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By Nadine Graham
By the time I was an adolescent, I had my mind made up: I wanted to be more like my laidback father as a parent … but younger. My parents were an entire generation ahead of me and while my dad was willing to learn, my mother was completely removed from my interests. So in related news, when I was 22-years-old, I had my first daughter. Three years later, I discovered a glitch in my well thought-out plan of being a young mom.
Rule #1: When you’re a young parent enamored with hip-hop culture, you have to be a bit more careful.
Growing up a native New Yorker, hip-hop was literally everywhere. From our beloved block in Brooklyn to Saturday shopping with my mom downtown, the biggest radio station, Hot 97, blasted from every available speaker. And if it wasn’t the radio, it was the unfiltered version of whatever rap album that had recently dropped. I fell in love with it all, even as my mother frowned and hurried me along, hoping that none of the debauchery stuck, I suppose.
I rarely, if ever, had common interests with either of my parents. My dad was a bit easier to connect with. He cussed from time to time, drank Heinekens and Red Stripes, and routinely took me on rides to his job uptown. While bumping Chicago and Stevie Wonder while riding down the FDR, he explained the importance of artists like Marvin Gaye and The Carpenters. By the time I was a teenager and Word Up! posters covered my bedroom wall, rap music had a hold on me and though my mother despised it all, my dad was the one who bopped along to Fabolous, recreating the lyrics to ‘Holla Back.’ He encouraged it. I blame him.
I’ve poured over rap magazines since age 11. I abandoned early dreams of becoming a pediatrician for new aspirations of painting pictures of artists through words like dream hampton did. I breathed hip hop — day in, day out. When I started having children, nothing changed. So I blasted the explicit version while cleaning the house. I brought my baby girl with me to pick up mixtapes. I jumped around to Jay Z while cooking dinner for the family.
Her father, only two years older than me, had begun his purging process. He’d proclaimed that the culture was “for the youngins’,” and shouldn’t I be “growing out of hip-hop by now?” Nope and nope. It wasn’t until one fateful day in 2008 when I saw the repercussions. Lil’ Wayne’s Tha Carter III had just dropped and I was particularly obsessed with the Kanye West-produced “Let the Beat Build.”
Clearly, my sweet little baby picked up on that because by the time Weezy ran through his first verse and got to the hook, she hollered proudly, ‘I hit the kill switch / Now that’s how you let the beat build b*tch!’ Explicit lyrics, anyone? Her father looked at me, chuckled and said, “See?” I was mortified. Tickled, but mortified.
Here’s how we handled that — promptly and, I’d say, pretty effectively. I turned the music down and pulled her towards me, “Mommy isn’t mad at you,” I started, “But this is Lil’ Wayne’s song. And he is a grown-up so he can say certain words okay? Those words aren’t for you yet so don’t say them.” She looked puzzled so I continued, “You like the beat right?” She nodded hard enough for her little plaits to flop around. “The beat is cool and Mommy likes it too. But some of those words are bad, so we shouldn’t say them.” And that was that.
I’ve never heard her utter a curse word again and it’s been six years since that day. She’s always been a musical baby anyway. Her father has bragged about her perfect pitch and song creating since she started talking, so in an effort to nurture her affinity for music I let her pick the tunes from time to time. She likes pop music. A lot. Regardless of her hard-core mama and all the rap she’s grown up listening to, my baby, now 9-years-old, prefers Ariana Grande, and that’s perfectly fine with me. Sometimes she can even get me to sing along.
How much do you censor the music your children listen to? Are their certain artists that are completely off-limits?
