Music Lyrics These Days!
No, I'm not clutching my pearls
On the way to school this morning, the first song one of my children chose to play was “Tone Deaf” by Eminem.
As I was listening to the lyrics “I can’t hear you, I have an ear in-fuck-tion and I cunt figure it out,” I thought, “shouldn’t it be ‘I CUNT hear you’?” I think that’s how we said it back in the day?
I started thinking about the changes in music since the time I was my youngest’s age. Maybe a bit younger. It was sometime during my grade school years.
My neighbor friend’s dad listened to a lot of Pink Floyd. Once, I was hanging out there and we heard the song “Money.” I wasn’t really a fan of Pink Floyd at that point (not until “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2”), but the utterance of the word Bullshit in a song had me bringing my little tape recorder over the next time I went to her house and making her play the song until I could get the word on tape perfectly! That was the first time I remember hearing a “bad word” in a song. I didn’t even like the song or want the whole song on tape, just that one word! I made good use of it!
These days. OMG. Currently, my children are obsessed with finding the songs with the most and most extreme dirty words they can! “Tone Deaf” is pretty tame compared to some of the others they have played.
I left them out in the car (they are an appropriate age for that) when I went into the grocery store to get something for dinner the other day, and they were DYING when I got back to the car, and had shut the music off while the grocery guy was putting the groceries in the trunk.
“WTF guys?” I asked.
OMG! So, we were playing (super dirty song that I don’t want to name because my mom may read this and I don’t want to get in trouble!), and this guy with a beard was at the car next to us and just gave us the weirdest look and like stared at us! We were playing the music really loud and singing and dancing!
“Please for the love of god do NOT tell me it was one of the guys that brings the groceries to your car! I’m here all the time and they know me and I will be too embarrassed to come back!” As a matter of fact, the guy that just put the groceries in my car had a beard…
They assured me that it was just a customer and not one of the workers, and continued laughing hysterically and imagining the stories that guy would tell, or imagining if it had been one of the workers and what they would say to me if I went back there…
Ohhhh mehhhh kidsssss.
I’m sure they get it from me.
I did get in trouble once as an adult for playing a dirty song. Hahahahaha!! We were in the Iowa State College hotel for my youngest brother’s wedding. It was the summer of 2002. This was the summer of Eminmen (Without Me), Nelly (Hot in Here), Jimmy Eat World (The Middle), and Avril Lavine (Complicated). I flew from Tucson, AZ to Houston, TX to drive to Ames, IA with my other brother for the wedding. So, of course I had made myself a nice selection of CD mixes for my portable CD player. We stopped at a Target on the way to the hotel and got portable speakers to hook up to my portable CD player.
One of the songs that I had on there was Khia’s “My Neck, My Back.”
I mean, come on, all the rap guys were making dirty songs.
I also had Missy Elliot’s “Work It” on the same CD. Which wasn’t quite as offensive to my step-dad.
Somewhere around the 3rd or 4th time for the weekend I started playing the Khia song, my step-dad told me that was enough. He may have even confiscated the CD briefly LOL. I like to push limits.
I was thinking about how back in the 70s, you just didn’t have dirty songs like that… but then I remembered while I was doing archaeological field school one year during the summer, one of the girls pulled out a cassette named “Copulating Blues.” (Way before the 70s). No, there wasn’t bad language in it, but it was definitely dirty! And hilarious. So, if anyone can find it or give me a list of the songs that were on it, I would LOVE it!!
~~~~Kristin