Kiss

Growing up with a K-Pop Kid

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

October 2, 2025

Fifty years ago, I was 11 years old and somewhere between my Elton John phase and my Kiss phase. All the girls in my class were in their Bay City Rollers phase. Now I have an 11-year-old and she’s firmly in her K-Pop phase. Yeah, there’s a new Taylor Swift album out tomorrow but that pales in comparison to having every single incarnation of the new album by Stray Kids (available at Target). I know, because I’ve had to drive her there to get each version. “I’m spending my own money, Dad!” I laugh because I was right there, spending my chore money on Kiss posters.

Three thoughts.

Thought One: I love the evolution of music. If you would have asked me in 1975 what the pop music of 2025 might sound like, I never would have guessed the post-modern electro-clash of South Korean K-Pop groups. It’s like music from another planet. Just blast “Ceremony” by Stray Kids and tell me what you are listening to. But it’s infectious. Is it “noise” (Get out my yard, kids!) or a brilliant innovation of the pop music genre? The rock and roll ethic is youth music is supposed to set the younger generation apart from the older generation. My Dad’s parents hated Elvis and my dad hated Run DMC. I’m supposed to hate this music but I’m fascinated by it. Sorry, Cozy. I’m in.

Thought Two: I used to lecture about “teenybopper” culture in my Sociology of Youth Subculture class. About how research shows that the “culture of the bedroom” allows pre-teen girls to experiment with heterosexual norms of dating. I’m from the seventies, so their were a lot of girls buying Tiger Beat for the pin-ups of Leif Garret and Shaun Cassidy. Cozy’s Stray Kids box sets come with similar swag that ends up on her bedroom wall. Her and her friend screamed yesterday as they pulled out the pictures of the members of the boy band, including Hyunjin, who she declared was her “husband.” Classic teenybopper. How many women my age were sure they would marry Donny Osmond?

Thought Three: Music is such a great way to bond with your kid. Some families have sports, or religion, or animal husbandry. Our house has always been filled with an unhealthy obsession with music. Taking Cozy to see Taylor Swift last year was something we will both talk about for the rest of our days. Being present for her present K-Pop obsession is a great gift and she knows I appreciate it because I was in a similar spot. (There is more than one picture of me in Kiss make-up.) Andi and I took Cozy to see the film Demon Hunter at the theater and she sang every world. On the fourth of July, Cozy and her girl squad were crammed into my Subaru and they put “Gnarly” by KATSEYE on repeat and full volume and sang at the top of their lungs while they threw Snap n Pops at pedestrians. It was bliss.

Thanks to Facebook routinely reminding me, I am often lamenting over pics of Cozy the Toddler. Or Cozy the Second Grader. I posted a lot of pictures of her and that was a great part of her and my life. Cozy the Middle Schooler has all kinds of new joys to offer. Yeah, I want her to get off her phone and clean up her room (That’s another conflicting conflict to explore), but there is so much for me and this kid to learn about each other. Me at 11 was on my bike, her a 11 is on TikTok. We’re different people in different times. Me at 11 was obsessed with Watergate and my first trip to Washington, DC. Cozy is more than aware that Trump is threatening her country and her city, in particular, but she distances herself because her father is so invested in it, often asking why I spend so much time on the protest front line.

So the music connects us. The night she was born, I held her in my arms and sang, “Yellow Submarine.” I can imagine myself on my deathbed with her singing me some K-Pop tune from the 2020s. I asked her yesterday, “What do you think the music of 2075 will sound like, because you’ll be there?” She said, “Like robots.” I said, “That’s what I said 50 years ago.” We’re both right.

I Would Have Hated the Beatles in 1964, or How My Daughter Made Me a Taylor Swift Fan in 2024

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

May 4, 2024

If I was my current age in 1964, as Beatlemania swept America, I would have absolutely hated the Fab Four. I would have been a 60-year-old jazz purist, dedicated to be-bop, hard-bop, and post-pop. I wouldn’t have had time for West Coast bop (sorry Brubeck), let alone mop top non-bop. I would have taken one look at the grinning lads from Liverpool, surrounded by millions of screaming girls, while they did their white people version of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” and turned up my nose. “That’s pre-packaged bubblegum. I listen to serious music, like Miles and Trane,” I would have said.

Turns out those millions of teenage girls were right.

I’m not making that mistake 60 years later. I am fully in the grip of Swiftmania and I have my 9-year-old daughter to thank for it.

