music to my ears?

I go to work early in the morning and sometimes I get home before anyone in the neighborhood, except the high school football coach two doors down, when football season is over.

Today I got home and the kid next door was shooting hoops in his driveway. He has one of those portable basketball goals that are on wheels, with a big plastic tank on the bottom that you fill up with sand for ballast. Anyway, he’s out there shooting baskets and he has his boom box turned up really loud. His mom works late and I guess his older sister runs the house until she gets home, but sis is upstairs playing her stereo really loud, because I can hear it outside the house, even with the kid’s boom box blasting. The kid in the driveway is playing his boom box really loud, too. He’s booming that song all over the neighborhood and I can even hear it when I go inside our house. You know the song I’m talking about. I don’t know the name, but the words are:

Motherfucker, motherfucker
Motherfucker, motherfucker
Motherfucker, motherfucker
Motherfucker, motherfucker

Yeah! That one.

Actually, I hate that piece of shit, but it’s better than that goddamned Christmas Shoes song-- although not much. I have to ask myself, what kind of music—if you can call it that—are these kids listening to these days?

Yeah, I remember back when I was a young man and I had my stereo down in the basement and I would occasionally listen to my music at an elevated volume. Sometimes, Dick Clinch, Sr., would open the door to the basement and shout down at me:

“Turn down that noise!”

But, that was different. The music we listened to in my youth was different and revolutionary, and I’m sure it sounded unusual to the older generation, but it was good music. Classic stuff. It wasn’t just some guy sampling someone else’s song and adding a rap banter to it. It wasn’t just some guy taking a vinyl record and twisting it back and forth on a turntable to provide background noise while he repeated that word to describe African-Americans that we would never use to describe African-Americans.

Anyway, I guess it’s just a different world, today, and I guess this afternoon is just a sampling of how we’ve gotten there. I mean, I’ve got some nineteen-year-old girl next door listening to Megadeath or Metallica, while she is supposed to be watching her younger brother who is out in the driveway listening to some motherfucker calling himself a motherfucker and some other ethnic slur. I’m inside the house, but I can’t help listening to both of them.

Yes, sir, it’s a different world.

Or my name isn’t Dick Clinch.