Saturday, October 16, 2010

"Mom, what's a poker face?"

The girls and I have so much fun dancing around the kitchen and family room. We are generally silly, dramatic and crazy, all at once. Of course, a lot of the best dance songs have, at best, questionable lyrics. So the question is, am I being a bad parent by exposing them to Lady Gaga?

Lady Gaga's songs are just fun to dance to and be dramatic with, but how do you explain a bad romance? And when your kindergartener walks around at home singing, "oh, oh, oh, poker face, poker face" you know she is singing that at school, too!

I've toned it down a bit by just playing the "Glee" versions (sorry Lady Gaga - didn't pay for your actual songs), but the words are still there....

I take comfort in the fact that most of my childhood, I had the wrong words to many songs and clearly didn't get a lot of them (songs from "Grease" anyone?) Anyway, what can I do, girls just want to have fun! (fun, fun, girls - now you are singing it too!

7 comments:

  1. We normally just play it off by saying they are being silly when when the come up witht he lyrics or Hubby and I yelled our prefered lyrics over the questionable ones.

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  2. When I was in the sixth grade, a friend and I danced in a school wide talent show to "Let's get physical" by Olivia Newton John. I was dressed as a nurse and she sang, "Let's get a physical".

    If they don't know what the lyrics mean, the words are not going to "corrupt" them--your girls will interpret them through the lens of what they know now and laugh about it when they understand the real meaning later.

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  3. I remember my mom asking me if I knew what "Billy Jean" was about. I *think* that I didn, but maybe not totally. And how about Like a Virgin? If my kids were going around singing that song now, I would have a heart attack!

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  4. I usually side step this dilemma by having dance parties to foreign music. I don't have to explain the lyrics (and in most cases, couldn't) and we still get to have fun dancing around. Although, honestly, I am usually the DJ and the announcer.

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  5. Why not ask her what she thinks the words mean? Lyrics can be like poetry, just because you think the words mean one thing, they can have a totally different meaning for someone else - and hearing her interpret the words would be VERY entertaining :)

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  6. Interpretation does have alot to do with it, but still words that come up that I just don't want to be a part of her vocabulary we replace.

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  7. At least your kid's favorite song isn't "Sexy Sadie." That's right. Out of how many hundreds of Beatles' songs?

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