Help, Somebody Call 911. There's the Same Old Thing Going On Here.

So I'm trying something in this blog post.  I'll write it and then I'll title it.  That probably will work better since let's admit it, neither of us know where it's going yet.

I haven't liked pop music for about 2 and a half decades.  Well, ladies and gentlemen, which might as well be me, since I'm the writer and the reader- I like pop music again.  I turn the presets from station to station and although I'm older than I've ever been, I don't spend all my time looking at the music of today and wondering what's wrong with those pesky kids who buy this junk nowadays.

In 1972 or thereabout, I became aware of pop radio.  I'm not sure which songs were the first I heard, but I distinctly remember Dolly Parton's Jolene, Lynn Anderson's I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, some version of Locomotion, Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown and I think Simon and Garfunkel's hit that sounded to me just like the theme from H.R. Pufnstuf "kicking at the cobblestones and feeling groovy."  I wonder which songs are actually from that time and which have settled there just in my memory.

Just now, I heard the song 911 with Mary J. Blige and Wyclef Jean for the first time.  I haven't been listening to pop radio, or should I say current radio that isn't Christian (gasp) so I don't know how long it's been out.

It's easy for a generation to slip into cynicism as they leave the demographic focus group deemed more important, and to look down upon those pesky kids and decry their taste.  But Mary J. Blige can do no wrong.  As an artist, she is the real deal.  My favorite artist these days is Diana Ross, sounding better than she did in 1967, now at the age of 71.  She's beautiful, she's without peer and she's a movie star who hasn't made a movie in a long time.  She is America's diva.  Mary J. Blige is on her own way, and does things in her own way.  But when I first heard her Christmas album with orchestra, I knew.

If you can hold your own with an orchestra, you have something there that may be different than what we may have once thought.

The song itself says that she told the police her lover wasn't there but because this is the kind of love our parents warned us about, they need to call 911.

This sentiment isn't new.  It's usually sung by twenty year olds though, who want the security of living in a secure society but don't want to have to follow its rules.

When I was 8 I would play cowboys and Indians without thinking one was better than the other.  The term Indian wasn't yet inaccurate or racist.  I didn't know how stupid a term it was.  But many words change their meanings and become stupid.  Why is this America, because somebody thought there was something here once, but never came over here?

We played cops and robbers with the same equanimity.  We didn't think of one as being moral and one as being immoral.  We needed to take a side so we could have teams and play a game.  We needed opposing sides to have a narrative from which to build our play.

As teenagers, and I don't think either of these singers qualify, which I find wonderful, we flaunt the rules we used to take for granted.  We've heard the warning but want the forbidden love.  We flaunt the law when it's time to be honest with the police or pay our taxes, but we want 911 to be available should we need it.