For Wednesday’s, non-WP-daily-prompt post, I think I’m going to throw a W question out there. Who, what, when, where, why…and maybe if I’m feeling spicy, I’ll ask a ‘how’ question.
The question on this first Wednesday is: What’s going on?
And by going on, I am referring to the social media trend of standing with your back to somebody and one person lip-syncing the first part of that 4 Non Blondes song “What’s going on?” and then they turn around and the person standing against their back starts lip syncing to Nicki Minaj’s song “Beez in the Trap”. First of all, how do these trends even start??? Some of them are really fun. Yesterday I saw the one that Kevin Bacon did with his wife, Kyra Sedgwick. The one with Gordon Ramsey was pretty funny because he did it at the beach wearing a wet suit and I think he danced in it too. Very non-traditional Gordon Ramsey behavior.
I don’t engage much on TikTok unless the younger people at work send me videos. My sister is on there trying to build her following, but her videos make me cringe. Maybe because I know her in real life? I don’t know.
But I bring this up today because that song takes me back to middle school. The 4 Non Blondes song that is. I don’t know much about Nicki Minaj’s discography to really put a time and place on those songs for where I was when they came out. That 4 Non Blondes song makes me think of my mother because she LOVED that song. I can still picture the dancing gestures she would do when she listened to it. She never actually sang along out loud but she did lip-sync.
I’m pretty sure she discovered the song because she heard it on the radio and liked it and then she asked me who sang it and I had to tell her and then I had to get her a copy of it on cassette tape. That’s how it went with my mom. She’d hear something on the radio and she could never tell me what the name of the song or artist was, but she could very badly sing a line of the song and expect me to know exactly what she was talking about. I’ll never forget the song she asked me to identify where the only line she could remember was, actually, it wasn’t even a line, it was the song that went “round and round and round”. After much frustrating back and forth, imagine my surprise when I figured out the song she was talking about was “Rollin’” by Limp Bizkit. Oh mother. Nowhere in that song are the words “round and round and round” He does sing “Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’” though.
It’s important to reflect on how my mother was with my music because I’m like that now with my secretary’s music. She’s 23. She’s a big fan of Sabrina Carpenter. She helped me figure out songs of hers that I would know. We came to the conclusion that I only know one Sabrina Carpenter song and I only know it because, you guessed it, that’s the only one I hear them play on the radio. Just like my mother. My goodness.
So again I ask, what’s going on? How did I go from rolling my eyes at my mother as she lipsynced and danced cringily to that song, to being her age and barely able to identify what the young kids are listening to these days. I’m not old, but I’m not young either. I’m somewhere in that middle-age place. But that’s o.k. I think my music is better anyway.
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