Image credit – photo of Patti Smith with her children, by Annie Leibovitz.
I really love my kids, I like having them around me. They can drive you nuts and they’re such a responsibility but it’s like a movie you can never see again. You watch it as it’s happening and you think it’s always gonna be like that and then…
(Interview question: What do you think of the whole debate on censorship—parents being offended by pornographic lyrics?)
Some of the stuff pawned off as freedom of expression, let alone art, is just trash, just jerking off, with no real duty attached. No seeking to elevate. No self-censorship. No conscience. Things seem too open to me now, children are being robbed of their childhood. I don’t know. Somehow I feel like Rip van Winkle who fell asleep in the ‘70s and woke up in the ‘90s. When I was a child we were much more cut off from the adult world. What I think is, “Toyland, toyland…once you pass its portals you may never return again”.
Patti Smith, being interviewed by Thurston Moore in BOMB Magazine (1996). (From here via something changed).
The next time someone accuses me of being a pearl-clutching, what about the children hysteric for being concerned about the sexualisation of young girls I will point to Patti Smith, because if this is moral panic then I am in good company.
blue milk 
VERY good company. I had an attack of pearl-clutching last night when my kids were watching the Billboard Music Awards. When I saw Rihanna & Britney slithering around stripper poles singing about S&M I screamed to TURN IT OFF OFF OFF! Why that had to be the opening number of the show, at the kid-friendly hour of 7 pm I’ll never know.
@Shannon Drury – Amen, sister. You’re in very good company!
It’s like terrorism. You are sitting around with you kids watching the formerly safe, innocuous television when suddenly, out of nowhere…wham…you are attacked with a vision of people doing or saying something totally inappropriate and, let’s face it, embarrassing. You can’t relax. You wonder if you should explain or “discuss” what now amounts to about 30% of what you are subjected to during the “family hour”. You wonder how it is affecting your impressionable children and how much of it they understand. You wonder if they will have the innocence to fall deeply and truly in love on day. It’s just an awful time in history.