The other day, I wrote about how much my kids just don’t get MY music, so I thought it would be only fair for me to talk about how surprisingly out of touch I am when it comes to what they listen to. I say “surprisingly” because I always fancied myself to be rather hip. I listened to pop music, I used to know all the bands and which musician was in what band before, and who influenced whom. I guess I blinked, or played the same Melissa Etheridge album over and over a few too many times, because the world of hip popular music seemed to have passed me by.
It came as a shock when I realized my kids were talking about bands that I had never heard before and I couldn’t name the previous winners of American Idol. I’d lost it. While I have never been opposed to buying “new music”–I realized that I was buying new albums from artists that I’ve loved for two decades (or more). I don’t think that is always the same thing. A friend of mine put things in perspective for me, however, when I started to get frustrated and down on myself: “We’re forty,” she said, “We’re not supposed to be hip to all the latest music. If you were, your kids would think that was gross.” I didn’t want to tell her that my kids don’t even use the word “gross,” But, I got the message. We cannot stay young and hip forever, and who would want to really? If I had to keep all those new bands, new “genres” of music, and lyrics in my head–there wouldn’t be room for really important and age-appropriate information like remembering to pay my self-employment tax and the most urgent items on the grocery list!