Rock Of Ages

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What all this means is, simply by pointing out to your children that you understand that Phish owes a lot to the Grateful Dead, you can distract them briefly from your otherwise evident decrepitude. There are already institutions that have positioned themselves to benefit from that fact, adapting rock to the family-theme-park phenomenon. The Experience Music Project in Seattle, which opened last year, aims to be a place where parents can explain to their kids that James Brown is the old guy who sounds like Mystikal, and kids can tell their parents that Mystikal is the young guy who sounds like James Brown. The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, even offers guidance to local high school teachers on how to work rock history into their lesson plans. This will make it easier for parents to talk to their kids about the music of their own youth, though it also opens the way to a day when sophomores will get detention for not turning in their term papers on Frank Zappa.

All the same, as a means to reach kids, rock is more complicated than pets and baseball. It has never been completely domesticated by age and commercial calculation. One way that rock bands keep their distance from respectability these days is by shouting "F___" a few dozen times on every album. (Or even "I wanna f___ you like an animal," as Trent Reznor famously offered on one of his Nine Inch Nails albums.) Rock is still all tied up with sex and drugs, and it's a supremely subtle parent who can share all kinds of music with her kids without also seeming to endorse the troubling stuff. On this past New Year's Eve, the Experience Music Project sponsored a sold-out dance party that attracted 1,200 people, including parents, teenagers and even younger children. The aim was to provide something with the feel of a rave party but without the drug scene that goes with it. Then again, the main stage attraction was the band Crystal Method, whose name is an obvious pun on crystal meth, the amphetamine-based party drug. "A band can call itself what it wants to call itself," says Robert Santelli, deputy director of public programs at EMP. Which is true, of course. But the adults who offer the band to kids are inescapably complicit in any message the band conveys. It all gets complicated.

The skanky side of pop music is something that Sheilia Brown turns to her advantage. Brown is an executive secretary at Tribune Interactive, part of the Tribune Co., the Chicago-based media empire. Her daughters Nnyla, 23, and Rayna, 13, love some kinds of rap. So does she. And the parts she doesn't love--the trash talk, the relentless treatment of women as nothing more than walking booties--give her a chance to discuss with her daughters just why she doesn't love them. "We discuss things openly about sex and relationships," says Brown. "What's tacky and what's not tacky. Sometimes the kids are more embarrassed by things they see in music videos than I am." Nnyla agrees that music provides a way for her and her mother "to talk about sex more than we might otherwise. Mom will say she doesn't like a song because it makes women look like sex objects, that rap music and rap videos take women back 20 to 30 years. I thought about it, and I can see that."

Even when you like the music you hear them listening to, there are reasons why it takes hard work to share music with kids. Pop-music turnover is faster than ever. The group that gets two or three successful albums in a row is harder to find. No sooner do you figure out who Blink-182 is, than Blink-183 takes its place. And music is more splintered into niche markets and tribal followings. It can be tricky to navigate the byways of postpunk and trip-hop, ambient techno and speed metal. But remember, there was a time when you had no trouble telling the difference between surf music and Merseybeat.

And what do you do when your kids find their way back to the very music you always hated as a kid? You try to steer them to the iconoclastic New York Dolls; they stumble into the cheesy pyrotechnics of Kiss. You send them off to discover early Chicago; they come back with Kansas. And what if, after all your careful guidance, they still love Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach? What if they still go out and buy that stuff by Eminem? At that point only the wisdom of age will do. Go back and take an unflinching look at your old record collection. There's probably a Black Sabbath album in there somewhere.