We Can Dance If We Want To...

The kids and I have a new ritual. We get down and boogey each night before I start to make dinner. It entertains them (and me) and wears them out a little and they seem to do better at independent play which makes the food prep process a littler easier on me. Anyway, I'll put on the radio, usually the local rock station because the kids don't tolerate slow music, unless we're pretending to ice skate (or kitchen skate as we like to call it) in our socks. I won many a competition on this old vinyl floor, back in the day. We brought our collection of CDs down with us from Vermont, but we haven't had anything new in a little bit. Not since Ernesto got the soundtrack to "Collateral" and that "Los Lonely Boys" album. If there's more than one, I don't know which one we have. This is the point I'm getting to, here folks...

So the kids love to dance and I love to encourage it as much as possible and expose them to as much music as I can, so I'm always happy to have something new, but I am no longer that girl who buys the new release of her favorite artist the day it comes out. That was the teenage/college years me. I don't know what happened to her. Partly I got my financial priorities in order and partly I got out of touch with the music scene. Oh, and then I had babies. So music- not at the top of the list. But I still love nothing more than to get into the car once in a while by myself and just turn the volume way the hell up ("this one goes to eleven") and rock out. I know I must look so old and lame and I feel old and lame just saying "rock out" because who says that anymore? And I don't care if people see me singing in the car. And I do. I pretend like I'm in videos. Oh, it's sad, but I know you do it too.

So a couple weeks after Christmas we took the kids shopping in tax-free NH for some good deals and Ernesto was talking about this group that he had heard about on NPR so I'm kind of tuning him out talking about it, because I figure how cool can it be? But he wants to pick it up so after a time at Border's reading books to the kids he finds what he's looking for and says that the got the album that he had heard about so he's telling me about them as we're getting in the car and that they're basically this couple that were married and the husband teaches the wife to drum and they're just fooling around with it but realize they've got this great band going so they make an album and so he puts it in, we're listening and you know how when you were a kid and you put a new tape in (or record on) for the first time and you just fell in love with almost every song right away and it was just an instant hit with you? Well that's how it was with the "White Stripes" and their album, "Get Behind Me Satan". Here I felt like we had struck lyrical gold and I just couldn't believe how much I liked it and that I was so on the cutting edge. Me!

Me: "So this is a new album?" I still can't believe I'm in on this cool new music. I am going to be hip again, I just feel it.
E: "Um, well, it's their latest."
Me: "Oh, like their second or something?" Maybe they had an obscure debut that no one had really heard of yet.
E: "mmmm....no. I think it's like their fourth or fifth."
Me: "I've never heard of these guys before!"
E: (shrugging) "I really hadn't either."

So later that night after listening to every song several times, and already skipping to my favorites ("My Doorbell", "Denial Twist" and "Little Ghost") E has got his laptop out and he's looking stuff up on them and they've got like a dozen videos out already, one featuring Conan O'Brien for goodness sake, so I think it is offical that I am the last person in America to have heard of these folks. Unless you haven't. In which case I will only laugh at you a little.

Okay, so there's no hope left for me, but my kids are on the cutting edge. They are little hipsters, bopping and grooving to "The White Stripes". What more could a mother ask for?

A Side Note: The White Stripes are no longer married, from what I understand, but they are still together as a band and God bless them. If you can make beautiful, post-modern, Led Zepplin-esque music with your ex-spouse and not go nutty, then you can do anything. Amen, I say.