Silly Kids, Love your Parents | Too Young for Springsteen?

• Tweet

When I was a kid, I had acquired my musical taste from my 13 year old babysitter. But she wasn’t just into teeny bopper garbage. She was up on what was new. What was fresh and hip. Because of her I was definitely too cool for school when I’d hit the classroom in the am still bopping my head to the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill, Run DMC’s Raising Hell, LL Cool J’s Bigger and Deffer, or banging my head to Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In, Def Lepard’s Hysteria, or Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. There was even that time that I got sent home from school for wearing a Public Enemy tshirt with a racial slur on the back. And…my grandma (God rest her soul) bought it for me.

Looking at that list of awesome, for an 8 year old anyway, then you can understand my surprise and fake smiles when on consecutive Christmas mornings I unwrapped Bruce Springsteen tapes. Right. Cassettes containing Bruce Springsteen’s music. Consecutive meaning for about 4 years. Yeah, Bruce Springsteen. WTF, right?

I have no idea where my loving parents got the idea that I liked what I considered absolute crap, but I smilingly accepted each album. And then I hid them in the closet. There was no way I was going to let my friends believe that I spent a second of my time listening to Tunnel of Love. Nope. I was a know it all skater that only listened to the cuttingest of cutting edge music. And my Springsteen ‘shun’ kept up until about 5 years ago.

I’m not sure where or how the change occurred. But, as I started to approach my middle twenties, I started to swoon and shadowbox to the Boss’s early catalogue. His words are gritty. His music is simple. And he creates such great pictures when it gets put together. I can listen to any one of his first six albums and be moved to tears, inspired to write, or simply motivated to do…anything. He’s incredible and I’m sure as time goes on I’ll listen to albums he recorded later in his career. Ah, we’ll see how that goes.

Now, I don’t know if my parents were attempting a silent intervention by giving this new music to get me away from hip hop or hair metal, but it didn’t work. That said, it’s pretty awesome that I have this memory and that if I were to ask my mom if she remembers giving me Human Touch for Christmas in 1992, she’d have no clue what I was talking about. But I now totally appreciate the fact that my parents cared enough to toss me some music that they thought was relevant.

Lesson to learn here folks, give your kids music. And listen to it with them frequently. Even if they don’t ask for it. Just make sure it’s Born to Run or Greetings from Asbury Park and not Tunnel of Love. Let them find that one for themselves.;)