Kind of inspired by the thread about why some films are deemed inappropriate.
My son has just discovered popular music and holy shit have things changed since when I was a kid. He likes rap, and the blatantly pornographic lyrics and glorification of violent criminal lifestyles are hair-raising. (#NotAllRap, yeah, but a large portion of what’s most popular in that genre). I don’t really want him exposed to that.
The songs they play on the actual radio are the “clean” versions, but like most people in 2021, we listen mostly to internet streams, which are completely uncensored.
Now I must admit that when I was a kid, I was listening to Frank Zappa (duh), who has a whole lot of explicitly sexual lyrics. By my early teens, my favorite bands included Millions of Dead Cops and TSOL (best known for their pro-necrophilia anthem “Code Blue”. So there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy here, but my kid is only 8.
In the course of typing this out I think I’ve found the answer I was looking for. Even if I get past my anti-censorship stance, I’m never realistically going to monitor every song he listens to. I guess I’m actually going to have to have conversations with him about the lyrics and the values they promote, even if such conversations are horribly awkward for both of us. I think they call that “parenting”.
But if anyone has a better idea, I’m all ears!!
I remember taking my very young son to a children’s dentist. We walked in and “Gunpowder and Lead” by Miranda Lambert was playing.
“I’m goin’ home, gonna load my shotgun
Wait by the door, and light a cigarette
If he wants a fight, well, now he’s got one…”
I don’t think my son really understood the lyrics. (He would have asked me about them if he had, and I think he was nervous about seeing the dentist.) I did ask the receptionist to play something else, and she changed the station.
It’d be an interesting experiment to have a death metal playlist for infants (with a Mozart control, if you have more than one baby). Probably not a swell idea though.
I was at the park with my (then) five-year-old, who was happily running around with a couple of her friends. At one point, I heard them chanting/singing the nonsense syllables part from Bad Romance.
Good lord. I don’t know where they heard that. Certainly not at our house.
Could be worse I guess. I was absolutely floored the first time I heard WAP.
Yes, there is definitely music that’s inappropriate for children.
Yeah, Dynamo Hum was very pornographic, as was Bobby Brown. I listened to the first one when I was pretty young, and my sister and cousin memorized all the lyrics to Bobby Brown when they were around 6/7. Sexy Eiffel Tower by Bow Wow Wow was on the radio when I was a teen in the 80s – it’s about a woman orgasming throughout, with her yelling “I’m coming” at some point, all played on WLIR in the 1980s.
The thing is, if kids don’t get the lyrics, it’s not inappropriate, and if they do, it no longer matters. I was listening to Hey Ya with my teenaged son – it wasn’t normally censored on the radio. Then, one version we were listening to (in a video game) censored “Don’t want meet your mama/just want to make you come-a” – they bleeped out the “come-a” and only then did the lightbulb go off for him.
ETA: Ooh, forgot Dirty Love by Zappa!
I remember a mother who let her son listen to anything he wanted as long as he read the lyrics aloud to her and they discussed them. I imagine the mortification wasn’t worth the music in some cases.
I love this idea!
My first reaction upon reading the thread title was something like: I don’t think music is ever inappropriate for children; but sometimes lyrics are.
But I think it does matter that those lyrics are set to music. When we read words printed on a page or a screen, we’re usually using our critical faculties in a way that we aren’t when we’re listening to music and letting the words burrow into our brain.
It’s inappropriate if the child will act/think inappropriately as a result of the song. Results will vary.
It’s inappropriate if the child will repeat wildly obscene lyrics at inappropriate times. Which small children will do, and will do even more once they see that they get a reaction.
And those words get into the child’s brain.
My daughters might not understand the lyrics of WAP, but they would remember them. I don’t want those words in their heads. At all.