Even Better Asks: Mother's Day
Even Better Asks: Mother's Day
This one's all about media that makes us think of mom.
You’re reading Even Better Asks, a recurring series where the head honchos at Even Better come up with an open-ended question for our extended web of pals to answer in blurb form. Last time, we went back to school and reflected on some embarrassing old music favs. This week’s prompt comes with a (slightly belated) holiday peg:
What's a piece of media that makes you think of your mom or a mother figure in your life?
Below, you’ll find some of the expected (and often quite unexpected) new mom classics:
My mom is a very standard ‘60s-’70s woman. She loves Jackson Browne, Neil Young, “Rosalita”-era Bruce, Crosby, Stills & Nash. I could play her something as seemingly translatable to those acts like Father John Misty or Sharon Van Etten on her Honda Bluetooth and she'd tell me to turn that garbage off.
But there was one modern act that crossed through her barriers. One day, before I had ever heard their eventual hit, she arrived home with a physical CD of a band she had heard over the PA at HomeGoods: All The Stars And Boulevards by Augustana. Maybe it's because she (briefly) moved to Boston, I don't know. But she was immediately compelled to go buy the record. And I'll always associate it with her. Honestly? The album is pretty good. “Mayfield” is a banger.
When my mom drove me to college before freshman year, we hit a massive traffic jam in Connecticut—like, park-the-car-for-two-hours traffic—and didn’t make it all the way from D.C. to Boston in one go. To pass the time, we watched the entirety of You’ve Got Mail on my new laptop while sitting on the highway late at night. (I guess we brought a library DVD?) An unusual way to watch a movie and a shared experience I’ll always remember.
Elliott Duea
A piece of pop culture that feels like it belongs to my mom and I is the Jamie Foxx-hosted game show Beat Shazam, a show where duos compete vs. other duos AND against the app Shazam to name songs as quickly as they can. My mom and I love it mostly because we play along at home like you would with Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune. As a team, we find that we keep pace with the contestants and I fully believe we could do well on the show ourselves. I'd be super open to auditioning for Beat Shazam if it didn't exclusively cater to extroverted party animals — you're expected to participate in a mini sing and dance party with every song that plays. My mom would be way better at that part. I’m fairly positive that the majority of people watching at home would be rooting for us, and that would 100% be because of my mom. If you’ve been lucky enough to meet her, you know what I’m talking about.
Mom I promise we’ll watch Beat Shazam next time I visit!
Aidan O’Neill
When my brother and I were little, my family used to play a game called Dance To The Beat Tag. The rules are all in the name: it’s tag but you have to be dancing at all times. We always played to the same soundtrack: a since-forgotten ‘70s compilation album that included both mainstream bangers and sleepers, like Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” and Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel.” Last winter, the latter song came on in a thrift store and hit me with a wave of nostalgia. I put together an incomplete playlist from memory and sent it to my parents. My mom was so excited she asked if we could play the game over Christmas, and we did. Dancing, dodging, and tagging enthusiastically, she tore the meniscus in her knee and was on crutches for weeks. Still a great time. Love you Mom.
My mom discovered “Electric Feel” by MGMT on a weird TV channel that showed music videos in the early mornings. She called me in, and we were hooked. After school, we huddled around the desktop in the computer room to watch the band’s latest interviews and dug up videos of their college days on the forum. I was a freshly antagonistic teenager, but MGMT brought us together.
One morning, we heard on DC101 that MGMT was coming to D.C. that fall on the Kia Soul Collective tour. We screamed and jumped up and down together. My dad test-drove a Kia Soul on his lunch break for our three free tickets to the gig, which was in a hazy Northeast D.C. warehouse. It was incredible. MGMT’s polarizing 2013 self-titled album tested our loyalty, and no band has united us the same way since, but we’ll always have those years.
As a family, we got Netflix in the winter of 2014. By then, the streaming platform had ample material you couldn’t find anywhere else, so I consumed it with reckless abandon when not studying for my physics class. That included New In Town, the 2012 John Mulaney comedy special that became his perfect segue from the writers’ rooms and onto our screens. It wasn’t his first special, but it’s the one my classmates still quote.
The summer before I left for college, I decided to show my mom both New In Town and The Comeback Kid, wondering if they might be up her alley. It felt risky: my mom is not conservative, but she spends more time watching period dramas and rolling her eyes at most family-unfriendly sitcoms. In at least one point during both specials, she burst out laughing to the point of losing her breath. Tears, writhing, crimson complexion, hollering, everything. I learned in that moment where I get my out-of-control laughter; it’s certainly not my father, who’s more of a reserved chuckler. I love laughing with my mom, and as I get older, she gets funnier. I can’t wait for more.
I'm lucky that my mom (and dad) both filled the house with lots of great music and movies, and it gave me a pretty solid foundation of good taste (last issue's answer aside). When I thought about this question, a couple things came to mind. For movies, it’s dumb throwaway lines in Steve Martin movies mostly. In terms of music, the boring answer here would be Jackson Browne or "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen. But after going past just “songs she liked and played often,” I immediately went to “B.Y.O.B.” by System of a Down. One of her favorite bits to entertain herself at the expense of middle-school era Brendan was whenever I was listening to anything where the singer did anything close to screaming (often for a kid in the midst of discovering punk, etc., and listening on the family computer) she’d smirk and say, “Hey Bren, why do they always send the poor?” And if I hear that song today, I practically look over my shoulder to make sure she didn't drive two hours just to get me with it. Drove me nuts. But it’s also cool that one of her favorite bits incorporated a System of a Down reference. Love you, Mom!
Shawn Cooke
There’s the media I know my mom holds nearest and dearest to her heart — The Sound of Music, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and lately, Electric Light Orchestra (though that one’s shared pretty evenly with my dad) — and then there’s Alice in Chains’ “Man in the Box.” Not to be confused with her absolute favorite song or anything, but this is the one that would always get her to turn up the volume when it came on the rock radio station if we were in the car together. You wouldn’t guess this from meeting her: a sweet, mild-mannered lady without an aggressive bone in her body (whose Led Zeppelin fandom nonetheless helped springboard me into heavier music). I’ll always love that this talk box deployment and monster riff were just powerful enough to bring out the dormant headbanger in the person I’d least suspect — and will always crank that up every time I hear it.