I love Old School rap music. I’m not sure why, but I cannot deny it. So I don’t deny it at all! I listen to it on Pandora and know all the words. Even the dirty stuff I love. It seems inappropriate to listen to at age 47, but then again who wants to be ‘appropriate’ all of the time? Not me.
In thinking about rap music, it makes me think of my daughter, here in Mother’s Day season. My 13 year-old daughter also loves it, which I didn’t know until about a month ago. We listen to electronica dance music on the radio all of the time together (think Coachella Music Festival). That’s what we like.
So one day my daughter links her phone up with my Bluetooth in the car and starts playing some rap music. Its current stuff, and its sooo ‘not appropriate’!!! So I say, as a good mother would, “That’s not appropriate! You can’t listen to that.”
She says back, “It’s all not appropriate mom.” She goes on to tell me that she just ‘loves rap music.’ The poetry, rhythm, beat, energy, mood lifting, and more. She has a point. Plus, I know that if we told her she couldn’t listen to it, she would just have to anyways because she loves the beat and the way the words rhyme and the way she can dance to it. So I’m just listening to her, and as I am, I look over at her, and she is rapping away to something wicked fast (which I’m impressed by) and she’s so happy. Sigh.
There were signs along the way… she memorized and could rap “Ice, Ice Baby” when she eight. She went as Mackelmore for Halloween when she was in 5th grade. I thought it was cute back then. Maybe she inherited this rap gene from me. Am I bad mother if I allow it to continue? Could I stop this train if I wanted to? My parents couldn’t with me, and I think I turned out alright. What’s been happening is what happens with all parents… letting go of control and realizing my own kin is just like me. Isn’t that Cat’s in the Cradle (“the boy was just like me…he’d grown up just like me”). But the singer is sad in that song. This singer/mother is choosing not to be sad, but to laugh at how much her daughter is like her. This mother is also not going to resist against what is: her daughter likes rap music, just like her, and we will all be okay. ;-)