I’m deep in the bag for TS. The haters are the people who knee-jerk react to the trope that “Popular = Bad.” After all, the masses are asses, as L7 sang. Anything as massive as Taylor Swift must suck. That’s the same thing they said about the Beatles in 1964, who clogged up the pop charts with their “Yeah, yeah, yeahs!” But here’s the thing. You can dig L7 (and the Yeah! Yeah! Yeahs! and Miles and Coltrane) AND Taylor Swift. Tay is on my playlists next to punk bands like Destiny Bond and jazz freaks like Sun Ra. I’m not going to let your hipster elitism deny me the appreciation of this crazy trip, especially when it is being led by my Swiftie 4th grader.

Like a lot of people, I drug my heals on the Taylor Train. I prefer Tuareg music from Mali over the American Top 40. But her 2022 lofi dream pop album, Midnights, caught my attention. It took me to some unexpected places that I missed from my youth (like the sound of the wind down at 3 am). But it was when Cozy, my always enthusiastic about something daughter, switched her attention from the Animal Crossing video game to Taylor Swift that I bought my ticket onboard the Swift Express.

Cozy’s cohort followed mine in many ways. In third grade, it was all about the songs. “Cruel Summer,” always got a, “Turn it up, Dad” in the car. (For me it was “Burning Love,” by Elvis Presley.) Fourth grade is more about the artist. Cozy’s girl gang has lots of Taylor Talk before, during, and after school. (By the end of 4th grade, I’d seen most of Elvis’ 33 movies.) The Eras tour sweatshirts are like their team jerseys. Cozy makes song bracelets in hopes that one day she’ll be able to trade them at an actual concert. She’s made her bedroom into a shrine to Taylor with taped up magazine pictures and a rotating “Top 13” favorite song list. (13 is a magical number in Taylor-world.) At 13, my room was split between shrines to Kiss and the Beatles. She falls asleep each night to the TS CD’s I’ve loaded into her mother’s ancient iMac computer. And I assume all her friends live in a similar Taylor bubble.

Cozy’s fanaticism is infectious. She knows every Swift lyric, including to the “Anthology” version songs on Swift’s new album. She knows the outfits of the Eras tour including the “22 hat.” (I have no idea, but she tells me she’s going to show me a YouTube video that explains it.) When the new album, The Tortured Poets Department, dropped at 9 pm on April 18th, we sat together as it streamed into our lives. The next day we raced to the record store to pick up a vinyl copy and record a review for my YouTube channel. That night, her crew had a Swiftie listening party where all the girls dressed as a different era. Thanks to her mom’s make-up skills, Cozy nailed the Reputation look. I don’t know what would be the 1964 version of that, but I’d like to think 4th grade Randy (Ringo’s Version) would have most certainly been combing his hair forward.

It might be different if this was 1997 and I had a nine-year-old who was gaga over the Backstreet Boys. Taylor Swift is an insanely talented artist. Like Paul McCartney, she could sneeze and a brilliant song would come out. Like Bob Dylan, she can take the story of her life, slam words together, and create poetry that we will be analyzing for generations. If you don’t believe me, listen to Dylan’s 1975 track, “Tangled Up in Blue,” written after his separation from his wife Sara, and then the ten minute version of Swift’s “All Too Well,” written after her break up with Jake Gyllenhaal, and tell me they don’t fit together like two socks in a drawer. But because Swift is a young woman (and blonde and thin) her artistry is dismissed. There are plenty of music lovers who extol Joni Mitchell in 2024, who also derided her in 1970 for trying to “be Dylan.” I don’t know what will be seen as “classic” in 2074, but, if there is radio 50 years from now, “Cruel Summer” and the dozens of other Swift hits will be playing to welcoming ears of Gen Z elders and their mutant children.

The mission now is to get Cozy to a Taylor Swift concert. Taylor is playing at Wembley Stadium in London (where I saw Live Aid in 1985) on Cozy’s birthday on August 17th. The cheapest, behind the stage, tickets start at $1200. Tickets to see the Beatles in 1964 were five bucks. For the price of one Taylor Swift ticket I could have bought 240 Beatle tickets. (Yes, I did the math.) I’ve entered contests, bugged friends in London, and watched StubHub like a lunatic. I want Cozy to have this experience. She even described seeing Taylor in concert with her mom and dad as her “perfect day” in a recent family therapy session. When I was her age, my parents took me to see Elvis Presley and it turned me inside out. So, somehow, this will happen.

All this is just a truckload of fun. It’s as much about Cozy’s joy as it is about the wonderful music that Taylor Swift makes. Yes, some of those songs make me cry (“All You Had to Do Was Stay” was written about my own break up, I’m convinced). But I’ll remember (all too well) dancing in the kitchen with my kid to “Shake it Off” and re-discovering the way music can completely consume you. I have my Beatlemania thanks to Cozy. And I’m screaming my lungs out.

