Rock Of Ages

By Richard Lacayo

Let's all get up And dance to a song That was a hit before Your mother was born --THE BEATLES

Remember when that song was about your mother? You do? Too bad. In that case, now it's about you. The very thought is enough to send a chill down the spines of most baby boomers, who already have plenty of reasons to wonder if they haven't started looking as old as Paul McCartney. (And remember, he was the Cute Beatle.) At one time it probably seemed that rock music was entirely yours, a thing that you could imagine grew out of your own fevered brain. Now a good slice of it apparently belongs to somebody else, somebody who likes gangsta rap and tinny kid pop and fight songs from WWF Smackdown! It doesn't help that this week the Grammy for album of the year may go to Eminem, the white rapper who wants to rape his mother, or at least he says he does on the album that may get the Grammy. Hey, you're probably old enough to be his mother. For that matter, so is Elton John, who is taking the risk of performing a duet with him at the Grammys.

To make things worse, pop music is otherwise going through one of those moments when the general run of things is so toddling--Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys--that skinny white boys who talk a little tough, meaning Eminem, get to seem like a big deal. So if you happen to be a parent in, say, your 40s or 50s, nobody would blame you if you just turned away from pop music altogether. And if you happen to be a teenager, of course, you might not mind if they did. But the funny thing is, at the same time that the hard edge of pop gets harder and the soft edge gets softer, it's plain that rock has also become one of those things, like pets and baseball, that lets parents and kids find a shared passion. It may be that Eminem doesn't provide much opportunity for parent-child bonding, unless you're trying to explain why the incest taboo is not just some stupid rule that Mom invented to be mean. But a lot of baby boomers have figured out that it's a short trip from the Pink Floyd they once loved to the Radiohead their kids love now. And a lot of their kids have likewise found their way back to the music of their parents.

This explains Emily Curtin, 22, who now plays guitar in a New York City rock band. When she was in her late teens in Worcester, Mass., Emily used to collaborate with her twin younger brothers to make rock-music-compilation tapes--they called them Kids' Pix--for her parents. The idea was to educate the folks, who already understood the rock music of their own warmly remembered youth, about newer stuff. "They listened to the tapes all the time," she says. "My mom got into the Magnetic Fields. Dad got into My Bloody Valentine."

In Marshfield, Wis., John Spellman and his wife Jeanne are fiftysomethings who reawoke to rock music as the older ones among their four kids discovered the Beatles, the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. "Now we spend time talking about things like how the Dead are not really a rock band," says John. "How they come out of a tradition of classic American blues, from Appalachia and the South." In return, he has picked up from his kids a taste for the Dave Matthews Band and U2, a group he finds "inspirational." Spellman's children even introduced him to music from his youth that he had missed the first time it came along. Through them he discovered Bob Marley, the reggae star whose supreme moment was in the 1970s.

Even if guitar-band rock is a niche market now, supplanted by hip-hop as the reigning format of pop music, it still qualifies as the lingua franca of pop culture. Roughly a half-century after Elvis recorded Heartbreak Hotel, nearly everybody under 70 has some emotional attachment to electrified music with a beat. As a consequence, pop music is no longer mostly a way that one generation defines itself against its elders. The baby boomers' own parents grew up with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Nat "King" Cole. Rock was such an unmistakable break with that creamy tradition that teenagers of the 1960s and '70s understood it right away as music to fight Mom and Dad to, especially since their parents usually hated the stuff. Now kids have to accept that most of their own music is not so different from what their parents had, parents who grew up on Lou Reed, to say nothing of Iggy Pop, a guy who was gouging his skin with broken glass when Marilyn Manson was still sticking thumbtacks in his tricycle tires.

