Broken records and bad ideas
- John DeSantis
- Nov 17, 2019
- 3 min read
Music can induce some of the earliest bonding experiences we have with our kids. It’s right up there with reading stories, playing with them, or driving through 2 counties in the middle of the night because they’ll only sleep in a moving car. Singing them to sleep (or at least trying to), getting one of those endless arrays of baby/toddler-friendly compilations that we'll eventually wish were thrown in a fire pit, and impending some of our own not-at-all overbearing musical taste onto them are likely scenarios. This is especially true with your first child, when you actually have enough time to be neurotic about such things. When my oldest son was born I had these delusions of grandeur about shaping his musical palette and imparting all of my great loves of music onto his growing young mind. I made various mixes of bedtime music with reverent and cool choices that spanned from Billie Holiday to Wilco and anything in between. My own narcissism drove me as far as making him intro mixes of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, and Pearl Jam, all among my favorites. I curated these things for hours on end, pouring over my now ancient iPod for the perfect song combinations for a young impressionable mind. When you have a very small baby in their first few months, all you have are hours. They don’t move and you don’t sleep so that’s what you do, pour over things as you pour another cup of coffee. Who the hell was I doing this for? My son or myself? These things screamed out as retraces of steps from my younger days, trying to rewrite history or infiltrate someone else’s before it even began in a distorted way. When my second son came along, two things happened: 1. I realized how egomaniacal and self-serving these activities were, and 2. I no longer had time for them even if I still wanted to continue to carry them out in all their demented glory. I probably forgot how to turn a stereo on in those first months with our newborn and his 2 year old brother. I fell asleep on the kitchen floor at least once. Who has time for music curation during such a time? After a while I thought about the music I really loved and how much of it was introduced to me by my parents. Maybe one instance, Frank Sinatra, was my dad's lone impressed upon musical preference that directly resonated. This music was before his time even, but he casually listened to it in an era of my childhood where car cassette decks or terrestrial FM radio were my main resources for music exposure. Another ingrained musical memory impression was the timeless motion picture soundtrack of The Big Chill. The count must be in the millions of kids growing up in the 1980’s and early 90’s who also got introduced to the pristine sounds of Motown via their parents’ well-worn cassette tapes of The Big Chill soundtrack. In time I discovered more music of my parents’ era I would grow fond of: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding, The Who, Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Eric Clapton and others my dad never forced on me like some aging hipster. They found their way into my life naturally along with the music of my era. An easy and general observation about children is that in many instances they mostly want what they want, and unless what you want also happens to be what they want, you're likely to find yourself disappointed. My own curiosity and freedom to explore different music from a younger age formed my own musical tastes, many of which met my parents on an adjacent road as I got older. My days of forcing my musical sensibilities on my sons are over. I'll be happy to share my preferences and guide them when they ask in the future, but one day I'll just be happy to meet them somewhere on that road where some of the crap they listen to meets the music that was so much better in my day. As a general matter of fact: any music your kids listen to is inherently crap, regardless of how similar it might be to the crap your parents had to deal with coming out of your speakers when you were growing up. Listening to:
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