A 6 CD Changer and nothing but kiddie music!
Now, I love the CD’s we have for our kids, or most of them anyway. I’ve recently raved about Sandra Boynton’s Philadelphia Chickens and the musical TV series The Backyardigans. And Elmopalooza is terrific, too.
But once in a while, I like to listen to something else. It’s almost impossible to turn on the news or sports stations in the car unless I DEMAND that the girls get quiet while I listen to a traffic report. And music that’s not something they’ve seen or heard a thousand times before? No way. When our oldest was a baby she had little choice but to listen to what I wanted: soul music, oldies, jazz, etc. Once she developed a taste, she’s pretty set in her ways. Now, she does like the Ramones, which is a good thing. But it’s still very rare I get to play what I’d want. For that I have to wait until they all are asleep, when I put the headphones on.
It’s funny to think of it now, because these times of communal music listening will not last forever. We may put our feet down and keep them from owning a TV set for a long while, and keeping videogames out is easy, too (I never had one except for a cheap knockoff of Pong back in the late seventies), but I don’t think we can do that with music players. It’s not likely. They have karaoke machines. They will get their own cassette or CD players. And it won’t be too long, I suppose, before they have their own discretionary income to buy their own music. And by then the Ipod will be cheap enough, I suppose. Will I miss these days of negotiating musical tastes?
When I was a lad, I was very heavily influenced by my father’s music, and we did not have any children’s music in the house, or rather, very little – Free to Be You and Me was a big deal then, and that reminds me I must get a copy of it soon for my girls. We had the record and I loved it. We also had this big, record player: it was really a huge piece of furniture that happened to house a turntable. And that was our only source of music. My brother’s stereo was pretty much his. We would use it to record ourselves on to 8-track tapes (that’s right, 8-track), but I don’t remember ever playing any music on it. So we had dad’s records; the ones he played for us were those great Oldies but Goodies LPs, with terrific mish-moshes of hits mainly from the pre-Beatles era. One side was slow, the other fast, but there were tons of great hits by the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Fats Domino; terrific vocal groups like the Penguins , the Moonglows, and the Five Satins (hey, didn’t Paul Simon write a song about them?), and lesser known artists with big hits like Preston Epps’s “Bongo Rock” or Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ “Wooly Bully.” That’s the stuff I grew up on, not kiddie music.
Maybe one of our first big Road Trips with the girls, as they get older (read: potty-trained), will be to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It means well, the Hall (for that matter, so does Cleveland). It’s a decent place. And I can talk to the girls about their grandfather’s role in that history, one that you can barely see unless you’re looking for it.
And for that trip, you bet your mp3 player that I’ll be in charge of the tunes!