly logical reason that totally escapes me now, as do many other details, too many to mention in this story), Pop, or Rock and Roll. You can forget all those because the only music in the entire world worth listening to is Classic Rock. At least in The World According to Cody. My son can tell you who the artist is, and the band, and the name of the song, all after hearing just a snippet of the tune. All of which is really mind-boggling because he doesn't remember a thing that I want him to. You know-things like bringing down dirty clothes before his room looks like an explosion went off in it, and getting to school on time. And silly things really, like getting homework done or calling his poor old mother if he is going to be late getting home before every hair on my head is white from stress and worry and not the nice gray color it is now after having four children! But to get back to the point, and I know I had one at one time, not only is Classic Rock the only kind of music worth listening to but it has classifications of its own. Songs can be divided into these categories: Bad, Nasty, Bad Nasty, Mad, Mad Ill, and the Mad Illest or Maddest Ill. If you don't have a teenager to ask, all of those names imply good, groovy, neat-o, rad or totally cool music! All of these genres seem to be decided by how good the instrumentals are in the song and nothing at all to do with the words and whether or not you can sing along to them. Frankly, I'm afraid singing along to the radio is just another example of how totally out of date I really am. It's okay to know all the words to the songs and actually is cool (my generation's word, not his). Saying the line before the band gets to it, is good, so people know that you know your stuff, but do not under any circumstances actually try to sing along with the band. This is a guaranteed eye roller and puts you firmly in the dark ages. The volume of the radio is another sticky wicket, as the British say. I think we should be able to hear an ambulance's siren if it comes up behind us, as my mother taught my sister and me, but my son feels ear bleeding levels are the norm and avoids all possibility of conversing, which I keep trying for. It's not that my son and I don't talk, we do; I talk and his eyes glaze over. If you have ever heard the teacher in Charlie Brown movies, you know how parents sound to their children. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah! I discovered when my first child became a teenager, oh so many years ago, that a moving vehicle was the perfect place to carry on a meaningful conversation (my choice of topics not theirs), because as long as you kept the speed up to about 75 mph they couldn't jump out to avoid the discussion and you couldn't take your eyes off the road to see if they were making funny faces at you or doing that pretend gagging thing with their fingers down their throat. By taking the time to try and explain the difference between Mad and Mad Ill music my son and I were, without giving it much thought, having a real conversation. It was a conversation that we both enjoyed and made the long trip much more fun for both of us. Jill Montgomery and family live in Braintree where classic rock rules the radio waves at their house. ____________ | |||||
