A Dad Remembers the Day His Parents Put Their Foot Down and Now He’s Glad

Brian Anderson had different values when he was a teen wanting to buy a certain CD. Now he is glad his parents said no and looks at the ideals he might have embraced.

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The coolest band in my sixth grade class was KoЯn.  It was 1997.  I was twelve, and my lame parents wouldn’t let me buy a KoЯn CD.

Now I’m in the 21^st  grade, so two weeks ago I bought one.

But before I tell you about that you need to understand how important it was to have a KoЯn CD in In Lamar, CO in 1997.  Though the x-games scene was more closely linked to punk music than to nu metal bands like KoЯn, living so far out on the prairie with a large proportion of parents who block MTV from cable subscriptions made it difficult to keep our nineties youth subculture movements straight.  Goth, ska, punk, skate, grunge: if it was alt in the nineties, we threw it in the mix and called it skater.

This was basically our working definition: A skater was someone who wore JNCOs and had the word KoЯn written with white-out on his Five-Star binder (skateboard optional). A Preppy, on the other hand, was someone whose mommy still picked out their clothes for them.  I didn’t make the rules.  I didn’t like the rules.  But that was it.  Either you listened to KoЯn or you wore Levi’s which was basically equivalent to admitting that you hadn’t started puberty yet.

And I was not allowed to get a KoЯn CD.

Two weeks ago, I hadn’t thought about KoЯn in years.  Despite not ever owning a KoЯn CD, I’d somehow managed to go through puberty and was at the store buying diapers for my baby.  But when I saw a brand new copy of KoЯn’s self-titled album in a $0.99 bin, that album cover that I’d only glimpsed before in cool kids’ lockers, caused a flood of prepubescent peer pressure to wash over me, and since my parents lived hundreds of miles away, I picked it up and bought it.

I opened the package when I got to the car.  I easily pealed the cellophane off and then spent several minutes trying to peel off that damn sticker label seal on the top.  This moment that been percolating since 1997.

But the first thing I noticed was the cover.  It was some kind of kidnapping or something.  I understand why a band would want to put a daemon or something rebellious, but why this creepy image?  What exactly about child abduction says rock ‘n’ roll?  Who are they trying to rebel against? The liner notes were no better.  They we filled with pictures of women reduced to sex-objects with labels like “slut” and “whore” obscuring their faces.

I felt embarrassed to have that booklet; I didn’t want my wife to find it and get the wrong idea about the coolest band in 6th grade, so I put the CD my stereo and dropped the case into a public garbage can in the parking lot before heading for home.

I got about 2 minutes into the first song before I thought, “I bet the next song is better.”  The second song was much quicker.  Before I got home I had skipped every song on the CD.  Some songs skipped because the lyrics were offensive (like the f-word.  Not the funny f-word. The mean f-word).  Some I skipped because lyrics seemed shallow and/or unintelligible.  Some I skipped because the drop-A seven-string sound seemed like boring white noise.  Some I skipped because singing “Ring a Round the Rosie” in a sexy happy-birthday-Mr. president voice just smacks with effort.

The inventiveness of bands like System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine have made them some of my very favorites since I first discovered them, so it’s not like I think rock and roll is a tool of the devil.  I think, in general, that both making and listening to music—everything from Mozart to hymns to KoЯn—are important ways for people to communicate and process complex emotions.

So from a first amendment perspective, I’m glad they made that CD.   But I’m glad that I didn’t listen to that KoЯn album just because all the cool kids were listening to it.  Because cool kids generally suck pretty hard.

I’m glad my parents were willing to make themselves a little less popular with me to give me a better experience with music and with life.  Because as a twelve-year-old, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize that CD for what it was.  I would have loved it, and I’m so glad I didn’t have that misogyny and violence bouncing around in my head when I was dating, or getting married, or having a kids.  I hope to have the same kind of relationship with my kids.

So what am I going to do when my future 12-year-olds bring home Justin Bieber’s Sexy Satan—the coolest album of 2023?  I don’t know maybe make them wear JNCOs until they get a little perspective on fads.

Or, put my foot down.

 

Photo: Flickr/Iron Miden