I Was Watching Grease... @Solsticepublish

My mother was a double major, Music and English.  As a result we grew up as kids watching every musical in the book.  We would watch Camelot, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, West Side Story, Godspell, The Sound of Music, The Blues Brothers the Beatles movies and pretty much any movie with Bing Crosby.  If there was a soundtrack for it, chances are we watched it and even owned it.  I was watching the movie “Grease” today.  That was always tuned in if it was on.  Its funny how many subtle and often inappropriate jokes were made in that movie that I never picked up on in my youth.  I was watching it with my twelve year old daughter and was wondering how many of the comments were going over her head and how many she actually understood.  It’s not the kind of question you ask because it forces you to explain all the hidden meanings and that would be one long conversation for no reason.  Still I watched her and wondered.  I think children have been exposed to much more adult subjects at an earlier age than I was.  Perhaps I lived a sheltered life but I think a good number of parents would agree with me that children are aware at an earlier age to things like sex and drugs than we were.  By the same token, my father told me that we were exposed to much more age inappropriate subjects than he and his generation had been.  The point was driven home for me a few years back when I was driving with my son and I was listening to the Beach Boys.  He told me that, “Their music isn’t much different from 50 Cent.  They just don’t swear.”  I am no expert on 50 Cent.  I do know that there is a world of difference to me between his styling’s and those of the Beach Boys.  From my son’s point of view, though, he saw them as the same.  It is not so dissimilar to my father lambasting my music as “junk” when compared to Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Tony Bennett and a slew of others.  It seems to be the nature of things that each generation takes music and pushes the envelope a little farther than it had previously been pushed.  Think about it.  In the 1980s you couldn’t have had a song like “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry.  It never would have flown.  In the 1970s you couldn’t have had Madonna being…Madonna.  In the early 1960s you couldn’t have had AC/DC singing, “You Shook Me…”  The list goes on.  It kind of makes me wonder what my daughter will be watching with her children one day and hope to not have to explain.