This comment was from Pedro on the post Livin’ at the Corner of Dad & Technology: The Influence of Music
One thing you can do as a parent is to provide good music when the kids are little. It is tempting to go the “baby in a Ramones onesie” route and try to turn your little tykes into indy rock hipster accessories, or to play nothing but “Mozart For Baby” even though you haven’t explored what you actually like in classical, but I’m thinking of a middle path.
We avoided the children’s music thing pretty much and played a lot of Sly Stone, Beatles, Sweet, Queen, and the Darkness, as I recall. I’m more of a classical guy these days so they heard solo piano one day, Renaissance motets the next, while my wife played more metal and rap stuff. My oldest used to request the jazz station for bedtime music. It comes from the parents having standards and confidence in what’s good and, as you said, not being afraid to launch into discussions about music. Music certainly doesn’t exist in a vacuum and if you wait until you hear, say, the latest hit song that prominently mentions drinking too much to have a talk about drinking and addiction, you might be a bit behind.
Nowadays the kids seem to like African music, dubstep, Florence and the Machine, Beastie Boys, and yes, the Beatles.
Oh, and the Eighties – you do know there was more going on then besides hair metal, right? Imvho, that was a decade of strongly original music. Arguably it was the last decade worthy of future revival movements. Not only was there post-punk and “pre grunge” like Black Flag, Husker Du, the Replacements, and the Pixies, but also some brilliant and underrated synth pop, the precursors of “college rock” (ie, REM) a lot of great pop that everybody knew about like Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper (right before MTV was taken over by hair metal), fun and groundbreaking rap, and an exciting underground metal scene. Also They Might Be Giants.
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photo: Orin Zebest / Flickr
I love the music my parents raised me on. When I got bored with my Sesame Street casette tapes before bed, they gave me the Beatles. We almost always listened to music over dinner, on road trips, on vacation. My dad would quiz us – Who is this song by? Who’s the singer, who’s the guitarist? – as we got older and was always proud when we got it right. He has a lot of rock-n-roll trivia in his brain, as well as firsthand experience – he was standing just a few feet away from Ozzy Osbourne when the crowd… Read more »
Thanks for the recognition. It’s an internet commenter’s dream come true!
-P