A good friend of my “wife” and I bought our son a system for his birthday (meaning the day he was birthed). If you don’t know what a system is let me tell you. A system is two speakers that are almost as tall as I am with a refurbished 1970’s turn table and an excellent vintage stereo system that picks up on tones that today’s MP3 files only dream about. Simply put, this is a badass system made for intense listening pleasure. So I have made it a Saturday morning tradition while my “wife” is at work to strap my son into his little carrier against my chest and hit the local thrift stores in an effort to scope out the records that have come in and perhaps score a Beatle’s record or Fleetwood Mac or Micheal Jackson (pre-1990’s) that is in great shape. I have also recently subscribed to the Rhapsody music program that brings virtually any album to your fingertips and with the help of a Radio Shack cord have hooked my computer through the system so we have just about anything we could want to listen to via vinyl or CD or MP3 and let me tell you, we get a lot of dancing done.

Sure, we expose him to all kinds of music; jazz, rock, fusion, blues, rap (yes I said rap), R&B, etc.. That is all fine and good and leaves my son smiling and me sweating and we all have a great time. The problem lies in the racy music that I like that is chock full of screaming and bad language and all the things that we are not suppose to expose our children to. Well, being an alternadad, I always swore that I would never censor what my child listens to. I always figured that the child is an individual that could hear or see and appreciate or disregard or whatever the art that it was exposed to. That was pre-fatherhood.

True, I have outgrown most of my youth angst rock where singers wail about oppressive and neglectful parents and loves that leave and friends that betray, I just can’t relate to it much anymore. I still have, however, a streak in me that likes to headbang in the living room to angry songs or laugh along to songs that are so offensive that they are funny (hello Frank Zappa). I still feel that my son is an individual who has the right to listen to or watch whatever they like (except…you know, porn!) but that is not really the case. This is me exposing my child to art that they at best may or may not approve of and at worst shape his thinking in ways that may not be beneficial to his development. So now we are left with the dilemma of how do you raise a responsible, liberal, open-minded child without exposing her or him to the trash that you expose yourself to? The question is am I becoming more like my father and if so is that a good or a bad thing?

My father is a great, hard-working man that if you take away the fact that I am a hard-core liberal who believes in gay rights and considers himself a feminist, I am a carbon copy of. So I turned out fine, I feel, but my father didn’t expose me to any media except football games on television, The Beatles, George Straight, and early Micheal Jackson (I told you, carbon copy) so I can’t say whether my exposure to racy art or lack there of makes me so careful about I expose my son to.

For the time being I have limited my rotation of heavy metal and down right dirty ditties while my son is around. So am I becoming more like my father? I don’t know. What I do know is that my “wife” is taking our son out to do a little shopping and I got whole living room that I can, and will, crank up the trash and get my headbanging on!