Parents! What do you teach your children?

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Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby never/ever » 08 Oct 2017, 00:54

Through FB and sometimes here I read how kids develop the craziest tastes for certain albums or music- perhaps none more clear than Matty's 4-year old daughter absolutely loving the Ramones' first LP.

Do any parents here have got something similar with their offspring? Do you make a concerted effort to avoid the usual kids stuff and give them a taste of The Beatles and such early? Or can you remember of your own youth picking up a certain album from somewhere way out of what you would expect kids to like?

My first very fond memory was as a 5-year old, looping an AMPEX-tape incorrectly into my dad's tape recorder, causing all the music being played backwards- the first song I heard that way was Penny Lane and it became my instant favorite.
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George P. Smackers
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby George P. Smackers » 08 Oct 2017, 02:05

I thought Beatles was the usual kids stuff, for the 6 to 12 crowd. At least around here.

I've kept my mouth shut and am waiting for them to grow out of it.

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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Bent Fabric » 08 Oct 2017, 03:01

I feel like you can supply access, but I'm generally certain they'll take what they want and leave the rest.

So it was with my parents and I (and I would come back to some of their shit decades later on my own steam).

My own children have gone fairly deep with many of my musical loves (see photo*), but they definitely aren't embracing it all wholesale. Some of it makes perfect sense (Nilsson, Cheech and Chong, Monkees, etc. seems like "kid shit"), but things like Joni Mitchell and Yes surprised me a bit.

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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Brickyard Jack » 08 Oct 2017, 03:55

I've just played lots of different things.

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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby The Red Heifer » 08 Oct 2017, 04:05

Mine is still only 5 months old but she loves noise, so whatever is close by is generally a goer. Mummy plays her a lot of R&B bangers due to the R&B Fridays concept out here and she seems to love to wiggle her hips and what not
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Moleskin » 08 Oct 2017, 09:08

I don't regard it as my job to "teach" my children about music. We've always played loads of stuff but I want them to discover their own favourites.

After all, we did.
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Osgood » 08 Oct 2017, 09:57

There's always hope. My daughter, now 29, used to listen to a lot of crappy Spanish hiphop in her teenage, but also some Beatles. Today she's a Kinks and Jefferson Airplane fan. My son, now 26, was hugely into music (he's become an excellent guitar player) used to listen to Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, RHCP and all that. Later he discovered Dylan, Bowie and Hendrix plus a lot of current acts that stand off my radar, mostly decent stuff.

But mostly I agree with Moleskin.
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Bent Fabric » 08 Oct 2017, 15:48

I definitely keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mine are only 8 and 12 - surely within a few years (months?) they'll have gone in some direction with their tastes that I won't find relatable in any way. It's like waiting for something to arrive in the mail - that particular shift seems like it's already been put in the post and I just have to expect it any day now. It's been put to me by other parents (parents of older children) that the sort of "shared experience" that my children and I are having at present can only exist on "borrowed time". Certainly no one's trying to indoctrinate anyone here - yet, here we are, and I can't pretend not to enjoy the commonality of listening habits. If it ended tomorrow, it would seem like no more than nature's way.

That said - (and boy do I hate hearing myself even open this can of worms) I do wonder if the world of popular music has changed in any fundamental way during the past...30 years? Was there something available to me in college (no massive epoch in music) that won't be available to my children? I cringe to hear any person of any age imply any number of things about "golden ages" and "declines" - I may or may not agree, but maybe it just sounds so insufferably smug that it can't not be a massive turn off...all sorts of unseemly fish/barrel punching down that ultimately sounds a bit too much like my tone deaf 75 year old dad describing rap/hip-hop (using a fair amount of the language his parents would have used to describe Bob Dylan).

I'm certainly no boomer, and I find it difficult to summon a cheer for any example of their culture and preferences extending its dominance (the very word "Clapton" seems like valid shorthand here - or perhaps we can paste some gigantic Rolling Stones tongue logo over everything) via artificial means/life support. And, yet - is the reissue/vinyl/old people touring as a means of survival/YouTube/Spotify "everything at once" relevant to what we're discussing here? You think about the sheer dominance of Ramones and Misfits merch/branding - would the average child now come to these things (and the Ramones are about as elemental and irresistible as anything ever was) with some built in recognition already in place? Similarly, are today's children getting unprecedented access to old shit via any number of channels? Is the "limits of what we have access to" such a changed parameter that anachronistic ingredients become less of a niche thing?

