Better Not Bring Your Kids!!

So a couple of weeks ago, I worked a gig in which I was an assistant D.J. to a 13 yr old’s birthday party. I won’t go into the details surrounding the gig but basically when it came time to make a playlist for the party, we were told that we could play “Whatever we wanted.”

Now when I say “whatever we wanted” I mean literally everything from that new Justin Beiber to Lil Kee’s “Buss It Wide Open” as long as the tweens were enjoying themselves. Now obviously there was some discretion involved and we definitely didn’t drop Khia’s “My Neck, My Back” two times in a row or anything like that… after all the kids in attendance were only 13.

At the same time though, these were the same 13 yr old kids that would eventually go on to request songs like Tyga’s “Rack City” and LoveRance’s “Up” both of which are pretty standard music to be heard at any decent club, but a bit of a surprise to be requested at a 13 yr old Bday party.

I was admittedly a little disturbed at this sight, and I thought to myself like “Wow what happened to the (relative)innocence of being thirteen? Have things really gotten that bad?”

I explained the story to a friend of mine to which he then proceeded to remind me what we were listening to around that age, which made me bust out into laughter upon reflection.

See, around the time I was 12-13 (2002-2003) there was this guy that was becoming insanely popular who goes by the name Lil Jon. And really from 8th grade up until my high school graduation, he and a select few of others within the Crunk movement had radios/clubs/house parties on lock smash. You would have to be living under a rock if you couldn’t complete the phrase: “From the windowssss, to the wallsssss” or had no idea what “Skeet” was.

So in a sense, you could say that my virgin ears were all but corrupted by the content that Lil Jon, The Ying Yang Twins, and various others had to offer. This may seem a little crude, but once you figure out what a “P***y Fart” is, discussing Dragonball Z with your male friends suddenly doesn’t seem as interesting.

Overall though, I didn’t grow up to be some kind of sex craved adult who only treats women like objects of lust, or any of the other things that people who are anti Hip-Hop would convince you is true; I obviously have a lot of respect for women. This just leads me to believe that the overall content of music hasn’t really changed much in the past decade, maybe even longer than that. Lil Jon could be to me what Uncle Luke and the 2Live Crew were to teens in the 90’s and so on.

That being said, does it make it OK to have music that’s catered to a slightly older crowd, be easily accessible by young teens? Meh, it’s really no worse(maybe even better?) than porn being literally a click away nowadays. I guess in a way, it’s funny how things change only to end up staying the same..