Music, Nostalgia, and the Power of Being Present

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

May 29, 2023

I have a very specific memory from the summer of 1980. I was 16 years old, driving west on North Decatur Road in my 1973 Gran Torino to do some record shopping at the Wuxtry. Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” was blasting on 96 Rock. I had the windows down and the volume all the way up. I stopped at the red light at Church Street. The car to the right of me and the car in the turn lane to the left of me were both playing 96 Rock at full volume. We all looked at each other and screamed, “Check it and see!” – united by technology, generation, and a great chorus.

I can’t imagine anything like that happening today, with everyone locked in their algorithmic streams.

Nostalgia is a dirty drug. There are countless memes that will tell you that music, cars, TV shows, and culture were better “back then.” It’s a lie. There was crappy music that you conveniently forget, death trap cars that were unsafe at any speed, stupid TV shows, and a culture that rewarded the bullies and marginalized everyone else. Donald Trump’s “great” America was 1950 (as he told CNN in 2015), the peak of Jim Crow, before civil rights movements for women, gay and trans people, and Americans with disabilities. And the top song was “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley. No thanks.

The truth is the past was great and super shitty. Just like now.

I love it when Boomers yearn for the days when you could ride in the back of a pick up or ride your bike without a helmet. That’s because they are alive to yearn. A bunch of kids got bounced out of the bed of the pick up and are not yearning because they are in yearn-free graves.

So what is it about music that locks us into these powerful memories of yesteryear? Incredible research with Alzheimer’s Disease patients has demonstrated that music can activate incredibly specific memories in people who can’t even remember their spouses and family members, because music exists in a part of the brain the progressive disease can’t reach. I’m guessing 90-year old me, in 2054, might not remember you, but play “Hot Blooded” and I’ll tell you all about that day on North Decatur Road in the summer of 1980 with great clarity.

The reason for my curiosity is the mindfulness practice of being present. Buddhism warns of being lost in the past (and worrying about the future). We spend scant time being in the present. Being present allows us to see our internal state and manage our emotions. Like Ringo said, sometimes you gotta stop and take time to smell the roses. As I’ve written about in this blog, there is great value in stopping.

So, to all the people of my generation, think about how we would listen to music. I have such clear memories of going over to Doug Warringer’s house to listen to a Kiss album or going over to Ed Overstreet’s house to listen to a Clash album. And we would JUST listen. We were present in the moment of listening to the songs. There was no, “This track reminds me of when,” or “This track makes me think about what I need to do.” There was just that moment. Then, when the album was over, we would do something else. But listening was the activity.

Our songs take us to those moments when we were fully present. It’s a weird nostalgia trick about memories of the present. I write this on Memorial Day, thinking about veterans whose brains are often frozen in those traumatic battlefield experiences. I know the songs that were blasting as we raced through the Ukrainian war zone last year are still in my ears. There is a direct link that connects what was playing during our first dance and our first war, present moments sealed in amber for all time. When I was 16, I didn’t have much of a past to ruminate over and my future was wide open so it was easy to absorb the moment. All these years later, being present is handicapped by memories of what was and what could have been and concerns about the future for me and my child. 

Here’s where music can help.

I’ve been kicked off of numerous “Classic Rock” Facebook pages for arguing with old timers who all think music today sucks. I remind them of what their parents had to say about AC/DC and they sound just like old people. “These kids today!” They point of youth music is that is separates young people from their parent’s generation. Then they’ll go on and on about autotuning and profanity and the “that’s not music” about the Cardi B’s of the world in rants that seem more racist than music purist. And I’ll say, there are countless new rock bands putting albums out and if you love 70s pop, have you tried Harry Styles? And bam, I’m banned again by classic rock old farts who are prisoners of their nostalgia, forever blocked out of being present with a great song.

I have the best moments with my daughter and her friends driving around with the Top 40 station (Z100 in Portland) turned all the way up, listening them sing along. I know the hits of 2023 will resonate with them the way the wonderful/horrible songs of 1973 do for me.

So here’s the assignment. If you were born in the twentieth century, I want you to go straight to the pop charts. Find a hit that speaks to you. My third grade daughter’s favorite song of the moment is “Flowers,” by Miley Cyrus (currently #3 on the charts). Listen to that song while doing nothing but listening to that song. How does that tune make you feel? Try not to get nostalgic or concerned about what’s to come. Just be in the moment. Then put it on a playlist. Make it your song for late spring 2023. Every time you hear it take a deep breath and think, I am here now.

There’s so much amazing music happening right now and so many opportunities to just stop and take in the moment. Be here now.