But that also makes it easier for them to comprehend the music their parents used to love. This helps explain the watershed success of the Beatles 1 album, which topped Billboard's album charts for eight weeks and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. You don't score numbers like that just from the middle-aged Beatlemaniacs still shaking their imaginary moptops. It requires massive sales to the teenagers and twentysomethings who buy most records. The phenomenon of that album followed the success of Santana's Supernatural, which paired a survivor of the '60s with up-to-the-minute acts like Lauryn Hill, Everlast and Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20. And before Santana, there was Aerosmith and Eric Clapton, Neil Young and Tina Turner, Sting and Cher, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen. All of them sustained long careers by adding younger fans to the ones who remember them from before they got reading glasses.

What all this means is, simply by pointing out to your children that you understand that Phish owes a lot to the Grateful Dead, you can distract them briefly from your otherwise evident decrepitude. There are already institutions that have positioned themselves to benefit from that fact, adapting rock to the family-theme-park phenomenon. The Experience Music Project in Seattle, which opened last year, aims to be a place where parents can explain to their kids that James Brown is the old guy who sounds like Mystikal, and kids can tell their parents that Mystikal is the young guy who sounds like James Brown. The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, even offers guidance to local high school teachers on how to work rock history into their lesson plans. This will make it easier for parents to talk to their kids about the music of their own youth, though it also opens the way to a day when sophomores will get detention for not turning in their term papers on Frank Zappa.

All the same, as a means to reach kids, rock is more complicated than pets and baseball. It has never been completely domesticated by age and commercial calculation. One way that rock bands keep their distance from respectability these days is by shouting "F___" a few dozen times on every album. (Or even "I wanna f___ you like an animal," as Trent Reznor famously offered on one of his Nine Inch Nails albums.) Rock is still all tied up with sex and drugs, and it's a supremely subtle parent who can share all kinds of music with her kids without also seeming to endorse the troubling stuff. On this past New Year's Eve, the Experience Music Project sponsored a sold-out dance party that attracted 1,200 people, including parents, teenagers and even younger children. The aim was to provide something with the feel of a rave party but without the drug scene that goes with it. Then again, the main stage attraction was the band Crystal Method, whose name is an obvious pun on crystal meth, the amphetamine-based party drug. "A band can call itself what it wants to call itself," says Robert Santelli, deputy director of public programs at EMP. Which is true, of course. But the adults who offer the band to kids are inescapably complicit in any message the band conveys. It all gets complicated.

The skanky side of pop music is something that Sheilia Brown turns to her advantage. Brown is an executive secretary at Tribune Interactive, part of the Tribune Co., the Chicago-based media empire. Her daughters Nnyla, 23, and Rayna, 13, love some kinds of rap. So does she. And the parts she doesn't love--the trash talk, the relentless treatment of women as nothing more than walking booties--give her a chance to discuss with her daughters just why she doesn't love them. "We discuss things openly about sex and relationships," says Brown. "What's tacky and what's not tacky. Sometimes the kids are more embarrassed by things they see in music videos than I am." Nnyla agrees that music provides a way for her and her mother "to talk about sex more than we might otherwise. Mom will say she doesn't like a song because it makes women look like sex objects, that rap music and rap videos take women back 20 to 30 years. I thought about it, and I can see that."

Even when you like the music you hear them listening to, there are reasons why it takes hard work to share music with kids. Pop-music turnover is faster than ever. The group that gets two or three successful albums in a row is harder to find. No sooner do you figure out who Blink-182 is, than Blink-183 takes its place. And music is more splintered into niche markets and tribal followings. It can be tricky to navigate the byways of postpunk and trip-hop, ambient techno and speed metal. But remember, there was a time when you had no trouble telling the difference between surf music and Merseybeat.

And what do you do when your kids find their way back to the very music you always hated as a kid? You try to steer them to the iconoclastic New York Dolls; they stumble into the cheesy pyrotechnics of Kiss. You send them off to discover early Chicago; they come back with Kansas. And what if, after all your careful guidance, they still love Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach? What if they still go out and buy that stuff by Eminem? At that point only the wisdom of age will do. Go back and take an unflinching look at your old record collection. There's probably a Black Sabbath album in there somewhere.

--Reported by Benjamin Nugent/New York and David E. Thigpen/Chicago

With reporting by Benjamin Nugent/New York and David E. Thigpen/Chicago