I don’t mind admitting that I’m a bit of an old fuddy-duddy. I’m 50, after
all.
Despite my complete lack of understanding of modern youth culture, I do like listening to pop music. It probably doesn’t help that I can’t remember names, although French radio stations rarely bother telling you who or what they are playing. But listening to pop helps relieve the monotony of some of my more mind-numbing chores and makes a refreshing change from the news channels I usually tune into.
Now and again, a song will stick in my head. Or rather, part of it. The lyrics, that is, not my mind.
Such was the case with a song I heard repeatedly this summer, a catchy little number about a woman getting ready to go out for the evening. Her telling of the story would be interspersed with a kind of shouted aside from a backing vocalist; the aforementioned only snippet of the lyrics that lodged itself in my brain: “I don’t take pills!”
Despite my complete lack of understanding of modern youth culture, I do like listening to pop music. It probably doesn’t help that I can’t remember names, although French radio stations rarely bother telling you who or what they are playing. But listening to pop helps relieve the monotony of some of my more mind-numbing chores and makes a refreshing change from the news channels I usually tune into.
Now and again, a song will stick in my head. Or rather, part of it. The lyrics, that is, not my mind.
Such was the case with a song I heard repeatedly this summer, a catchy little number about a woman getting ready to go out for the evening. Her telling of the story would be interspersed with a kind of shouted aside from a backing vocalist; the aforementioned only snippet of the lyrics that lodged itself in my brain: “I don’t take pills!”
In what I now realise was middle-aged naïveté, I found it
charming that this young person should be extolling the virtues of avoiding drugs. "Good for you!" I thought. "Whereas other entertainers of your generation are bragging about getting drunk or stoned, you're telling your audience that you can have fun without popping ecstasy, prescription pills and all those sundry other legal and illegal substances." So whenever I heard the tune, I would mouth and sometimes even sing this
mantra-like edict at the appropriate places.
Whilst cooking dinner with my 16-year-old daughter this evening, I
was amazed to discover that she knew all the titles and all the singers of the songs that
played on the radio. Thus, each time a new song came up as we chopped our
mushrooms and beat our eggs, she would robotically rattle off the name of the artist and
the piece within a few bars of the beginning.
To my great delight, “my” song eventually came up, and I therefore looked forward to showing off my pop-savviness by chiming in at the relevant intervals. We hadn’t even got through the introduction when my daughter announced, “Sia, Cheap Thrills.”
And that’s when the penny dropped: far from being what I thought I had heard, Ms. Sia was actually singing “I love cheap thrills.”
I don’t think I’ll be joining in with the chorus any longer. Now if only I could get that damn tune out of my head ...
To my great delight, “my” song eventually came up, and I therefore looked forward to showing off my pop-savviness by chiming in at the relevant intervals. We hadn’t even got through the introduction when my daughter announced, “Sia, Cheap Thrills.”
And that’s when the penny dropped: far from being what I thought I had heard, Ms. Sia was actually singing “I love cheap thrills.”
I don’t think I’ll be joining in with the chorus any longer. Now if only I could get that damn tune out of my head ...
LOL. Great song too. Introduced to me by MY daughter!
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