We were on a road trip not long ago and while listening to a song on the radio I said, “Ugh, that’s grasa.” It was an expression I’d picked up when I was learning Spanish in Argentina a couple of decades ago, but it doesn’t seem to be used by my kids’ generation.
Grasa means cheesy or tacky or trashy.
My kids took a liking to grasa, but as we speak English among ourselves in Argentina, they translated it into English and started to pronounce any song they did not like as “greasy.” It soon became part of our vernacular.
I hadn’t thought about that time until a few weeks ago when I walked my 10-year-old daughter to her first pop concert. It was a free gig some 10 blocks from our house on the coast in Pinamar. We soon walked past a slew of parked cars and joined other people heading down a sandy lane to a stage with bright lights and a thousand or so people waiting for the concert to start.
Then the singer, Tini Stoessel, came on with six backup dancers. My daughter stood on her toes to watch, and clapped after each song. The beat was good, the dancing as well.
After a while, my daughter said she was tired, and so we started to walk home, and I asked her if she had enjoyed the music. She said, “Yes,” and said how she thought it was funny that some of the songs were in English like “Finders Keepers.”
I told her that I had interviewed the singer a few years earlier when she was the star of a Disney soap opera for kids. And I had interviewed her father a few years before that when he was a producer of another soap opera, back in my days as a reporter on the entertainment beat.
My daughter listened to my stories and said that wouldn’t it have been great if I could have got her CD when I’d met her.
“Yeah,” I said, not telling her that she wasn’t a pop singer back then. I was just enjoying the moment with my daughter.
And then she said we should buy the CD because then we can play it in the car.
“That sounds good,” I said.
“Yeah,” she added, “because her music isn’t greasy.”
