3. Children's Music Comes from Satan
Feb. 28th, 2006 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupMusic is an especially important thing for children, and for their parents. It makes possible long car rides and occasionally even some pleasant moments at home. And we all have songs we remember and treasure from being kids.
At first it doesn't matter so much what music you play. For infants, they are likely to stop screaming just to be able to hear whatever is on the car radio. They might even enjoy the same music you do, for a while. Jo subsisted for a good few months on Kraftwerk. But then that while stops, and you need a remedy for crying, and you reach for the Raffi.
Big mistake.
What the researchers tell us, and what I think is true based on my own experience, is that little kids are basically scientists exploring the world. They like simple music because they are learning patterns. They absorb through repetition. They can then notice the apparently minor variations between two nearly identical experiences, much the same way that my wife and I can now have long discourses about how one of the kids singing "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" is too loud and slightly off-key in the first, second, sixth, and seventh choruses. (We have nicknamed her "squeaky" and developed an extensive backstory about how the sound man tried to eliminate her in the editing and they eventually kicked her out of the group for the rest of the album.)
So you face the basic dilemma in approaching kids' culture. You need to find something they like. But if they like it, they will really, really, really like it. So you'd better have made your peace with it, because ten thousand times from now, I guarantee, you will like it a heck of a lot less than you do now.
Raffi and Barney and Laurie Berkner and all that mind parasite shit -- the problem is, undoubtedly, it really works. The stupider the music, the more your kid will love it, and the more you will want to kill yourself. It's a classic Catch-22.
In our case we have honed this into a finely graded system for dealing with toddler distress. First goes in Burl Ives: mellifluous, folksy, not too saccharine, he's almost like music you might choose to listen to. If Burl isn't cutting it today, we go on to Maria Muldaur's renditions of show tunes. Her voice is pretty weird, and the songs are sort of jazzy.
Defcon 2 is reached via an album of "Children's Favorites" (featuring the aforementioned "Squeaky") running the gamut from Row, Row, Row to Clementine to the Hokey-Pokey. When it's an emergency, there's the Shalom Friends mix, which was made by a local parents' group and includes four-year-olds and their off-key progenitors singing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" over and over again. Effective medicine, but small doses, please.
Edit: Forgot to mention -- become acquainted with the fade dial on your car stereo, the one that puts all the music in the back. It is your new best friend.
As the Mrs. points out to me, the common theme of these childrearing hints is basically "preventing the possibility." Take notes now, I'm telling you.
Next: Children's media as a whole comes from Satan as well.
At first it doesn't matter so much what music you play. For infants, they are likely to stop screaming just to be able to hear whatever is on the car radio. They might even enjoy the same music you do, for a while. Jo subsisted for a good few months on Kraftwerk. But then that while stops, and you need a remedy for crying, and you reach for the Raffi.
Big mistake.
What the researchers tell us, and what I think is true based on my own experience, is that little kids are basically scientists exploring the world. They like simple music because they are learning patterns. They absorb through repetition. They can then notice the apparently minor variations between two nearly identical experiences, much the same way that my wife and I can now have long discourses about how one of the kids singing "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" is too loud and slightly off-key in the first, second, sixth, and seventh choruses. (We have nicknamed her "squeaky" and developed an extensive backstory about how the sound man tried to eliminate her in the editing and they eventually kicked her out of the group for the rest of the album.)
So you face the basic dilemma in approaching kids' culture. You need to find something they like. But if they like it, they will really, really, really like it. So you'd better have made your peace with it, because ten thousand times from now, I guarantee, you will like it a heck of a lot less than you do now.
Raffi and Barney and Laurie Berkner and all that mind parasite shit -- the problem is, undoubtedly, it really works. The stupider the music, the more your kid will love it, and the more you will want to kill yourself. It's a classic Catch-22.
In our case we have honed this into a finely graded system for dealing with toddler distress. First goes in Burl Ives: mellifluous, folksy, not too saccharine, he's almost like music you might choose to listen to. If Burl isn't cutting it today, we go on to Maria Muldaur's renditions of show tunes. Her voice is pretty weird, and the songs are sort of jazzy.
Defcon 2 is reached via an album of "Children's Favorites" (featuring the aforementioned "Squeaky") running the gamut from Row, Row, Row to Clementine to the Hokey-Pokey. When it's an emergency, there's the Shalom Friends mix, which was made by a local parents' group and includes four-year-olds and their off-key progenitors singing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" over and over again. Effective medicine, but small doses, please.
Edit: Forgot to mention -- become acquainted with the fade dial on your car stereo, the one that puts all the music in the back. It is your new best friend.
As the Mrs. points out to me, the common theme of these childrearing hints is basically "preventing the possibility." Take notes now, I'm telling you.
Next: Children's media as a whole comes from Satan as well.
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I am sore afraid
Date: 2006-03-01 01:02 pm (UTC)Re: I am sore afraid
Date: 2006-03-01 02:11 pm (UTC)Re: I am sore afraid
Date: 2006-03-01 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 01:58 pm (UTC)But re: simple and repetitive: Why not the Ramones? :) And I remember some of the weirder Beatles White Album-type stuff working very well for me when I was little.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 02:07 pm (UTC)Some Beatles would be good, but unfortunately the Chipmunks covering the Beatles are going to be a whole lot more effective.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-02 02:02 am (UTC)Also try They Might Be Giants - No!
no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 04:35 pm (UTC)I guess an implication of what you describe is that parents should put any candidate music in repeat-forever mode on the iPod or in the car or whatever; if you get sick of it quickly, you'll know not to expose the kid to it. You're going to get sick of it anyway, but at least you can control the arrgghhh! factor by previewing.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 04:41 pm (UTC)My sister and I had a record player. The only album I recall playing on it was a collection of themes from Disneyland: Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, the Tiki Room, the Electric Light Parade, that sort of thing. God we used to love that album.
I don't remember what other albums we had, but I do remember being fascinated/spooked out one night where I accidentally played one on the wrong speed and the woman's voice became a man's.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 07:51 pm (UTC)