|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
I’m thrown into a full-on flashback. In the frame of my iPhone camera are two young girls, hands pressed to their faces, tears streaming down plump cheeks, glossed lips forming little O’s. Their eyes are locked onto a giant video screen, where eight gorgeous boys in matching red jackets explode into view. The girls — a teen and a tween — let out little gasps and high-pitched chirps followed by shrill demon screams. The boys — Stray Kids, K-pop royalty — are storming the stage, dancing and chanting in perfect sync: Boom, boom, chick-chick, boom.
The scene at Truist Park in Atlanta, home of the Braves, is taking me back nearly 30 years — to MTV’s second-floor studio overlooking Times Square in New York City. Working as an executive on the afternoon show TRL, I’d often stand by the windows and watch an earlier generation of teen and tween girls flood the intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street. Thousands of them, smashed together, holding signs scrawled with “I love Justin” and “Marry me, Nick,” their eyes trained on our studio for fleeting glimpses of the members of their favorite teen-pop groups: The Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, 98 Degrees.
The difference between then and now? The teen and tween here in Atlanta for their very first concert are my own family: Alora Rose and Vivia, daughters of my partner, Tandra — basically, my step-children. Another difference? In the late ‘90s, I had contempt for the teen-pop idols we brought onto MTV. In my arrogance, I knew better than the millions of teenagers who tuned in to TRL, who screamed for those boybands, who knew every word and every dance step… like I was somehow above it all. I’d have preferred that my team at TRL book more indie rock and underground hip-hop, and that our hosts would provide deeper historical and musicological context for those artists. In a nutshell: I wanted TRL to give young pop fans a crash course in the music that I thought really mattered, as if I were some kind of alternative music guru.
Ah, but I was so much older then — I’m younger than that now. These days, I’m listening more to the voices of the children in my life. And what they’re telling me is that maybe I don’t know as much as I thought. Maybe, when it comes to music and pop culture and just being a kid, I’m not the expert I once believed myself to be. After all, their Stray Kids are what the Jackson 5 once were to me and what the early Beatles were to my older sister. Had some pompous music critic tried to school me at 12 on why Bob Dylan and Gil Scott Heron were “better” than the Jackson 5, I would’ve told them to sod right off and leave my headphones alone.
AS AN OLDER PARENT who arrived late to the game of raising teens, I’ve had decades to contemplate what not to do. I’ve seen friends force-feed adult-contemporary Americana music on their kids. (Didn’t work.) I’ve seen social media posts from parents who mock their children’s teen-pop tastes. (Definitely doesn’t work.) One adult child of a prominent Boomer uncle who co-raised her told me that, as a kid, her punishment for misbehavior was to be sent upstairs to sit alone in a room and study a book about The Beatles. To this day, she hates The Beatles.
After reaching the ripe old age of 50, I vowed never to force music on any kid, my own or otherwise. When I was married to my ex-wife Tarrah several years ago, my step-daughter, Amber, was already in college, and her tastes were well established and similar to my own. (Easy-peasy.) My biggest problem then was keeping her away from my Ramones T-shirts. (I failed.) Now, with Tandra, we have Vivia, who’s 12, and her older sister, Alora, who just turned 18. Their musical tastes are still evolving. Vivia remains pretty entrenched in K-pop, although she also likes several young singer-songwriters and pop-rock acts that she hears on TikTok. Alora still loves K-pop, too, but as a budding singer-songwriter herself, her tastes are beginning to advance in a more sophisticated experimental electronic direction.
Here’s where we were last year when I decided to take the family to Atlanta to see Stray Kids: Vivia already had an elaborate collection of K-pop-related regalia (outfits, charms, photo cards, plushies), and Alora already was (and still is) mesmerized by Stray Kids heartthrob Hyunjin. As for the wide spectrum of music that I know about and love: Vivia has zero interest. Alora is somewhat curious, although she scrunches up her face when she hears certain kinds of dissonance. She once exclaimed, “God, that sounds terrible,” upon hearing the wailing final notes of Nina Simone’s classic song “Four Women.” When I tried to explain that the musical crescendo was intended to mirror the character Peaches’ bottled-up rage and the long history of trauma endured by Black women, Alora wasn’t impressed. “It just sounds terrible to me,” she said.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Watch highlights from the girls’ first concert experience:
_______________________________________________________________________________
So I listen to them. They play DJ when we go on long trips. They tell me about the music that they love. They explore their own tastes, and I get to watch them. And when or if they have questions, I’ll be there with the best answers I can come up with based on my years of following and studying popular music. For now: I learn more from them than they could possibly learn from me forcing them to listen to music that I deem “important.” I’m just thrilled that they love music and art and dancing, and that their love of it seeps into every aspect of their lives. I don’t have to understand or even like what they’re listening to. I just need to not get in their way.
SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER our summer jaunt to Atlanta to see Stray Kids, I’m driving Vivia to school one morning — the same middle school in Asheboro, North Carolina, that I attended when I was her age. The school whose halls I walked with Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” ringing in my head. As usual, I’ve handed my phone to Vivia to choose the music we’ll listen to. On this fall day, the sounds coming through the speakers of my Subaru Outback aren’t those of Stray Kids or other K-pop boybands like ATEEZ or TXT. They’re not the infectious grooves of two of my own favorite K-pop hits, “Jellyous,” by Illit, or “Gabriela,” by Katseye. What I’m hearing is an acoustic-based song with a bossa nova shuffle by a singer-songwriter named beabadoobee — the very kind of cool indie-rock artist that I’d have preferred that my team at MTV book on TRL.
This is not an unusual occurrence. During our morning drives to school, Vivia has introduced me to other young artists she’s discovered on TikTok and through friends — the non-K-pop Korean indie band Wave to Earth; the moody alt-pop artist Sombr; the sample-happy L.A. act TV Girl; and yet another indie singer-songwriter, Laufey. She’s also queued up songs by artists I already know and love: SZA, Steve Lacy, Childish Gambino.
Alora, too, has introduced me to music I’d never heard before — the world of bizarre, carnivalesque nerdcore, glitchpop, and electronic sounds made by bedroom musicians like Griffinilla, JT Music, and The Living Tombstone, who record fan-made songs for video games. Alora is also working on her own concept album of songs that nod to all of her disparate influences while also drawing emotionally from Billie Eilish, dramatically from Lady Gaga, and aesthetically from more experimental artists like FKA Twigs. The music is like nothing I’ve ever heard. Alora has written all the lyrics, composed the music on Bandlab, gone into a studio with local producers and engineers, and even has a full-on stage show mapped out in her head for when the project is done.
What I’ve learned by listening to the two young adventurous souls in my life is that I don’t need to cram down their throats a history lesson of canonical music that Mark Kemp considers important — whether Sun Ra, the Velvet Underground, Funkadelic, or Solange. They’ll find what they need to find. And I’ll always be here if they want to explore more. For now, I’m happy learning from them. Because they know. I guess what I’m trying to say is pretty much the same thing that Willie Dixon alluded to way back in the early days of the American blues revival: The men don’t know, but the little girls understand.