Mama I wanna be a Rockstar

Jan 25

Jan 25 Mama I wanna be a Rockstar

My mom likes to tell me that she took me to Lollapalooza when I was in the womb. Unfortunately, I don’t believe her because according to the Internet, there was no Lollapalooza in 2002. However, it’s confirmed that she took me to see Lenny Kravitz when I was an infant.

Lenny Kravitz on tour, 2002. Image via Flickr.

I don’t think I realized that I was surrounded by the influence of rock legends as I was growing up. I don’t even remember my parents ever playing music in front of me. But I remember talk of names I didn’t recognize when I was a child, Prince, Freddie Mercury, Slash, Eddie Vedder…

Even if they didn’t play music, in the grocery store, a restaurant, or a coffee shop, my mom would burst out singing when she heard Guns N’ Roses or ACDC, throwing her hands in the air and dancing just enough to make me embarrassed and beg her to stop.

But I can already feel myself becoming that way. And now I love it when she does that. So when I do think about it, maybe rock music was there for me before I even realized it.

Entering elementary school, I thought that music my mom would sing and dance to was too loud. A little angry for my six-year-old taste. All I wanted to do was sit in the backseat of my babysitter’s gray Mazda and listen to Y100, the local pop and top hits radio station. I would run my fingers back and forth on the cloth that lined the car, let the feeling of the car baking in the sun all day warm my skin, and I would secretly kick my feet to the beat and memorize the lyrics in my head. That’s when I began to know I loved music.

Then I happened upon a precious object that fueled the love that was born through the car radio. An iPod. An iPod nano second generation to be exact. An electric blue color. My older sister’s passed down to me. This is where the ear damage began, playing Britney Spears’s Blackout and Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad at full volume through my pink earbuds. I downloaded my own additions (High School Musical Soundtrack) using my iTunes giftcard.

However, there were a few songs of my sister’s on the iPod that unnerved me and I always skipped them on shuffle. They were …different than what I was used to. I had a distaste for the bass riffs of the Plain White T’s and the grimy vocals of the Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. But something began to make me stop and listen. Perhaps it was Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” that was the turning point.

Heart’s *Little Queen* album. Image via Wikipedia.

I got older. About 9. I was still on my pop music wave, though I liked to watch my sister play on Guitar Hero on the weekends. Like my mom’s music, it hurt my hears sometimes. As she hit every note on expert mode, I began to be hypnotized by the shreds of a genre of songs I had ignored until that point. Even when she put down the Wii remote and stopped playing, Hit Me With Your Best Shot by Pat Benatar and Barracuda by Heart rang in my head, and I sang along (the guitar solos too).

Today, I turned out the way you would imagine the child of an 80’s hard rock mom would turn out. I wear all black (and often leather) just like her. I wear tall shoes just like her. I scream to my favorite songs just like her. I play electric guitar like she probably wanted to.

And I always feel proud when one of her favorite songs comes on and I sing all the lyrics and she remarks “how do you know this?? I loved this song when I was your age.” And then we’ll dance to No More Tears together.