My niece is in college now - if she's into anything beyond K-Pop, she certainly hasn't told me. The nephews are in high school - full on "brown sound" metal: QOTSA, Mastodon, Tool and various offshoots...things like Death Grips and Muse, maybe the occasional "old school classic" like Metallica.

Beyond them (in my sphere) however, I have my 7th grader coming home and excitedly telling me about a girl in his class with a Kinks shirt - a girl who is also (apparently) into Wings, Zombies, Brian Wilson, and so on. Now, if I was getting shit (as I most assuredly was) from my peers for flying the Beatles flag in 1983/84/85 (a mere 20 years after the British Invasion, and somewhat in the throes of yet another Beatles revival/successful solo careers/Lennon's martyrdom), what on Earth would the equivalent of a Kinks shirt have gotten me then? I looked it up - it would have been a Bing Crosby shirt. Without getting into anyone's personal opinion of Meghan Trainor or Taylor Swift, I think we can say that the general schoolyard narrative has shifted considerably: for whatever reason, all this ancient shit is (seemingly) more readily integrated in a way that I could never have predicted in my own youth/adolescence. The fact that the DJ at the school dances plays more 35/40 year old music (Earth Wind and Fire/Michael Jackson) is indicative of something or other, that the big movie studios are shoving Black Sabbath, Nilsson, Redbone, etc. into children's movies may also have some chicken/egg business (are they doing this for the parents, or do these musical cues have an evergreen mojo as narrative/dramatic signifiers?). What I'm trying to say, maybe, is that we (and our children) now exist in a context where the dividing line is a great deal more blurry than it once was: if you (as a pre-adolescent) heard the Raspberries in a movie, would you actually care or observe that it was somehow "yesterday's news"? Has the sheer pervasiveness of sampling and horrible Smashmouth/Foo Fighters covers and various forms of revivalism (the sort of thing that seemed tasteless and garish to me in the era of Jellyfish, Black Crowes, Redd Kross, Lenny Kravitz, Kingdom Come, to some lesser extent Matthew Sweet and Sheryl Crow using specific records as templates...and got worn down through the Strokes, White Stripes, Blur, Oasis, Darkness, Interpol, Jet, and whomever all of those Cure/New Order bands were 15 years ago) also helped to make yesterday's music now sound increasingly like "the music on the radio"? Would Justin Timberlake unwittingly be leading listeners straight past him and directly to his source material?

Is "Mom and Dad's lame ass music" just simply less and less of a thing in the present day?

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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Moleskin » 08 Oct 2017, 16:23

I suppose there is a lot to be said about the relative availability of 'old' stuff - even aside from our collection - to my children. That said, they were both fans of dayglo Beatles from the time they came home to find me watching the Yellow Submarine film and made me start it again. For a long while we had the Songtrack as default 'going on an outing' music.

But we have always allowed them to choose music for CDRs to play in the car, so we've had to endure The Feeling & the Crazy Frog alongside songs they've heard playing around the house. Our daughter's first concerts were Franz Ferdinand, Twenty-One Pilots, Placebo, and Imagine Dragons. She found these acts by talking to friends at school (and now university). I may not think much of all these acts, but there's a lot to be said about the shared generational experience of music.

Meanwhile, my son is a *big* fan of the Beatles. Enough that he recently suggested that such-and-such a 1964 song anticipated/shared some of the traits of the 1965 sound. He reads a lot about the acts he's keen on, mostly wikipedia. And he's discovered Weezer, Rush and Hall & Oates by himself. Frankly I prefer that.

As a contrast, my elderly mother now buys CDs to listen to at home that - at the time - she dismissed as modern rubbish. (Possibly this is a source of nostalgia for her, remembering the times when her children were still around the house playing this stuff.)

