Generation Gap

This was too funny!

I was sitting on my balcony this evening, toasting marshmallows for s'mores over the dying coals of my little grill (yeah, I know, grilling on our balcony--gasp!! But we're extremely careful about it...) when I heard the kids next door talking and laughing. This is nothing unusual; if the weather's decent, they're outside for hours in the early evening, riding bikes and socializing with the kids on the block.

What made this evening different is that they started singing along to a music player one of them brought out. The first song was something I didn't know, but the second song was... "We Are the World"!

Yeah, that's right--one of the defining songs from the Eighties, a song that raised funds for the children in Africa and brought together such artists as Kenny Rogers, Kim Carnes, Huey Lewis, Michael Jackson, and Cyndi Lauper, among others. To anyone who was a child of the Eighties: does it bring back a couple memories of the era?

What I found so funny was not the song itself, though that brought out a couple of grins, remembering Cyndi's New-Yawk accent, singing "Wehll, wehll, wehll, let's realize..." 

No, what had me nearly in tears laughing was that these kids were playing it and knew the words to it!!! They couldn't have been more than 10 or 11 years old. They weren't even a gleam in their parents' eyes when that song came out!

It all left me with two reactions: 1.) shaking my head in disbelief, that this song continues to pop up even today, and 2.) laughing myself silly, that kids in the online iTunes era are singing the words to a song by a number of singers whose careers peaked before these kids were even born... :)