I Got The Music In Me

It's March 19th in New England and we have yet another snow day. After sleeping in and grumbling a bit, my teenage daughter settled herself on the TV room couch. My husband is (yet again) shoveling and I'm working in my home office. 

But, my teen is not exactly alone; she has her iPhone and my iPad.

These days, it seems like the age-old divide between adolescents and their parents can be measured in personal electronic devices. Yes, I own as many as my daughter does, but they are not my lifelines (or more like additional limbs) as they seem to be for her.

When I was fifteen, the only new-fangled technology I owned was a Sony Walkman and a Texas Instruments calculator — both of which I cherished, BTW. If I wanted to watch something, I used my parents' TV. If I wanted to listen to music, I did so via cassette tapes and vinyl records, just like my mom and dad did. But that's where the common ground stopped.

At fifteen, music plays a critical role in helping us define who we are. In a recent New York Magazine story (Why You Truly Never Leave High School), Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University developmental psychologist and expert on adolescence, explained it this way:

“... no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.” 

Puberty and adolescence are the periods when our brains sort us into the categories that determine the type of person we are. "I'm the type of person who does this. I'm the sort of person who likes that." And then it follow us ever after. As Steinberg relates to himself, “There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers.” But, at an earlier, impressionable, formative age, he determined that he was "the type of person who likes the Allman Brothers." And the rest, as they say, is history.

These days, my daughter is all about Imagine Dragons. This morning, she approached me with great excitement because the band has published (online, of course) its upcoming concert schedule. This summer at Boston University, but not open to the public. ("Arrrrrrrgh! Mom! Dad! Who do we know at B.U.?") December in Columbus, Ohio. (Errr ... no, despite the presence of our best friends there, we are not going to spend $1,000 on airfare to see a concert on a school night.) And, some future date that I can't remember in Paris. (Okay, that one I might consider ... Not.)

I asked her, reasonably enough, if they are her favorites now because she got to see them live a few weeks ago. She said they would be her favorites anyway. 

Her love runs deep.

Mine does not. 

Frankly, like countless mothers before me, I don't get it. I know — I'm vaguely aware of, would be a more appropriate choice of words — some of their songs. "It's Time" was covered on Glee, and "Radioactive" has a bizarre video with a gangster Lou Diamond Philips and a bunch of Muppets on crack. I am by no means an expert.

But, that's okay. 

Frankly, I don't have to like her music. Just like my parents didn't have to like mine (although, in truth, my mom and dad were way cooler than the average moms and dads back then). I don't get the music, but I do get the feeling. And that feeling will stay with my teenager long past her teen years. Just like Steinberg, I'm a focus group of one that proves this.

What's in my car right now?

Eagles: The Very Best Of
Janis Ian Between the Lines
Billy Joel, Greatest Hits Volume I and II
Elvis Costello, My Aim is True
Carly Simon Hotcakes
The Best of the Commodores
Changes 1 Bowie

And, as always, a lot of Elton John.

This selection is more a snapshot of a moment in time than loyalty to a particular genre, artist or style. Most of these CDs would not please either my husband or my child. But, when I'm alone and I hit "Play," I am instantly transported to my teens — an emotional period, certainly, but one that was filled with hopes and dreams and expectations that have faded over the past 35 years.

Until, that is, I hit "Play."

Gangnam Style Mom

Remember when we were teenagers and we'd listen to our favorite records? (Remember records?) Invariably, our parents would bang on the door and tell us to turn down the volume on our stereos. (Remember stereos?) The noun used most often for our beloved popular music was "noise." As in, "Turn down that noise!"

At the time, of course, we couldn't imagine being so square, so old, so completely out of it that we would confuse music with noise.

Well, what goes around, comes around. My teen daughter and I may share many things, but our musical tastes are ... um ... different. I hate to confess it, but I just don't get a lot of today's hits.

Thank goodness for Zumba. Really. If it weren't for my Zumba classes, I would be even more in the dark about contemporary tunes than I am. You see, 2-3 times a week (4, if I'm being particularly good), I not only hear the latest songs, I dance to them.

This past week, two of my instructors added "Gangnam Style" by South Korean rapper Psy to our class. It must have been hysterical to watch a room filled with mainly middle-aged women gyrating and galloping in a sorry attempt to imitate PSY's signature move. (I'm sure any flies on the wall were laughing themselves to death.)

"Hey, sexy lady" indeed. 

By anyone's measure, "Gangnam Style" is a worldwide phenomenon. With nearly 530 million (yes, million!) hits on YouTube, the video has been parodied by everyone from the British Prime Minister to the United States Naval Academy. It has provided the catchy soundtrack to countless flash mobs. And, it has been praised as a "force for world peace" by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. 

Say what?

This morning, a friend had posted a video meme of the song on Facebook. I absentmindedly hit play as I was packing my daughter's lunch. The song's ubiquitous techno beat opening started up.

"Ohmigod! What are you doing?" my daughter called out in utter disgust.

"I'm just looking at a "Gangnam Style" video," I explained.

"Ohmigod," she repeated. "That's just wrong on so many levels!"

I didn't ask her to elaborate. I mean, how many levels of wrong can one mom take? Instead, I shut it off quickly and decided to wait until she was safely out of the house on her way to high school before attempting to watch it again.

