Music for Kids

[lillibet]

Things (friends' comments, a video posted, a blog post) have been bringing up this subject at least weekly for the past month or more, so I thought I'd post about it and solicit others' thoughts on the subject

Comments

[greenlily]

I listened to what my parents listened to, for a really long time. Simon and Garfunkel, Ian and Sylvia, Peter Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, the Beatles up as far as "Rubber Soul", vast amounts of 50s and 60s doo-wop and a little Motown, the original Christmas Revels album, and lots and lots and lots of musicals. Jesus Christ Superstar was probably the closest thing we had in the house to actual rock music or to anything my classmates would've called cool.

I was a kid in the 70s and early 80s, when a lot of the goofy dweeby pop music that got played at the grocery store and the dentists' office and all that, was also melodic and fairly harmless. One of my very early memories is the horrified look on my folk-music-loving mom's face when she asked me to sing her something and I came up with Billy Joel's "My Life", which was all over the radio when I was about Alice's age. :)

My brother and volare got me going on classic rock and some metal in my teens, sometime around 1989--Metallica, Guns and Roses, Queen, the Doors, etc. Our parents hated

[bedfull_o_books]

Ooh. I second the Putamayo vote.

I have a couple if you want to borrow them....

[lillibet]

We have several of the Putamayo albums on the iPod, actually--somehow I forgot to mention them, but they're there and reasonably popular with her.

[spwebdesign]

I grew up listening to almost nothing but classical and John Denver. Yes, my cultural literacy suffered a bit, but Alice has many, many years to catch up and is bright enough to know how to look up anything she might be curious about.

Two advantages I can think of in growing up listening to a lot of classical, jazz, and folk: (1) This type of music, especially the wordless music, encourages the child's imagination to grow in ways pop music does not. (2) She'll gain a better appreciation for a diversity of good music, so that when she discovers more popular styles she'll know how to discern quality music and creative musicians from a lot of the insipid, uninspired stuff on the airwaves. (Or at least she'll be able to tell the difference between stuff she likes, because she's developed her tastes beyond the reach of cultural pressures, and the stuff commercial entities will try to convince her she likes.)

[ayelle]

I don't think I have an opinion worth offering on the pop music question as I haven't really thought about what I would do. (FWIW, I grew up on the Beatles and other classic rock, my mother's limited 70s and 80s pop/rock collection, my father's enormous collections of folk and classical music, a goodly bunch of musicals, and occasional bona fide children's music that my dad brought home as presents for us, which always went over like gangbusters -- stuff like "Peter Paul & Mommy" and the musical "Cats.") But I do have a few recommendations to add to your repertoire, although it's possible you know them all already. Specifically, these albums are children's music that I've heard about through children's lit connections over the years, bought for myself, and liked very much

[ayelle]

I love The Playground so much!!

[pekmez]

The 'popular' music we listen to with K is the popular music we ourselves like. So, maybe not so 'popular', I guess. :) In any case, we certainly don't filter our Jim's Big Ego, or our Kris Delmhorst, or our classical music or our decades old U2 or Depeche Mode. Some of it she likes better than others. When I listen to music I often put on WUMB (NPR folk) as a default station; she often requests that I swap it to classical instead.

I don't feel like it is my job to introduce her to whatever pop musician is on the top of the charts. I think she will probably hear it anyway, and be somewhat sensitive when she comes across some pop hit that everyone-knows-except-her, but I think we will try to play catchup when she wants to know why everyone is singing along to song X except her, rather than making sure she is exposed to the right song X's in advance.