COMMENTARY: Singing words we would never speak

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Dale Hanson Bourke is the publisher of Religion News Service and author of”Turn Toward the Wind”.) (UNDATED) A few years back, when Tipper Gore and Susan Baker launched a bipartisan mother’s campaign to label record albums, I watched from the sidelines. My children were listening to nothing racier than Raffi, […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is the publisher of Religion News Service and author of”Turn Toward the Wind”.)

(UNDATED) A few years back, when Tipper Gore and Susan Baker launched a bipartisan mother’s campaign to label record albums, I watched from the sidelines.


My children were listening to nothing racier than Raffi, so I drew upon my own experience as a teen-ager. I can still remember my parent’s footsteps growing slower as they passed my bedroom, hoping to hear a word from one of my albums. They had suspicions about my music, but since even I couldn’t understand the lyrics, we confined most of our debates to volume.

But now I have a teen-ager of my own. And it’s time to apologize to Tipper and Susan for not supporting them, and even to my own mother for showing what I now see was considerable restraint. As much as I believe in free speech, I am grateful that at least the labels on CDs in stores today serve as a warning that the words being sung are often not ones used in a civil society.

My own awakening occurred last weekend at the mall. My son had heard a song on the radio he liked. I had liked it, too. It had a nice rhythm and the thoughts expressed were repetitive and inane, but not offensive. He decided to buy the CD and harassed me until I promised to drive him to the record store.

I took him to the mall and hid in the bookstore so no one would know that he had a mother. (I am not so old as to forget the incredible embarrassment of being seen in public with your parents.) He went off to the record store to buy his CD.

At the appointed time we met on a bench where we could act as if we didn’t know each other and I looked at the floor and mumbled,”Did you get the CD?””Naw,”he said, while looking the other direction and not moving his lips.”What happened?”I asked, blowing our cover by looking right at him.”They wouldn’t sell it to me,”he said.”They told me I had to have my parent’s permission. It’s got one of those stupid labels on it,”he said.

And then he added,”Most stores sell you the albums anyway, even if you’re not old enough.” By now my son was ready to leave the mall, since he was sure all of his cool friends had seen him with me and he was ruined for life. So as we drove home, we began to discuss the issue of lyrics.

I broached the big question:”Have you bought other albums with warning labels on them?””Just one or two,”he said.”I never listen to the words anyway.”(I felt a wave of nostalgia as he said it. I used that one myself on occasion.)


And then I crossed the line.”Would you mind showing me the lyric sheets from the albums?”I asked, trying not to sound like the suspicious, prying mother I knew I had become.”Oh mom,”he said, just the same way I used to say it to my own mother.

The memory of my own parent’s persistence fortified me. I bugged him until he finally turned over the lyrics.

Now, I was a teen-ager in the 70s. I went to Deep Purple concerts and loved Jefferson Airplane even after they morphed into a Starship. I am not a prude and I believe in artistic freedom. But several of the songs on my son’s CDs had lyrics so vile that I was shocked that anyone thought them up, let alone printed the words and then sang them.

I am not just talking about”bad”words. I am talking about perverse views of sex that demean women and even children. And words that are calculated to incite violence and cheapen human life.

If these words were used in a public forum, we would all be outraged. But instead we let them be played privately, not knowing the impact or even realizing what socially unacceptable concepts have been set to music.

I’m not an advocate of censorship. But I am an advocate of informed choices. Thanks to the labels on CDs, teens and parents can know what is being offered before they buy them. But without the involvement of parents, the labels mean nothing.


Yesterday I called the record store where my son shopped to thank the manager for enforcing the label warning. From now on, my son and I have agreed that he won’t buy albums with warning labels, even if he can get away with it.

And I have now learned to take the time to read lyric sheets, even in my own CDs. Seems I’m still not very good at understanding the words. Once I read them, I discovered that some of my own music was pretty unacceptable. So I promised my son that I will live by the same standards I have imposed on him.

I told my son this morning that I was planning to buy the Beatles’ complete CD set so we could listen to it as we drive to school.”Oh mom,”he groaned.”That music is so gross.” I just smiled, secure in the knowledge that history repeats itself and someday he will have a teen-ager of his own to harass.

MJP END BOURKE

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