I know I'm getting old. The evidence is everywhere. The scattered invasion of random gray hairs . . . the body parts that are slowly giving up the never-ending fight against gravity . . . the strong urge to literally yell, "GET OFF MY LAWN!" when a group of neighborhood teenagers lingers too long on the grass in the front yard that we are working so hard to get growing. And, now, I have my granny panties in a bunch over some swearing.
I think one of two things happens when you have kids. Either you keep on cursing and don't ever give it a second thought, or you wake up one day and envision your preshussssss baby saying THAT word and flip out. There's nothing really wrong with either path, but flipping out is SO VERY STRESSFUL.
Needless to say, I'm a flipper outer. It's cute and adorable and hysterical if your preshusssss swears, but just thinking about Alexis doing it elicits the same response in me as thinking about Tiger Woods flirting with her. It's not pretty.
In order to avoid having laser beams shooting out of my eyes, I monitor the music we listen to in the car. Alexis thinks she's a teenager. She wants music that is upbeat and happy, music that makes you want to jump up and dance. It's just who she is, and I happen to like who she is. So, when she decided she luuuuuurves The Black-Eyed Peas, I spent an evening hunting down the album on iTunes (I know iTunes isn't the best place to get music, but I had a gift card).
The only thing was I had been burned by iTunes before. I have two copies of a P!nk album because the first one I bought was filled with cursing and such. It was properly labeled, I just somehow bought the wrong one. I wasn't about to make the same mistake a second time, so I carefully examined the album description and reviews. No mention of cursing. Yay!
Then we put the album in the CD player and . . . shit. Literally. They must say "shit" 3513450985 times on the album.
I thought about just letting it go and not mentioning anything to Alexis, but then she started to sing the entire first chorus of Boom Boom Pow.
Shit.
Literally, like ten times.
So, back to the drawing board. I scoured iTunes some more. Nothing that was definitely swear-free. I checked Amazon. Nothing, unless you count hundreds of pissed off reviews by parents who bought the album not realizing that it was not exactly appropriate content for a small child. I scoped out Best Buy and a few other places, trying -oh- so hard to just find the couple of radio-edited versions of the singles that I needed. NOTHING.
Finally, I looked to the heavens and asked myself, "Self, what company is all sorts of high and mighty and wouldn't dare sell you shit?" Myself jumped for joy as she thought of Walmart. Wooo! The goody two-shoes company that refuse to sell anything with a parental advisory label!
I found the singles, but was dubious when I realized there were no reviews or descriptions. There was no parental advisory label, either. Finally, after reviewing the company policy on music content a few dozen times, I decided that Walmart is Too "Good" to be selling curses, so I went for it.
SHIT.
LOTS OF IT.
The songs were the exact same ones I already had--the ones that we had determined were not OK for Alexis to listen to. I rushed back over to the website to figure out what had happened. How did WALMART sell me two songs full of cussing? HOW?
A few dozen emails back-and-forth with customer service, and now I get it. Parental advisory labels? ARE A JOKE. It's a completely voluntary program and it's up to record labels and artists to decide if they want to put them on an album.
Uh, Black-Eyed Peas? Clearly don't have any kids. There is no ifs and or buts about it, that album should have an advisory. We're not just talking about Fergie dropping a bunch of comments about her poop. There's an entire song about 2:00am booty calls that's so explicit that I deleted it right away so that I didn't have to deal with Alexis catching any of the words.
It's all part of a conspiracy, I'm sure. Walmart is trying to make me buy Kidz Bop (IT'S NOT HAPPENING) and The Black-Eyed Peas are trying to make me feel old. er. Older. OLDER.
Shit, I'm old.
