Barney vs. Britney

    One of the things I hear from adults who don’t have children is that they’re glad they don’t have to put up with stuff like Barney. In fact, I probably reviled Barney as much as the next guy before my daughter became a Barney fanatic. But once you get past the fact that it’s a show aimed at very young children, the show isn’t as bad as it first seems. In fact I have to confess that I’ve actually found myself playing one of the many Barney CDs we’ve bought even when my daughter isn’t around (don’t ask).

    The other recent obssession my daughter has picked up on is far more annoying than Barney ever was — I’m talking about Britney Spears. For some reason my daughter loves Spears’ “music”. When she couldn’t even understand the lyrics, she’d start bopping in her car seat every time that inane “Hit Me One More Time” (or whatever that song is called) came on the radio. Which unfortunately meant her mom and dad couldn’t immediately change the station without a very vocal protest.

    So imagine our horror when our daughter came home one day and started singing lyrics from “Oops, I Did It Again.” Yuck. But it was cute and so we relented and bought the CD. The good part is that my daughter only wants to hear the “Oops” song, with the bad news being that she wants to hear it over and over again. The worst part, though, is that one day I actually decided to listen to the rest of the album. As Spears herself might say, ohmigod.

    I saw in USA Today some parents weren’t happy at her striptease act during the MTV video awards. I am more horrified that a generation of kids is going to grow up listening to Spears’ version of the Rolling Stones classic “Satisfaction” — yes, she actually covers the song on her latest CD. But that’s not the worst part; she actually had the gall to change the lyrics. Apparently it just wouldn’t do for a teen idol such as Spears to sing the last part of the song wherein Mick Jagger informed the world that the man on television telling him how white his shirt should be “can’t be a man/Because he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.”

    So somebody wrote new lyrics for her to sing instead. Bizarre. Give me “I love you, you love me” any day of the week.