White Lines

Yesterday after school my daughter and I were playing Go Fish when Grandmaster Flash's White Lines came on the ipod.  She instantly ditched the cards and started to rock out.  I'm pretty sure she's never heard the song before, but she took an instant liking to it, much to my satisfaction.  I know the content is pretty inappropriate for a five year old, but I'm fairly certain she didn't know that Flash was referring to snorting coke.  Besides, his core message is "Don't do it!", right?  Anyway, I wasn't about to interrupt her jam session.  She was especially keen on striking poses to the "Freeze!  Rock!" part of the song.  It was good stuff.

It got me thinking about how lucky people of my generation are to have come up with such great music.  The poor kids of today are stuck with the likes of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus.  Lame.  We children of the 70's and 80's were fortunate enough to grow up with punk, funk, new wave, proper pop and hip-hop.  The music of my generation pretty much kicks ass.  

All of this reminiscing about the music of my youth got me thinking about Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude.  What a great book.  Not only is he a ridiculously talented writer, he's obviously quite a music aficionado as well.  You'll be downloading many of the tunes discussed in this book.

Apparently the novel is semi-autobiographical and takes place in the 70's, 80's and 90's right here in Brooklyn (walking distance from my house!).  The main character, Dylan, is one of the only white kids living in an all black neighborhood and becomes privy to a culture that's quite different from his own.  It's got all of the drama associated with racial tensions, drug addiction and familial strain.  There are also a ton of delicious references to the pop culture of this era, complete with a fascinating biography about the advent of tagging and the birth of hip-hop.

It made me go back and appreciate the fact that I was raised in a diverse community myself, though much less so than Lethem's.  I'm proud of the fact that the heritage of my friends pretty much spans the globe.  I'm thrilled that my daughter is in a class with at least a dozen kids whose names I'm not sure how to pronounce.  And they all manage to get along.

Go read the book.  It raises a lot of intriguing issues.  And you'll find that the nostalgia it stirs up is something of a phenomenon, baby.