#140) "Ms. Jackson" by OutKast - Ms. Jackson has the notable distinction of being on a short list of rap songs I can relate to on a personal level. It smartly forsakes the usual cavalcade of bitches, booties and brainless swagger that distinguishes (too) much of the genre, and actually says something, painting a legitimately moving, even haunting at times, picture of a set of circumstances I once knew well.
Yes yes, I know exactly what this song's talking about. I was young once, and entirely in over my head. I remember as though it happened yesterday what it's like to be saddled with a link to someone I can no longer relate to (or in moments stand), the exhausting dance between bitter conflict and (at best) cold civility consuming our days, those days strung together only by responsibility to a little one who is at once our biggest joy and biggest source of conflict. I remember keenly that responsibility predating my maturity and means, doing my best to adjust for that, her doing her best to adjust, but never quite meeting in the middle, and the situation routinely frayed around the edges by the girl's mother, 'grandmother' waging war on numerous fronts. And all of this at a very young age, when the world in general seems much more daunting than it really is.
These days I'm gleefully free of such responsibilities, and I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. Whenever I spot a young couple drifting through the aisles at the grocery store with their only slightly less young ones in tow and the tension of their tumultuous day-to-day trials as plain as day on their faces, I feel a strange impulse to tell them it gets better, it balances out. Kids grow up, become adults themselves, with any luck take their place in that important roll call of 'friends and family', and all the petty stuff that matters so much now won't in ten years.
Together or apart, life will, in all likelihood, get sorted out and patched up, with mother and grandmother alike. ;-)
"And yes I will be present on the first day of school, and graduation..."
#141) "Christmas at Ground Zero" by Weird Al Yankovic - As a child of the 80s, I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, and while 'pinko' hysteria was not quite what it had been in the 50s, the Soviets were still considered a larger-than-life threat. It was still very much us against them, two superpowers locked in a life-and-death staring match, the implications and ramifications of which far transcended winning or losing the Olympics. If one of us pressed 'the button', the other would respond in kind, and humanity would be wiped out in a single stroke by the H-bomb (as opposed to the mere A-bomb...)
I grew up aware of this threat, and fearful of it. At my elementary school, in the late 70s, they were still conducting nuclear raid drills for God's sake, still instructing children on duck and cover procedure. I was made uneasy by the sound of a civil air defense siren, the sight of the hammer and sickle. I remember our 2nd grade teacher giving the wrong frigging answer to the question (posed by another kid during a post-duck and cover classroom discussion...seriously), 'What would happen [if the bomb were dropped]...?'
She replied, "There probably wouldn't be much left of anything or anyone."
These days, air raid sirens herald only the approach of a severe thunderstorm, and in some small towns, fire off when it's time for lunch, and though I don't fear intangibles the way I did when I was eight, the sound still causes the hairs on the back of my neck to trill.
Christmas at Ground Zero is typically funny, exactly what you'd expect from Weird Al Yankovic. But when I was just a little bit older, eleven/twelve/thirteen, and started to really understand the implications of nuclear holocaust more than I had in 2nd grade, it came to mean much more to me. Probably more than Yankovic could ever have imagined. It actually helped me cope with the anxiety I felt, taught me that it was possible to laugh about serious things....even deathly serious things. It lent me a kind of gallows humor I still employ today.
And will bring along with me on 1/48/50.
"You might hear some reindeer on your rooftop, or Jack Frost on your window sill / But if someone's climbing down your chimney, you better load your gun and shoot to kill..."
