Budding Insufferable Music Snobs.

Happy 4th of July, Americans! Here's a photo I took from last night's fireworks show in Romeoville. Many Chicago area residents trek down to the lake to watch the firework show, which is undeniably a good show, but we're too lazy for that. So we spread some beach towels down on the grass of the Romeoville public park with the rest of what Anna Wintour referred to as "little houses" and we had a jolly time.

See how I get distracted from the point before I even start the blog post? Now I have no segue to get to from fatly watching fireworks with other people fatly watching fireworks to what I was going to briefly discuss, which is my attempts in the kids' musical education.

Their taste isn't that bad, really. I've kept them away from Radio Disney ever since the AM dial in my car broke. Steve keeps the radio in his car turned to jazz, because he's not only a little house, but an 80-year-old house as well, a house that clearly has faulty wiring somewhere on the second floor that makes him want to listen to smooth jazz. (See how I tied the first paragraph in with the second? Whew!)

They like Green Day, and Alex has a huge crush on P!nk, who I love just for this one song:



I've been trying to educate them on The Beatles, explaining their importance in pop music culture, and of course this week has been a tutorial of Michael Jackson, from the Jackson 5 through Thriller.* In my car, it's WXRT all the time, which plays enough Green Day to keep them happy. If you listen to XRT, you are of course familiar with Terri Hemmert and her runaway obsession with The Beatles. I respect Hemmert for her vast musical knowledge as well as the fact that she is one of the nation's top radio DJs, but I think by this point she's become the 800 pound gorilla at the XRT studios, and if the gorilla wants to play non-stop Beatles, then by god she's going to get what she wants.

I've yet to hear her inflict Revolution #9 on her listening audience yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. I mentioned to the kids while listening to the white album's "Revolution" in the car that on the same album there is a track called "Revolution #9," and it gives me the creeps. Of course they were all about hearing it then, and nagged me until I put it on the CD player for them when we got home.

I present to you now their reviews on it:

Christopher: It sounds like an angry mob being chased by a swarm of bees.

Alex: Besides somebody saying "Number 9" over and over again, it's mostly a bunch of crap.

I think they're both right.



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*Alex loved Michael Jackson's music, and I've tried as hard as I can to focus solely on his music and his groundbreaking talent and not his personal life. Due to the extraordinary amounts of plastic surgery he chose to inflict on himself, plus the weird skin-lightening, which I do not really believe was vitiligo, a condition I have seen first hand and looks nothing like that, this has been extremely difficult. We've still managed to avoid the child molestation trial, but I'm sure that will eventually be discovered as well.

The Fights You Caused On the Playground.

Time has started to blur for me just a little bit now. I'm losing a memory with every new gray hair. But I still remember so clearly being on the playground at recess in third grade, waiting to play Charlie's Angels, and we couldn't because of the passionate fight for the opportunity to be you.

Time was ticking away, and one by one the other girls trickled off to convene in a corner of the playground to call up the ghost of Elvis Presley, but two of the girls just wouldn't let it go, despite Cathy Anne's pleading attempt at diplomacy, "There can be two Farrah Fawcetts, okay?"

The whistle sharply tweeted from the lips of the supervising teachers parked on their lawn chairs, and recess was over. The girls in the corner holding the seance all screamed abruptly as a flash of rhinestones and a whiff of Brut shimmered in the protective circle their bodies made, but we didn't have any kind of adventure that day, due to the unbearable thought of not being able to walk in your shoes, just for a minute, just in our own minds. Just once.

Attention!

Christopher has an announcement.