Dear Plain White T’s,

My son has very cool tastes in music. He’s five years old and he likes Johnny Cash, Weezer, The Avett Broth­ers, The Pix­ies and other hardly-ever-on-the-charts bands. He doesn’t like girl singers, just boy singers, but the boy singers he likes by and large are pretty awe­some and I’m proud to say that, yes, my son knows the words to Cash’s “Sea of Heart­break” and The Avett Broth­ers “Die Die Die”.

My wife on the other hand does not always lis­ten to cool music. She grav­i­tates towards the ‘mix’ sta­tions, and that’s where our trou­ble starts.

If you ever lis­ten to any of these ‘mix’ sta­tions you’ll real­ize that they are pretty much easy lis­ten­ing for 30 year olds. Songs you used to shake your fist in the air to, like Bon Jovi, or piano bal­lads from Elton John, or the offi­cial band of the ‘mix’ sta­tion, The Fray. These songs were once cool, long ago, and now are not, but these ‘mix’ sta­tions con­tinue to pump out these songs every hour so peo­ple lis­ten­ing in office build­ings can hum along to some­thing and hope­fully, god will­ing, get them through the day.

Sev­eral months ago one of the big songs on these ‘mix’ sta­tions was “Hey There Delilah”, a sappy syrupy love song writ­ten, I guess, to the singer’s girl­friend. The song is pretty lame, but for some rea­son my son, who has very cool tastes in music, loves it.

Plain White T’s! Grum­ble grum­ble grumble.

Where did you emo wannabe’s come from? Will you ever leave us? Prob­a­bly not, now that you have some other crummy song called “1, 2, 3, 4″ on the radio, on that ‘mix’ sta­tion that my wife lis­tens to and my son hears as my wife dri­ves him around Dal­las. Why can’t my wife lis­ten to some­thing awe­some like Hüsker Dü or Wilco or Grandaddy or some­thing like that? Isn’t there a law against music like this? Aren’t we clos­ing the prison at Guan­tanamo Bay because of peo­ple like The Plain White T’s?

Maybe we should water­board The Plain White T’s. That would be satisfying.