So the youngest boy has a laptop provided by his school that includes monitoring software that gives us insight into the sites he’s visiting and the searches that he’s conducting. The older boy, who has a laptop issued by the public school, has no such software installed; what happens in Public School, stays in Public School, you know.
But what I found on my youngest son’s search list was SHOCKING and DISTURBING.
He wanted to find the lyrics to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”:
Actually, it wasn’t a surprise since he spent much of the weekend singing the chorus over and over again.
I guess he’s doing some sort of computer animation to a snippet from the song on one of his “learn to code” Web sites.
However, the boys have discovered another piece of musical rebellion. In addition to sensitive male folk singers of the 1970s, they can listen to fin de siècle boy bands. Or, honestly, most music that came out of the 1990s. The oldest has already discovered that I cannot stand Green Day and had a phase when he really liked them.
Of course, when I was their age, I was also into oldies, Old Man (Millennium came out in 1999, so it is an oldie, and Justin Timberlake is something your parents listen to). I liked the Beach Boys a bunch and a lot of surf music; I even had a couple of Beach Boys audio cassettes if you can believe it (as you probably can, gentle reader).
But I will be happy when this phase passes.
And I am not going to embed the song for you, gentle reader, because I respect you too much.
