“Rock Lobster is just better than the stuff we listen to today with all those electronic sounds.”
-Hudson
Whenever I come home, I hear from behind Hudson’s closed bedroom door, the B-52’s single “Rock Lobster” playing on repeat. It’s kind of my least part of coming home from boarding school. The song has the phrase “rock lobster” roughly twenty times. Now multiple Ricky Wilson screaming it times forty.
It started last fall when my uncle gave Hudson a record player for his birthday. Hud and my uncle had been listening to records for the past few months, and Hud cried a little when he opened the box and a small collection of records fell out. He also cried over his Xbox.
I can walk into Hudson’s room and see him sitting at his desk with his back to me, facing the window. He’s drawing, or maybe building some sort of warship out of Legos. Usually the record player is sitting next him on the desk or on his lower bunk, playing “Rock Lobster.” It’s kind of the worst song ever. The music video is made up of plastic lobsters and a woman with a wide mouth draped in orange boas while Fred Schneider and Ricky Wilson lose their absolute shit over Rock Lobster in the background.
The funny thing about Hudson’s recent record-playing obsession is that the kids at my school are doing the exact same thing. Going vinyl is the cool thing now, just like all the hipsters who like Doctor Who and use their typewriters in Central Park (An exaggeration, but you get the point.) Hudson likes Doctor Who just as much as the girl who lives across the hall from me with her life-sized Matt Damon posters. Yes, plural. But Hudson loves Doctor Who for the science (or lack of) in the show. He’s loves records for different reasons too. The God-awful 80’s songs aren't available on iTunes, and he looks at record purchasing as a financial investment. He told me that these records are rare and that one day, he’ll be able to sell them for a lot, he means a lot, of money. Honestly, he’s sounds like my uncle who is a forty year old man who grew up on vinyl, and spends Saturdays at the Jockey Lot looking for vinyl.
Maybe some of my blatant aversion to the song is that Hudson went from eleven to forty in what feels like five minutes. And I think my parents have grown a special place in their hearts for “Rock Lobster.” They are immune to it. And when I come home, I am constantly reminded that Hudson has new interests that he came up with all on his own and I’m not there to watch. And I know that I sound like some parents who only gets to see their kids on the weekend. I know that I just need to let this bikini whale make its way through Hudson’s life and restrain from snapping the record in half like a rice cracker.
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