CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Music, Teenagers, and The Digital Age

Saturday, May 12, 2007

this entry brought to you by toadies, "possum kingdom"



I'm a rational person, so I obviously don't think music can lead anybody to kill anyone. Over the years, it's become increasingly obvious that any idiot parent saying that music made their child do anything beyond wear stupid clothes or smoke marijuana isn't ready to look anywhere near the right places for an answer. With that said, I do believe that music does have an affect on impressionable teenagers. If a parent wanted to say their child's love of music lead to drugs, well, it would be hard to argue, because when you hear a bad-ass mofo that you idealize talking about smoking blunts or Mr. Brownstone or whatever, it's really easy to completely ignore all the dark things that are also mentioned either intentionally or not intentionally, and completely buy into the glamorization of that. I also think that music can affect a teenager's views on sex and gender politics. As a barometer for coolness, music is essentially the epicenter of it, and while I don't think anyone is lead to do anything they absolutely would never do otherwise, music can help mold and shape teenagers into a person opposite to what a parent might want, and as a parent I see absolutely nothing wrong with restricting certain kinds of music in their homes.

What always amazed me about these idiot parents of psychotic children, in the aftermath of some horror, whether they went and killed other people, or killed themselves, is that the parents are so quick to point the finger at musicians. But what I never understood is how exactly the parent didn't notice what their teenager was listening to. If they think that, say, Marilyn Manson made their kids do these horrible things, at what point did they come to this conclusion? At what point did they realize that Marilyn Manson wasn't something their kids should listen to? What I mean by that is, how does a parent not walk by their children's room and hear what's going on in there? How does a parent walk by their lonely, brooding teenager's room and overhear the music blasting and not say "Wait, did that guy just say 'When I'm God everybody dies'?" Because the thing is, teenagers are the least subtle creatures on the planet. They blast their music at such insane levels it warrants multiple yells of "Turn that shit down!" They throw posters of their heroes on their walls-- how do you live in the same house as your brooding teenager for more than a dozen years and not notice that poster of Marilyn Manson naked, humping a bible? How do you not see “MARILYN MANSON RULZZ” written on their Trapper Keepers, on their t-shirts, blasting from the car stereo as they roll into the parking lot from having borrowed the car for the evening? If you think Marilyn Manson drove your child to killing a group of people in his school, why didn't you stop him from listening to Marilyn Manson months and months before it ever got to that level? You don't need to invade your teenager's privacy to notice their CDs strewn about their room half hazardly, and to see the big "Explicit Lyrics" sticker on the cover. You don't need to be an oppressive fascist to not notice the Pentagram drawn on his hand.

...But then again, all this was years ago, when music was bought in a store, and was printed in the form of CDs and vinyls and cassettes. It was never difficult to just simply look and see what exactly your kid was listening to, and to simply put it in the player and see if it was acceptable for your child's listening. But here's what worries me about parenting in the 21st century: MP3s.

Nowadays, kids don't go out and spend their allowance on music. There's already a whole generation of kids that grew up listening to music that they downloaded off the Internet. And as a parent, all the obvious signs of the posters on the wall and the t-shirts and the scribbles on the Trapper Keeper are all still going to be true. But you could argue how often, exactly, parents from this point forward are going to be saying "Turn that shit down!", when music nowadays is played on MP3 players, which usually come with a handy dandy set of headphones with which to listen. There's still going to be kids with stereos, but any teen worth his beans is going to have an Ipod and a set of headphones. Furthermore, all their music is obtained on-line, where it's impossible to control what they can and can't get their hands on. Sure you can just turn on a firewall on your computer so that he doesn't download anything, but he can get more music than he could possibly want with a simple jack into a friend's computer for free. And simply not giving your kid access to an MP3 player would be completely unreasonable and borderline insane-- if your kid likes music, and more than likely he or she will, to deny them an MP3 player would be the equivalent of your parents denying you a CD player when your tape player worked just fine. You could go through your teen's stock of music on their MP3 player, but playlists on Ipods can change so quickly even the nosiest parents can't keep up, and it wouldn't be difficult for them to just burn music they don't want you to know about to unmarked CD-Rs-- what kind of parent would you be if you went through your kids' piles of CD-Rs looking for questionable music content?

I suppose the answer to all these questions is that you can't control what your kids listen to anymore from this point forward, and that you must be more vigilant with all the other signs, and watch your teenager's behavior more carefully, which really, any parent should be doing anyway. But the "My House, My Rules, and I say you can't listen to that under my roof" rule has essentially been thrown out of the window in the new digital age.
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on this day last year remember when the "phone of the hook" tone went on and on forever?
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with love from CRS @ 9:38 AM 

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