Singing seems pretty important to you, and you seem to enjoy filling your day with music. You often walk around the house singing or humming to yourself and you always put a CD on before bed. Sometimes you will put on a CD and dance around the house.
Usually you insist on turning it up much too loud. This doesn’t fill me with huge amounts of hope for quiet teenage years, but I figure that if you talk to us civilly at all from the ages of ten to twenty we’ll be doing alright. Plus, loud music potentially gives us a “pulse check” when you reach the age that you won’t talk to us, so we can infer that you are alive and that everything is terrible.
Having said all of that, you don’t sing songs in the car. In the car you insist on listening to music, the type of which I can rarely predict. Your choices range from Flogging Molly to The Muppets, to Dog Train, or sometimes Jimmy Buffett. Sometimes the album or musician is requested. Other times, when you embrace living under the tyranny of choice with rational exuberance, you request a specific song.
It’s when we get to specific songs that we have problems. Requests like “Daddy, can we listen to my favorite song?” often result in equal parts of frustration as I am unable to discern what your favorite song is at this single point in time. One lucky days (for me), your favorite is either a song you have heard recently or something that recurs in your requests. On unlucky days, your favorite song seems to be something that is either an “Indie” band I have never heard of, or possibly a small group of orthodox monks who are singing songs of life and death in Latin.
Even simple requests like “Daddy, can we hear the Wimoweh song?” result in me digging around my car to find my mp3 player in the hopes that I actually have the song requested.
Much of the confusion results because you don’t always ask (or care) what the actual name of the song is. And, as often as not, when you ask me the name of a song I have no idea whatsoever, because I’m using the small amounts of my brain that have not gone cloudy to do things like drive or put my shoes on the correct feet.
So we often have a dilemma when we get in the car, where you ask for a specific song that you know and love, and I have to negotiate with you to identify the song further and then find it in the car and play it.
The other day you managed to bypass this whole problem, which I hope is a sign of things to come. You were able to pull specific words from the song so that I could identify it without any difficulty.
Unfortunately, you happened to identify a portion of the song that you probably shouldn’t readily know about and then mix up the words in a fashion that would make it sound worse than it actually is.
This past week you asked if we could hear the “Shake it up dirty song!”
The title of the song you were actually referring to is “Bad Influence” by Pink. The actual lyrics are:
Sure I'll have another one it's early
Three olives, shake it up, i like it dirty
Tequila for my friend it makes her flirty
Obviously, you do not understand the context of the song, or the subtle irony of the lyrics. You do seem to understand the appeal of the rhythm, and you enjoy the “Da-daa-daa-daa daa-da-da-daa-daaa” portion at the start of the song. Unfortunately, it seems that other parts of the lyrics have managed to imprint themselves in your memories, and your little mind has unknowingly formed it into a phrase that makes fathers of girls cringe.
Someday, as payback, I want you to explain to me why those same words don’t both fathers of boys.
