Generation Gap?
Here's a guest post from listener John Doty of Westford, VT. I'd love to get more guest posts from listeners...if you'd like to submit one, e-mail me at david-at-ncpr-dot-org...
I like to think that I have a pretty broad taste in music. I will listen to just about anything with a few notable exceptions. Before I had kids and even after I had kids, but before they had developed that nasty trait of “Dad likes it so it can’t be good”, I had free run of the radio and the CD’s in the stereo. After a little while we got infected with “kid music” and listened to that over and over again. Luckily for my wife and me, that period passed rather quickly. But now, the girls have developed their own taste in music, influenced by their friends. Don’t get me wrong, I my like kids to have opinions about what they think is good and what they think is bad. The only problem is when their opinions clash with mine.
Now I know that kids are genetically programmed to not like things their parents like – I grew up listening to Punk and heavy metal while my mother liked to listen to Classical music, play it on the piano and sing in church. So I expected to have issues with my kids as they grew up and developed their musical tastes. What I don’t really understand is although I like rap and dance music (I do listen to the Beat Authority every chance I get), I don’t really like the “dance” music that is played on the local dance music station. I think one of the problems I have is that when a commercial radio station plays a song, I don’t like it and may not listen to it but when it is played on a non-commercial station (NCPR, local college radio etc.) I will have patience and listen to it and accept it as something the DJ likes therefore it can’t be all that bad. For example when Kanye West’s song “Stronger” came out I didn’t like it (or even listen to it) when it was on the local station but when David played it on “The Beat Authority”, I gave it a listen and decided it wasn’t too bad after all.
Now why does that happen?
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On a different note, I dragged out my LP copy of Big Audio Dynamite’s “
posted by David Sommerstein @ 9:51 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Two thoughts, John. First, I think there are some great pop songs, tunes with great hooks. That what I love so much about Kanye. I think they stand out as good songs when they're separated from the wallpaper of over-produced, hyper-sexed and -violent, under-creative music on most of FM radio.
Second, we need to a have a blog post - or series of 'em, I think - on childrens' music.
Yes, there are some great pop songs with great hooks played on lots of radio stations. My girls are fond of turning up their radio station and yelling to all who can hear "Dad - Here is your favorite song!"
It is tough to sort them out from the rest of the static some times.
I like the idea about kids songs - there are some great ones out there. I have a few albums by Allen Sherman to clean up and convert to CD. Once I have them done (hopefully by Xmas) I will work up a post on him and include some songs.
John
Great post. I second the idea of some future posts on kids music. My daughter turns 3 in a few weeks and we've had pretty good luck avoiding some of the mind-numbing (for parents, at least) options in favor of Dan Zanes, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Folkways comps. She's starting to branch out and I am hoping to exert as much undue influence as possible. She's already warming up to the Beatles. Luckily, FM radio is not an issue for us (we only listen to radio in the car and it's all NCPR all the time). Hopefully, by the time she's old enough to choose, FM radio will have gone the way of the dinosaur.
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