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The parent/child relationship has been hugely important in rock music since its beginnings—perhaps because rock'n'roll was the first music aimed primarily at teenagers: earlier pop musics shot for an adult audience, or at least an audience of independent means. Rock was different in that it was consciously a music of teenage rebellion, and the parental presence is (subtextually, at least) never far away, inasmuch as it is the primary thing against which to rebel. The familiar theme is "Parents just don't understand."
A familiar early theme is that of the parents limiting the offsrping's access to an automobile.
Eddie Cochrane, "Summertime Blues"
Well, my mom and poppa told me, 'Son you've got to earn some money
If you wanna use the car to go riding next Sunday'
I didn't go to work, i told the boss I was sick—
'Now you can't use the car because you didn't work a lick'
See also the girl in the Beach Boys song, who'll have "Fun, Fun, Fun" 'til her daddy takes her T-Bird away.
The Coasters' "Yakkety Yak" is in the voice of a parent laying down the law as regards chores ("Take out the papers and the trash/or you won't get no spending cash") and behavior ("Don't you give me no dirty looks," as well as the refrain's basso "Don't talk back.") Chuck Berry told his folks to "go away, leave me alone/and anyway I'm almost grown."
A lot of the weepy ballads of the 50s and 60s had parental disapproval as the primary force keeping the young lovers apart.
A little later on: Roger Waters of Pink Floyd has made an entire career out of his conflicted feelings towards his absent father and overbearing mother. (See most of The Wall). Ditto John Lennon ("Julia," with the Beatles: "Mother," solo), who also addressd the generation divide from the other side, speaking as father to a young son ("Beautiful Boy," most obviously; also "Watching the Wheels").
Once you get out of your teens—and in post-1960s rock, when the music, arguably, had become more mature—family ties are a two-edged sword: they provide continuity and stability, but can also be paralyzing. When Bruce Springsteen sings about New Jersey with that mixture of nostalgia and disgust—aware of the shabby parochialism, but man, what great memories—he's singing about family. He explicitly addresses his father in "Walk Like a Man," from Tunnel Of Love, where he recognizes both the necessity and the sadness of having to separate oneself from one's parents (in thiscase, by his father's death) in order to enter into full maturity. More emblematic is "My Hometown," from Born In the USA, where the narrator watches the economic decline of his hometown, but starts a family there anyway, perpetuating the cycle: at the end, he tells his son as hi own father had told him, "This is your hometown."
Steve Earle traces family histories in "Copperhead Road" (a three-generation outlaw saga, beginning with the lines "My name's John Lee Pettimore / same as my daddy and his daddy before"), "Johnny Come Lately" (how grandma and grandpa met dring the London blitz), and "Ellis Unit One" (where the narrator becomes a prison guard, "just like my Daddy and my uncles did.") Earle also sketches his family ralationships in "The Other Kind" ("I am the apple of my momma's eye / and I am my father's worst fears realized") among many other songs.
Kate Bush's large and loving family is ever-present in her songs: see especially "The Fog" (couching the inevitable detachment of oneelf from one's parents in the metaphor of a swimming lesson: "Is this love ... big enough to let go of me?")
In the 90s, grunge tracked family relationships in the context of abuse or neglect: Pearl Jam's "Jeremy," for instance, or, even more directly, "Daughter" (with a line that seems to encapsulate many a family relationship, "she holds the hand that holds her down"): broken family is alsothe subtext of many a Nirvana song, as noted above: to that list, add "Had A Dad" and whatever that one is with the chorus "Grandma,take me home"—the title is "Sliver," I think.
This is tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. What I think we've learned here is that Morrissey is, for better or worse, not a microcosm for pop music in general. |
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