My father is a man of varying musical tastes.

When my two brothers and I were in high school, our daily school runs always featured some or other of my father’s favorite songs. Sometimes it was 80’s disco (The Spinners, Diana Ross and the like), other times it was gospel music but most times it was the dizzying guitar licks of late Zimbabwean musician Oliver Mtukudzi.

The songs weren’t meant as a substitute for conversation though. During the interludes or a song’s dying moments, my father would wax lyrical about the deeper subtext of the music we were listening to. I’ll Be Around by The Spinners, with its guitar riffs and racing congas, was about the impermanence of romance. Whitney Houston and Cece Winans’ Count On Me was about the regenerative power of friendship and Tevin Campbell’s Dandelion perfectly indexed every romantic thought my father felt for our mother.

Fours years ago, my son was summoned into the world and I’ve unsurprisingly inherited my Dad’s practice of soundtracking the daily school runs with my son. Unlike my father, though, my tastes have always been singular in their scope. I grew up on hip-hop. From middle adolescence to adulthood, some of my most vivid memories are accompanied by the sounds of A Tribe Called Quest, Little Brother, Jay Z and Gangstarr.

For the most part, my son would fix his stare on whatever toy was in his possession while Pusha T’s Infrared or Future’s Mask Off blared through my car’s speakers. This wasn’t completely unexpected; children his age are passive listeners and the music itself was mostly so I could unwind after giving nine hours of my day to the man. But it wasn’t until he attempted to mouth the chorus to Shack Wes’ Mo Bamba (a song that sees Wes catalog how many “h*es” blow up his phone) that I gave pause to which of my musical tastes he would ultimately inherit.

I’m not the kind of parent who’d forbid my son from listening to any genre of music. When he’s old enough, he’ll make his own moral assessments of rap. But I’m also cognizant of how the music he listens to will ultimately shape his view on women, money, religion and his place in this world.

Suddenly, the music I played took on a deeper significance.

Two days after the incident, I started being more deliberate with my music selection. First up, was pre-MAGA Kanye. My son took a particular liking to Family Business (but that might have to do with the fact that I had it on loop for about 15 minutes). The song, which features on West’s award-winning debut album, The College Dropout, has a Southern-gospel feel to it and sees Kanye rapping about the importance of family values. “I don’t care about diamond rings,” the choir belt during the chorus before wrapping up with the sentiment that family is worth more than gold.

Similarly, Chance The Rapper’s Blessings—a spoken word piece about the rapper’s financial and spiritual successes—would elicit a giggle or coordinated head bops from my son. It’s a sweet coincidence that Coloring Book (the album that Blessings appears on) marked a shift in sound and subject matter for the rapper. On Coloring Book, his drug-inspired songs about youthful nihilism gave way to PG-13 raps about the redemptive nature of religion and fatherhood. In Blessings opening lines, he raps: “Found warmth in a Black queen for when I get cold. Like Nat King, I’m doing the dad thing.”

If it sounds like I transformed into the Cliff Huxtable of modern-day rap, it’s because I’m leaving a bit of detail out. Outside of the gospel-infused raps of Kanye and Chance, I still regularly bump songs that are anti-capitalism, anti-religion and anti-authority. Mick Jenkin’s 11 is a tribute to Eric Garner. The song’s title and closing refrain (“I can’t breathe) is a reference to the amount of times Garner said the phrase before his last breath was taken from him. Future’s Codeine Crazy, sees him break out of his tough-guy avatar in the final verse to talk about the emotional tsunami that followed his break up from Ciara. XO Tour Life by Lil Uzi Vert details the rapper’s struggle with drug abuse, fame and post-breakup depression.

All of these songs have more four-letter words than I’d like my son to be exposed to. But they’re also honest, existential reflections on life, loss and what it means to have material success and still long for some great and unknown infinite thing.

People are complicated and their personalities are always in flux. Today’s homophobe is tomorrow’s next openly queer rapper and nowhere is this dichotomy more present than in rap. Jay Z, whose earlier releases are replete with vivid descriptions of his time as a drug dealer, grew into a progressive, feminist-espousing family man on his 2017 release, 4:44. Eminem surprised the world with Revival—a left-leaning political album where he substituted his usual themes of rape, murder and homophobia for missives about the Trump administration.

So, maybe, when puberty rolls around in the next decade and my son asks me about the birds and bees, I won’t sit him down and shoot off a beard-stroking lecture. I think I’ll play him Slick Rick’s Teenage Love instead.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book of essays: Your Father, The Hip Hop Head.