And in later life I've gained an appreciation for some of 'mum and dad's lame-ass music' anyway - Sinatra / Matt Monro / jazz. (Yeah, I probably own more of that stuff than they do nowadays.)
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Moleskin » 08 Oct 2017, 16:29

We had quite a fun afternoon in the car trying to guess which of the Tone Poems of Colour we were listening to.
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Penk! » 08 Oct 2017, 19:12

I was talking about this with a friend yesterday: his two boys (5 and 2) were messing with the radio and managed to land on a hard rock station and now they just want to listen to rubbish Swedish hair metal.

My four-year-old isn't really that interested in music, but he will never complain about what I put on. He has a remarkable ability to fall asleep in the car whatever is playing: PiL, Aphex Twin, old Blue Note records...

The one-year-old loves a sing and a dance. Any kind of tune or song comes on the stereo or TV and she's waving her arms around and "ba-ba-ba"-ing along. She hasn't displayed much critical thinking yet, though: she will do the same dance and song whether it's Shostakovich, the Kinks or the theme tune to Charlie and Lola.
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Jimbly » 08 Oct 2017, 21:10

I just play stuff and if the kids like it fine. Madame cried when I played Trout Mask.
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Joe Baxter » 12 Oct 2017, 17:13

I have three boys, all well grown up. The two older boys (38 and 36) aren't music fans. My youngest boy is a musician, a really good drummer, shite guitar and bass player and a lecturer in Music and music production. Currently, he's dead against guitar solos, I hope I'm not to blame for that. His current band don't have a lead guitarist, guitar bass and drums, my daughter in law is the singer/songwriter/guitarist.
Unlike me, they weren't music fans at a young age, I was a music fan at age 3.
As an aside, back in the day, on Mojo, I asked did anyone remember Sandy McPherson, an organist, playing requests on the radio, only the infamous McKendrick did, as did my wee pal Harry Alder. Sadly, Harry died this year, but I found out on Sunday that my aul' pal Les remembers him well - Les is 75, I'm 63. Cabin Fever I think.

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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby sloopjohnc » 12 Oct 2017, 17:24

We used to play children's stuff, but my daughter listened to my music on the way to preschool each day. She is an expert on the Beatles and early Nick Lowe as a result.

She has her own tastes too - used to be Emo, then EDM and lots of hip hop, but she can do the Beatles with the best of 'em.
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Rayge » 12 Oct 2017, 21:53

Joe Baxter wrote:As an aside, back in the day, on Mojo, I asked did anyone remember Sandy McPherson, an organist, playing requests on the radio, only the infamous McKendrick did, as did my wee pal Harry Alder. Sadly, Harry died this year, but I found out on Sunday that my aul' pal Les remembers him well - Les is 75, I'm 63. Cabin Fever I think.

I'm pretty sure I remember him, too, in the 1950s (I'm coming up to 69)
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Darkness_Fish » 13 Oct 2017, 08:28

When Tom was a bit younger, say 5-7, he loved a bit of jungle (what kid wouldn't like shouting booyaka booyaka, bidness, etc), Kraftwerk's "We are the Robots", and slightly perturbingly, the shouty track from Non on that Rough Trade electronic comp.

Last night I had to download "Slow Hands" by one of the less interesting guys from One Direction, and Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do". I guess that's all right and proper. I'd rather that than Beatles or classic-rockism.
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Re: Parents! What do you teach your children?

Postby Joe Baxter » 14 Oct 2017, 14:22

Rayge wrote:
Joe Baxter wrote:As an aside, back in the day, on Mojo, I asked did anyone remember Sandy McPherson, an organist, playing requests on the radio, only the infamous McKendrick did, as did my wee pal Harry Alder. Sadly, Harry died this year, but I found out on Sunday that my aul' pal Les remembers him well - Les is 75, I'm 63. Cabin Fever I think.

I'm pretty sure I remember him, too, in the 1950s (I'm coming up to 69)

I'm a mere stripling of 63, but have fond memories of Sandy coming through the big wireless. We moved from that house when I was five, and I don't remember the wireless going with us. I still remember Workers' Playtime and The Billy Cotton Band Show. I'm pretty sure that Sandy is responsible for my love of instrumental music.
I wish some of the music lovers on here had heard Harry, he was a fabulously gifted musician, and musical encyclopaedia. He had a long, long battle with cancer, and didn't play for the final four years of his life.
I miss him like fuck.


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