janradder

"What's punk rock?" Éiden asked me at breakfast this morning.

I looked at him trying to think of how I could answer that question. I mean, for someone who purports to love punk so much you'd think I'd have some sort of stock answer at the ready, but I couldn't come up with anything.

"It's a type of music," was my lame reply.

He seemed satisfied with that, finished his breakfast, and then went upstairs to get dressed. I couldn't stop thinking about it though, because I really hadn't answered his question. So I thought about it some more, and the only thing I could think of was to play him some punk rock. When he came back downstairs I slapped a Henry Rollins record on the turntable. "Don't think about it -- just do it!" screamed Rollins through the speaker.

"So, Éiden, this is punk," I told him.

"Oh," he said, and listened carefully.

"But not all punk sounds like this," I added.

"Oh," he said again, absorbing that information.

"One of the things about punk is that it all sounds different," I said. "Here -- I'll play you some other punk so you can see."

Rollins finished his rant and I swapped him for Richard Hell and the Voidoids. And then when the Voidoids had finished doing their thing, I followed them with the Dead Kennedys and then Wire and the Ramones and then Sonic Youth. Finally, I put on the Minutemen, and as they propelled the rushing surge of "Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs" forward, I turned to Éiden again.

"Do you want to know how people dance to this kind of music?" I asked him, smiling.

"Yeah!" he said.

Grabbing a hold of the rhythm, I started twisting through the living room, arms pumping wildly, feet dancing to the beat, spinning and bouncing like a lunatic.

"Really, Daddy?" Éiden asked with a huge grin on his face. "That's really how you dance to this music?"

"Yeah," I said, "and sometimes you bump into people. It's called slam dancing."

Éiden laughed and started to copy me, and then he started throwing himself against my legs so he could slam dance. I put on X's Wild Gift and we danced some more, and at the end of each song Éiden would ask eagerly, "Can we hear another?" and then the next song would come on and we'd go back to being a couple of dancing fools gyrating, whirling and caroming across the living room floor.

When it was over, I turned to him once more and asked him how he would describe what punk rock was.

"Slam dancing?" he said with a questioning smile. "Loud. . . and fast!"

"Yeah," I said. "I guess that's pretty much it."