The Daily Wail

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized
           The Daily Mail is at it again!  For those US readers, the Mail is one of the most-read of the London daily newspapers, mentioned in the lyrics to The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer.”  Its stance is not quite as right wing as Fox News, (they’ve even hired the occasional liberal columnist) but some of the arrogance from their veteran columnists comes from the same gene pool as Fox. On Saturday, November 14, the Mail ran an article by one Penny Marshall (obviously not the “Laverne & Shirley” star), entitled “So What’s On Your Child’s iPod?” Yes, there apparently still is a quorum of disgruntled parents who wish their kids would listen to something harmless like the Osmond records they listened to in their youth.

             This debate of whether Pop Music corrupts our children goes back at least 55 years, to the age when R&B songs were being bought by white teenagers in favor of the white bowdlerizations that the more mainstream record labels were foisting on the public as “a pleasant alternative.”  The complaint then, mostly from the Southern racists, was that this music was bringing kids down to the level of the Black man. Soon after, when Rock & Roll officially arrived, many parents groups linked it to juvenile delinquency. Nice try, but Rock & Roll couldn’t screen its audience, and because it was so immediately popular, it attracted elements from all socio-economic levels. Many parents would have been happy then if Pat Boone and his ilk had ruled the roost, but thankfully, common sense prevailed, and a space was made for the Boones to co-exist with the Elvises.
 
            Marshall’s article devotes a lot of space to Lily Allen’s “Not Fair,” one of the most fun songs of 2009, singling it out as a corrupting influence because of its references to oral sex and her partner’s inability to make her climax. The words fly by quickly, but Marshall seems to worry about having to explain the true meanings to her primary school children. Maybe it’s awkward for her to have to explain these things, hoping to wait til her child is, oh, 21, but eventually it’s going to have to happen. In America in the 90s, the questions about oral sex came up not from something the kids heard on the radio, but from a government trying to bring a president down for being caught in an “inappropriate relationship” with one of his interns. A lot of kids in the late 90s asked their parents “What’s oral sex?” and many probably balked at explaining it, which only exacerbated the confusion.

                 I personally have never had children of my own, but was a stepdad for five years, and one of the times I felt most parental was when I had to explain what the “c-word” meant after my 9-year-old stepson mentioned being called one on the schoolground.  It didn’t become part of his lexicon as a result. Similarly, I had a more recent encounter with the teenaged daughter of a friend, who was asking what was the deal with Britney Spears’ “If You Seek Amy,” a truly horrible record, but not because of its implications. It only took spelling it out, literally, and that was the end of discussion. She absorbed it much better than an audience of adults I played to in Nottingham two nights later, for whom I had to do a lot more than spell it out. Granted, not all kids are as intelligent as the two I’ve dealt with, but it seems pretty certain that any claims of explicit Pop music corrupting our youth are highly exaggerated, just as they always have been. Just MAYBE the kids like the salacious songs because of the music? 

                   Yes, the things said in recordings of today leave less to the imagination, but in a way it was worse when investigators into the corrupting influence of Pop Music, particularly in the 60s and 70s, tried to find hidden meanings that weren’t there, or tried to play records backwards to find hidden satanic or drug references. The religious Right had a field day, but did they really have to implicate “Puff The Magic Dragon?” That was written as a kids’ song, end of story. It’s amusing that The Beatles’ “Please Please Me” has more recently been interpreted as a song about oral sex, but if it was on John Lennon’s mind to write such a double entendre song, he so craftily disguised it that maybe he’s all the genius we believed he was and more.

                 The words in today’s tunes do address the world of sex more directly, but in even the most misogynistic of songs, most of it is done tongue in cheek. The hard core rappers don’t advocate rape, even if their songs may treat it passively. Just remember that most Pop Music is fiction, and your job as a parent will be much easier. We don’t need more gloom and doom messages from The Daily Wail and its staff. Of course, the Mail is also guilty of thinking it’s a serious newspaper just because it doesn’t have women posing topless on page 3. 

November 10th, 2009



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