Even self-proclaimed cool dads have their limits. I'd heard Soulja Boy's megahit and dance craze "Crank That" months ago and didn't pay much attention to the signification of the lyrics. I just laughed at the hundreds of YouTube performance videos of the catchy dance. I guess I just didn't want to believe that this 18-year-old had really written a huge hit song about ejaculating all over his woman.
My kids are addicted to Radio Disney, listen to it obsessively on the computer so I figured they were immune to contamination but of course last week my nine-year-old daughter and one of her best friends came home singing the song and doing the dance. It's hit their public elementary school and is all the rage with the girls. They obsess over dance moves anyway and the Soulja Boy dance is ridiculously infectious.
When she's not practicing the Soulja Boy dance she's practicing her ballroom dancing steps. Every New York City fourth grader in the school took eight weeks of ballroom dancing and last week she had her big, all-school recital. The hundred of them paraded on stage in various stages of dress-up and counted their way through the foxtrot, the Lindy hop, the merengue and the tango. They looked so almost grown up there that every parent's heart was wide open.
Ava and her friend were just as open and happy running through the Souja Boy, of course have no idea what they lyrics are talking about, and I wasn't about to correct them.
These age-inappropriate events were so much cuter when she was very, very young. Now they give me the creeps. Back when she was three her mom and I were playing Rick James on the car stereo and when he crooned, "GIve it to me baby," she piped in from her car seat, "Give it to the baby." I'll remember that forever. And even just two years ago when Ava was 8 and Chet 5 they'd heard 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" on the radio and for weeks were singing, "Take me the candy shop, I'll let you lick my lollipop." I didn't encourage them but of course I never disabused them of their reading of the lyrics.
I love sex and know that zealously hiding all traces of it has produced a neurotic and repressed culture. But its omnipresence now is making it hard for a kid to be a kid. 
Here in the near triple-digit heat A and I took the kids to the Botanical Garden to see the Henry Moore statues. I love this photo of them. It looks like an album cover. Maybe they could be the Carpenters of the new millennium? Good, clean music (minus the eating disorders).
Do you censor what your kids hear?