It made me wonder, however, what other teens may be thinking about "Gangman Style." Is it cool? Is it stupid? Or, perhaps more to the point, was it cool and now it's stupid because so many moms are trying to dance to it at Zumba? 

Mystery solved. Here's a take on it directly from the teens themselves: 

"I do! I just like it so much!"

"The way you feel about it is just like awesome."

"This is the randomest video I've ever seen. But, it's the best video."

That last one, my friends, is my favoritest quote.

SOPA is Not Music to Anyone's Ears

We had a flood in our basement last Fall. We lost our washing machine, some cherished mementos and a boatload of — to use the technical term — crap. At first, we thought the nearly 200 LPs that were stored down there were gone, but it turns out the water didn't reach them. Nevertheless, we saw this as a sign from some prescient DJ in the sky. We've lived here thirteen years and haven't ever dusted off the records much less tried to play them. Time to say ...

"Good-bye, yellow brick road."

Our first stop was a used record store in the next town over. Two extremely cool, aging hippies came out to sort the albums right in the trunk of our car. (Have you ever picked up a crate of records? You don't want to carry them anywhere if you don't have to!) It quickly became a competition: whose albums were worth more? My showtunes or my husband's Southern rock? Stevie Nicks or David Bowie? Bruce Springsteen or Prince?

If nothing else, we were a source of amusement. And insight. By the end of the process, I think the record store dudes knew more about each of us than any therapist could.

And, at the risk of gloating, I was ahead by a couple of titles when all was said and done. The used record store took 28 albums. We took our proceeds (all $56 of them) and went out for a nice lunch. That would have been the end of the story (or the end of an era), but we still had a trunkful of records.

A couple of days later, my husband pulled up at Savers, and unloaded what was left. The young kid working there was impressed. "Whoa," he said. "Did you, like, collect these?"

We laughed about it later. The albums may have weighed a ton and taken up the entire trunk of our sedan, but no, they weren't a collection per se. They were the 1970s and 80s equivalent of an iPod.

I still buy music. Given the choice, I'll still purchase a CD. Even if I plan to upload all of the tracks into iTunes and listen to them on my iPhone. It goes back to 1976, when I would use babysitting money to buy the latest Elton John release at "Cheap Records" near Bloomingdales on Manhattan's East Side. Any title $3.69.

This is one of many (okay, many many many many) things that speak to the generation gap between myself and my tween daughter. She had a handful of CDs when she was younger: Disney movie soundtracks, High School Musical, Hannah Montana. Then, she graduated to a hand-me-down iPod and all the downloads her iTune gift cards could buy. Today, she knows better. Using her iPhone, she can listen to (and watch) pretty much any music she wants. YouTube, Facebook, even individual musicians' websites provide streaming musical content. Why purchase something when it's out there and readily accessible? Why commit to a particular song or artist or album when there will be something new next week?

The idea of owning music is as passé as the bell bottoms and Frye boots I wore on my weekly trips to Lexington and 58th Street.

However, my daughter is still supporting the musicians she likes. While I bought as much vinyl as I could afford, she and her friends are willing to spend big bucks to see their favorite performers live. From this mother's perspective, it seems as if the recording industry has evolved its financial model. I paid very little to see a group at Madison Square Garden and then bought all their recordings. My daughter consumes recordings through free social media. But, she has no issue with the idea of a $100 Katy Perry ticket. (That's actually pretty reasonable. If we were lucky enough to get Lady Gaga tickets, we would have to take out a home equity loan.)

Right now, there is a lot of debate about SOPA, the hotly contested "Stop Online Piracy Act." Should my daughter and her friends be arrested for listening or linking to copyrighted material online? Of course, I don't think so. But, should artists be able to protect and profit from their art? Yes.

The Internet is the single greatest game changer that we (or any previous generation I can think of) have lived through. Trying to mold laws governing analog objects to fit digital information will not succeed — unless we are willing to undo any progress that has been made in terms of information-sharing, research, business and communications. This doesn't just affect the entertainment industry. The ability to share content is critical to continued improvements in science, healthcare, human rights and domestic security.

Before a person (or blog or website) should be prosecuted for copyright infringement, a few common sense criteria should be applied. Are they willfully passing off someone else's work as their own? Are they profiting from the posting or link? Is the work readily available for license or purchase but they knowingly circumnavigated the process? Did they even know they were doing something wrong? The proposed SOPA bill would make bloggers responsible for comments posted by readers. It would make enormous new media channels like eBay, YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook liable for all of the activities of their hundreds of millions of members. It would make posting a video of a married couple's first dance together a felony.

And, under SOPA, owners of websites are encouraged to shut down content first and ask questions later. You are guilty until proven innocent. 'Doesn't sound very American to me. The so-called conspiracy-theorists who worry that SOPA will forever change the nature of the Web are not crying "wolf."

My daughter and her friends don't remember a world before the Internet. They don't see any difference between music my husband and I listen to on the radio and music they listen to on a Web site.

Except that the radio is our thing and the Web is theirs.

To learn more and/or to sign a petition asking your representatives to rethink SOPA, click here.