“Dad, what does this song mean,” my daughter asked, and I immediately regretted my awesome choice in music.
The car radio was blaring something that I have been mindlessly singing along too since I was a teenager. Those songs always stay with you and shape you without you even realizing it. Those songs of our youth, before we were fathers, spoke to us in a way that our parents could not. In fact, my parents hated 90% of my music. But I cut them some slack by remembering that at one point they were filthy hippies.
“Well, this is a song by Tom Petty,” I told her. I left the conversation there hoping that she wouldn’t push it. My own daughter is now a teenager and we all know that teenagers love to push.
I sometimes wonder if my teen daughter would like teen me. Probably. I listened to Tom Petty.
“Ok, but what is the song about?” she said.
A man can’t just up and quit his music, even when he has kids. It doesn’t work like that. In our heads, our youth never leaves us. On some level, we are still those teenagers that had slim waists and broad shoulders.
For us Gen Xers, we didn’t believe in the “show” or what was “presented.” At our core, we valued experiences that were stripped down to truth. When we looked at the world, we saw fluff and pretend. This is where our apathy comes from. It’s a lack of excitement about truth being hidden behind corporate slogans. We realized that we were being lied to. And our music helped us shape that belief.
But also, a lot of our songs were about weed.
“Well, you see,” I began. “This song is talking about a last dance. And that’s sad. Yes, very sad.” I thought that was a pretty good dodge. I asked my daughter if she wanted to stop for ice cream and a pony.
“I get that it’s a last dance, but who is Mary Jane?” Dammit.
One day our kids get old enough that they have to ask what the lyrics to a Tom Petty song mean. We never thought this would happen when we were younger. That is the great thing about being young. It’s about the here and now. It’s about catching that girl’s eye, flirting, and driving a 1980 blue Ford pickup that you are sure will never break down. But it does eventually breakdown and that girl that you flirted with is now your wife and you have a teen daughter together.
My daughter doesn’t want to get ice cream. She knows that I’m avoiding her question and stares at me. Who is she to judge me? I’m a dad now, I’ve got bigger responsibilities to think about. She needs to be protected. That’s my job.
The righteous anger from my own years in the early 90s rushed back into me. I am who I am. It was a different time, and I doubt that my daughter could understand that. There is no way that I can explain to her what this song is about. She isn’t ready for it. After all, she is only a teenager herself.
And there was my mistake. There was my betrayal of who we are. If Nirvana was still touring today, they would schedule a special stop at my house to punch me in the face while reminding me that corporate mags suck. I think that one mistake that our parents made with my generation is that they attempted to hide the truth from us for way too long.
But you can’t hide the truth. It always comes out in good music. Jeremy by Pearl Jam is proof enough of that. But perhaps finding out that without experienced guidance was the mistake. Actually, I’m pretty sure that is the answer.
“It’s about weed,” I told my daughter. I’m not going to be making the same mistake the older generation did. I will not be telling my kids that Elvis shook his hips because it was fun. I will not be hiding our own hypocrisy as was once done. I’m looking at you, Woodstock parents. To do so would be to turn my back on the man I was becoming all the way back in 95. “That’s what this song is basically about.”
We can shelter our kids from the world but we shouldn’t shelter them from the truth. We guide them through it. That’s what we do.
“Ok,” she said and turned it up.
“Well, let’s talk about it,” I told her. This is the first of many conversations we will have. For the rest of the ride home, we had the drug talk. The pitfalls, facts, and the current situation. We talked about the opioid epidemic. We talked about prisons and the war on drugs. I softened blows as we went, but what I told her was the truth.
It is the hubris of the old to think that our children “don’t get it” or “can’t understand.” My own teenage self calls bull on that. And I think that the younger generation does as well, and hopefully us Gen Xers are guiding them well by exposing that truth. We have teens taking active steps, becoming involved in their community in a way we never where, and holy crap speaking in front of Congress about the issues that matter. You know, Gen X, we might be doing a damn fine job. The younger generation is more engaged than ever before. It’s probably because of how our music raised us.
That’s what our music means. Truth being more about substance and less about glam. We may be known for being apathetic but we are raising some amazing kids.
“I’ve got to ask you a question now,” I told my daughter.
“Shoot,” she said.
“I don’t understand Lizzo. What is a side piece and who is sliding into DMs?”
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Takahiro Kyono from Tokyo, Japan
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