On his parenting blog, my pal Al offers up an interesting… musical… take on an age-old conundrum:
Am I turning into my parents?
For even the most music-savvy father, Al writes, there is a danger of becoming “stodgy, judgmental, etc” about the musical tastes of the next generation, of becoming…
“the kind of dad who in the 50s or 60s would’ve declared that the Beatles or Elvis were dangerous.”
Sadly, no matter how cool their parents’ musical tastes, it seems as if some kids are hard-wired to be attracted to music that drives mom and dad up the wall.
My personal moment of truth? After years of feeding the offspring a balanced diet of… well… of music from my own collection… healthy, hearty tunes which I assumed they would embrace as their own faves… the offspring have gone outside the comforts of the family iPod and instead embraced the rap-meets-Metal musical stylings of Linkin Park.
On long car trips… sometimes short ones, too… it takes all the willpower I can muster to restrain myself from shouting “TURN THAT NOISE OFF!!!!”.
Okay, sometimes I can’t muster the willpower.
And the music I want to listen to? The tunes that I painstakingly played for them throughout their young lives in the hopes of fostering some parentally approved musical taste?
Boring, they say.
The happy ending to this tale? The offspring and I have discovered common ground:
The White Stripes. I dig ’em. They dig ’em.
Until a bout of stomach flu felled a couple of us, the whole family almost saw the Stripes this summer, when the duo toured Canada, playing big concerts and making headlines with some smaller surprise gigs.
In Apex, Nunavut, just outside Iqaluit, the White Stripes took a break from surprise-concert-giving and shot a music video for You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told) . You can see and hear it at the bottom of this post.
Lately, on long… and short… car trips, the offspring and I have taken to blasting that particular tune and singing along.
Well, I sing along, at least. The offspring, strangely, seem to find me a bit embarrassing at times…
echenblog 
Hey Alan,
I’m Al from your post.
Thanks for calling me a “music-savvy father”. That’s partly true. The dad part, of course. The music-savvy part? Well, not entirely. I would have agreed a year-and-a-half ago that I was hip to that. But after years of checking out bands on College St. and Queen St. West in Toronto and 8 years of covering arts and culture, I’m getting educated. Or at least re-educated.
These days my toddler is challenging me to expand my musical horizons. We’ve got toddler tunes, of course. That’ll surely expand one’s musical taste.
But I’ve also reacquainted with Ron Sexsmith, Neko Case and the Beatles. They, of course, never went away. I find that my little guy and me can groove and dance to their tunes.
Oh … and I played the White Stripes video as I read and typed. Thanks for that.
Maybe he and I will check out their vid together. I’ll keep you posted on that….
Al
To expand musical horizonts try to listen asian music, its realy interesting!