There’s always that one song your whole family loves. You grew up listening to that song in your dad’s car while running errands, at family bat/bar mitzvahs, or at your parents’ college reunions. For my family, it’s Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
My parents introduced the song to my siblings and me when we were just in elementary school. But we had mature, sophisticated ears for classic rock even at such a young age. We loved this song. We would blast it in our living room and dance around to it. My sister and I even made a choreographed dance.
Just so you get a feel for the song in case you don’t know it, here are the lyrics to the chorus:
“Don’t stop me now I’m having such a good time
I’m having a ball
Don’t stop me now
If you wanna have a good time just give me a call
Don’t stop me now (‘Cause I’m having a good time)
Don’t stop me now (Yes I’m havin’ a good time)
I don’t want to stop at all”
So, twelve years later of loving this song, my dad finally reveals to us innocent Greenberg children what it’s actually about: jerking off. Now go back and reread the lyrics with this new meaning in mind. Yep, yep, I know. Gross. Now just imagine a seven year old, a nine year old, and an eleven year old belting these lyrics. Even grosser, right?
This one revelation makes me now question what else my parents have been hiding from me. I’m in my twenties now; I deserve to know other innuendos or “adult content” I’ve failed to catch in my favorite songs or in just about anything really.
So I extensively interrogated my parents. In my endeavors, I was a little disturbed when my dad told me what he thought the song “Alison” by Elvis Costello was about. To give a little background, this is a song he used to sing to me as a little girl because the title is my namesake. So you can imagine how distraught I was when he confessed that he thought the song was about someone wanting to murder Alison. But I Wikipedia’d that one. It says that the song is just about someone disappointing someone else, which still isn’t that great, I guess.
Whatever they reveal to me, I hope it’s not as traumatizing as when I realized all the sexual subliminal messages in Disney movies. That’s a lot for anyone to handle all at once.
In all seriousness though, it is nice to know that I have that relationship with my parents where they feel comfortable talking openly about songs referring to jerking off. It does make me cringe, but I still appreciate the gesture. As I grow older, my relationship with my parents has entered this “limbo” zone, where they teeter between parental figures and friends. I’m realizing that they’re people too; people I would probably hang out with if they were in college with me now. So if them telling me the truth about things they hid from me as a child means our relationship is heading into the “friend zone,” then I have just one challenge for my parents: BRING THE TRUTH ON.
Image via.