The other night my husband took our daughter Clementine to see the Plain White T’s perform on campus–a truly selfless act for which I will be in his debt for approximately the next three hundred years.
Not that the Plain White T’s are so bad. (Although their hit song, “Hey There Delilah,” has one of those moronic, looping melody lines that get stuck in your head for days. The kind of song that you find yourself singing under your breath every time your windshield wipers hit a certain speed.) But still: that’s just one song–not enough to taint an entire concert.
No, the reason I owe my husband for the rest of my natural life (and beyond) isn’t because of “Oooooh, what you gave to me; ooooh, it burns when I pee,” (or however that song goes)–they could have played nothing but that song over and over again all night and it would not have mattered one bit. Actually, they could have conducted a highly thoughtful and cogent discussion on the state of the current economy, and that wouldn’t have mattered either. As a matter of fact, nothing the Plain White T’s did would have made any difference to my husband’s concert-going experience at all, because from where he sat the concert consisted of only one sound:
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!”
(This is the sound made by twelve hundred preteen girls screaming in syncopated adoration.)
A lot.
My first thought, when he described the concert to me, was to feel bad for the band. After all, the Plain White T’s aren’t just some jumped up Disney concoction like the Jonas Brothers or Hannah Montana; it only seemed reasonable to assume, then, that when they were first sitting around in their garage and dreaming of hitting it big those dreams didn’t include things like, “Yeah, man, and the chicks are going to go crazy for us–at least until they get old enough to start wearing bras.” A few words with my husband, however, relieved me of my concern. “No,” he said wryly, “they seemed well aware of who their audience was.” Meaning that they said the type of things up on stage guaranteed to elicit more screaming, rather than less. Things like:
“Hey, you guys know what? We were just in”–looks at cue card—“Kingman, and they said that the kids in Flagstaff didn’t know how to rock…*” (rest cut off by screaming). (*Satire alert: this is not an actual Plain White T’s concert quote.)
Here’s the thing: I must confess, that even though I was once a preteen girl myself (long, long ago–back before the term “preteen” even existed), I’m still at a loss to understand the screaming thing. While logic tells me that it must be some kind of defensive strategy leftover from our caveman days (can you think of a better way to drive off a Sabre-toothed tiger?), that doesn’t help explain why, then, those screaming attacks are only used when girls are confronted with something they want to get closer to, not when they are confronted with the things they want to drive away. They don’t scream (at least not like that) at their little brothers; they scream like that at Rob Pattinson. And Daniel Radcliffe. And even, oddly enough, the guy from Napoleon Dynamite. And they definitely scream at bands.
This presents something of a dilemma for parents who are also music lovers: do we tell our daughters to shut up, or do we just let them enjoy the show (screams and all)? In the end, I have to say that I agree with my husband’s decision to let our daughter scream, although I’m sure that it was frustrating for the people who actually came to hear, and not just see the Plain White T’s.
Both of them.