Kenna, Chaylee and I walked into Century Link Field adorned with fancy light up wrist bands, ready to experience the joyous mystery of live performance. The first opening act was your typical young, emerging female artist. She hardly opened her mouth when she sang and moved around the stage seductively while breathing heavily into every lyric as if it needed to be resuscitated. Sort of a, Lorde meets Lorde, meets an asthmatic with good pitch. We got through it.
Then came Tov Lo…
I gotta stay high, all the time to get you off my mind… Not the best advice for young people.
She came off like a promiscuous Peter Cetera, post-legalization, with daddy issues and a crop top. (Note: Chicago produced some of the most co-dependent love songs of all time.)
Each song contained copius amounts of profanity, which I don’t usually have a problem with, if the taboo verbiage is well placed and surrounded with quality prose. But these were just F-bombs tossed out into the audience haphazardly–striking children and middle aged women who just really love the song Yellow. It felt cruel.
By the third jam, Kenna was placing actual wagers on how many F words we would have to endure per song. And these weren’t the angry adverb kind but the literal type. Carnal requests really. If she would have just dressed it all up in some fun innuendo I wouldn’t have had to ear muff my ten year old for a half an hour. My arms were getting tired.
What’s her next song gonna be called? I shouted over the applause, “My Vulva’s Crazy!”? Chaylee laughed hard, then asked me what vulva meant.
Just when we thought the onslaught of sex, drugs, and techno was overTov Lo decided to deliver one last little number.
This last song is my new single. It’s called “Disco Tits”. I hope you like it.
That was better than my crazy vulva idea. I cringed and awkwardly placed my hands back over Chaylee’s ears. Kenna was loving it. Not the song, but the spectacle of watching her mother squirm as Tov Lo belted out:
“I’m fully charged, nipples are hard, ready to go…”
How could Coldplay do this to us? Did they perform a background check on the Swedish super vixen? Had they heard her new single? I didn’t want to deliver my daughters from Disney bubble gum pop music only to introduce them to soft porn techno. Fortunately, we have strategy in our family for handling these kinds of situations–one that has been handed down for generations. If you can’t make it good…make it memorable. So I decided to treat Tov Lo and her free love–here have some drugs–message as an opportunity to banter with my girls about femininity, character development and the various anatomical reasons ones nipples may become firm. It was indeed memorable.
The headliner never apologized, but they didn’t disappoint either. By the end of the night I was confident that Tov Lo did minimal damage to our moral fabric and that Coldplay did some good.
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Story Time With Heather Pasley 