Remember that old song “Cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon…”
This article made a lot of sense to me.
Listening to Cat’s in the Cradle
By Stephen H. Webb
Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle is a maudlin song, meant to manipulate, and it hits me hard every time I hear it pop up, unpredictably and infrequently, on the radio. The song is a bit preachy, which is probably why it has been used in so many sermons, and why it has also been an easy target of parody and ridicule. It is about a father who is too busy to spend time with his son, who nonetheless admires him and wants to be just like him. When the son grows up, he is too busy with his own work and family to spend any time with his aging father. The son, in other words, has turned out just like his father, though in a way that the father regrets.
The irony of the song is a bit obvious, but it still packs a powerful punch, at least to guys my age. The song is partially autobiographical, because Chapin’s father, a musician, was on the road during much of his youth, but it is also about Chapin himself, since his wife is actually credited with writing the lyrics. She was worried that Chapin would not be around to help raise their newborn son, Josh. She wrote the song as a warning to her husband, and it has served as an effective wake-up call to fathers ever since. The song begins,
My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away.
Chapin took his wife’s words and added a catchy melody that makes the sad lyrics almost bearable.
Cat’s in the Cradle was released in 1974, reached the top of the Billboard music charts, sold millions, and earned Chapin a Grammy nomination for Best Song. In other words, it struck a chord.
The 1970s were a divisive decade. What began in the 1960s as a fairly elite and limited rebellion against traditional moral standards became in the 1970s the social norm, with catastrophic results. College radicals failed in many of their political objectives—the backlash that began with Nixon’s election still has momentum today—but they succeeded in transforming American culture. Even teenagers raised in the Midwest with solid traditional values fought their parents over trips to the barber and what to listen to on the car radio. I know that from personal experience. Rebellion was in the air, and rock and roll provided the soundtrack.
My students, as we would have said back then, just can’t relate. Every year I teach a course for freshmen on Christianity and Popular Culture. I try to persuade my students, all of whom are usually Christian, that having faith should force them into a protracted and messy battle with popular culture, but I’ve seen that message make less and less sense with each passing year. One of the hardest things I have had to learn as a teacher is that my story is not their story. This is a good thing, of course, given how low the 1970s sunk, but it is also something worth thinking about.
My generation was raised in conflict. What do students today fight for, and what do they fight against?
When I tell my students that my father and I had constant battles over the length of my hair and the span of the bell bottoms on my favorite pair of purple plaid pants, they just laugh. They have been spared the ravages of a society trying to redefine itself through bad fashion. When I tell them that rock and roll was meant to tear families apart by promoting promiscuity and drugs, however, they think I am joking. They listen to the same music as their parents. Rock and roll has been made safe by Contemporary Christian Music. Rock is simply the way the world sounds.
Many of my students (I teach at an all-male college) tell me that their father is their best friend. That is great, but I wonder what they have lost when they do not experience fathers as a source of judgment and an obstacle to adolescent excess. As one of my students was talking about his father the other day, I noticed that he has a pierced tongue. When I asked if that bothered his father, he replied that his dad paid for it and thought it was “cool.”
Stephen H. Webb is a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College
I am of the generation whose dads did not take them to the tattoo parlor.
Actually, I am glad that my dad doesn’t think tongue piercing is cool.
And I wonder, with Professor Webb, what this generation has lost.
When I sit and chat with the older men in our congregation, I aspire to the honor and dignity, they deservedly bear.