kids and music

my 5-y-old's favorite musician is flo rida

halp

quick, play him some throbbing gristle

My kid and his friends all listen to Sublime.

My 10yo loves Mary Timony, Angel Olsen, Waxahatchee, Newley-era Bowie(!) but, when all is said and done, nothing tops Irene Cara's two biggest hits.

And the 12yo might love Talking Heads and be a keen drummer but she will put the Crazy Frog version of Popcorn on Spotify if she gets to the phone before I do on a Saturday morning.

it's a fine line, I know parents who are all like "my kid's favorite band is kraftwerk" and that seems so corny to me, no kid finds that "organically" (lol in a kraftwerk context) in 2017. organically e.g. with friends they'll find pop like we did, which today (or a few years ago?) I guess is flo rida (here it's like kendji girac but whatever). my littlest one loves charli xcx. could be worse!

Yeah, Boom Clap is still one of my daughter's favorites.

I keep asking them what their friends are into and whether they like it too but - whether out of fear of disapproval or genuine dislike - they always claim to have no interest. It's disappointing in a way - I would like to see 2017 pop through their eyes but they seem weirdly disdainful of it. Maybe I will have a solid chart session one weekend and see if they're actually into it. I know they know this stuff. I want to be educated.

The other day Lulu was absentmindedly humming along with Black Beatles and I made the mistake of asking if she liked it. That drew the defensive response "no of course not", which may have been true in the context of not being on a par with Ex Hex or "Flashdance" but I'm sure I could've handled that better! Though she's nearly at the age now where me saying "this is pretty cool, right?" about contemporary pop would make her cringe. So I can't win.

I'm interested to learn where they mostly get their music from. Is Youtube the go-to source? Or friends' recommendations?

Michael I think they will later thank you for having introduced them this early to Talking Heads, but you are probably entering the most difficult phase now :)

my toddler seems to mostly ignore non-kids music we play, until he latches onto an element then demands to hear the song over and over. This happened with Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen songs. He came up with a dance routine to a song from Hamilton too.

a friend introduced my older daughter (6) to the voice and blake shelton yesterday so now she's talking about how much she LOVES country music. she mostly finds music by listening to kidz bop on spotify so it's a lot of mainstream pop, plus like the moana soundtrack. with maybe a couple of rare exceptions, she has never had any interest in engaging with any of the music me or my wife like, and usually demands that she have a turn whenever we try to put on any music. she does get a kick out of knowing that her parents have music that they made on spotify and sometimes forces her friends to listen to our bands.
the younger kid is 2 so she only likes the dora theme and elmo's song. she seems to be a little more tolerant of at least having our music on in the background, sometimes she'll dance to it for a bit.

i don't try to push my tastes on my kids at all, i listened to pop when i was her age, but it's weird to me how resistant she is to even having my music on in the background for longer than a few minutes. i'm trying to remember how old i was when i got into exploring my mom's record collection.

the only luck i've had is with stuff with a strong visual component, like showing her bowie doing "boys keep swinging" on SNL with the weird puppet body or the sleater-kinney video with the bob's burgers characters, and even then it feels more like she just enjoys getting extra screen time

I know parents who are all like "my kid's favorite band is kraftwerk" and that seems so corny to me, no kid finds that "organically"

ha otm.

my kids love music and will listen to anything but they definitely like kids music the best. we do some kids music classes and they love all the sing-a-longs with classic kids songs. they also love raffi, elizabeth mitchell, and those super annoying "music together" albums. they also really love "get lucky" and "d'yer mak'er" right now.

my younger son is obsessed with his ukulele and therefore seems to enjoy any solo acoustic guitar stuff, we watched john fahey videos on youtube and he was pretty mesmerized by them, watching fahey hold the guitar and mimicking his postures.

I'm disappointed that there wasn't been another What Does the Fox Say recently. More pop songs with cute animals would go over well.

I know parents who are all like "my kid's favorite band is kraftwerk" and that seems so corny to me, no kid finds that "organically" (lol in a kraftwerk context) in 2017

idk what you mean by "organically" unless you mean "not in their parents collection" because we went through a period when Judah was 3 and literally ALL he ever wanted to hear was Kraftwerk's "The Man Machine" album, over and over. He would demand to hear it on a daily basis and throw mini-tantrums if we played something else.

Did the album grow in your garden?

it is bespoke, hand-crafted vinyl artifact

super annoying "music together" albums

this shit is the fucking worst

my 9 y.o. daughter doesn't have her own phone/stereo yet so she's p much stuck hearing whatever my wife and I have on and since I p much have music on 24/7 her tastes have developed in that context. She doesn't really hear much chart pop although I expect that to change w in the next couple years and shortly I will be forced to take her to concerts for whatever boy-band is around the corner. She prefers "80s" stuff (in her words) and gets fixated on certain songs periodically, like Ca Plane Pour Moi or E=MC2 or I Eat Cannibals.

The girls have their own all-in-one record player in their bedroom at their mum's which means our friends have been constantly buying them charity shop LPs. Now, I had some misgivings about getting them into vinyl, like it was some sort of retro experiment (why not just let them RUIN THEIR PRECIOUS HEARING with crappy earbuds and YouTube on their phones (not that they *had* phones when we got them the turntable) like every other kid?). But it's been really nice - they sit up there and work/play/read/draw while The Pretenders or some '70s Top of the Pops comp spins quietly in the background. At mine, it's mostly Spotify. They have their own playlists on my account but mostly it's ad hoc add-to-queue listening. I made a Sleepytime playlist (Harold Budd, Aphex, Satie, Eno, Richter) for them when they first stayed over but, after several months they rebelled and decided it was "too scary and sad". So they fall asleep to stuff they could be dancing to...

my two oldest (boy 8, girl 6) sleep in the same room and when it's my turn to put them down, after all the other stuff, I play one song for them. Always try to mix it up, usually do a little history lesson or explanation of some sort, even if it's just explaining the instruments, or the song structure. It's been fun, they love it, I love it.

I am 100% trying to warp and shape my kids' musical tastes, which is why they spent so much of last year shouting the "luna luna luna luna" part of Underworld's "If Rah". The two things they got obsessed with that I didn't actively foist upon them were Katy Perry singles (particularly "Roar", "Firework" and "Dark Horse") and the Big Bang Theory theme (which exists on Youtube in practically any permutation you can imagine). It is very funny when people ask them to sing a song; the reactions they get when they start in on "The whoooooole universe was in a hot, dense state" are priceless. (They are currently 3.)

I'm with DJP. My 4yo is too young to be able to find her own music, so her favourite stuff is from what we've played: she's mad for Bowie (The Laughing Gnome, Scary Monsters, Wild is the wind, and the Labyrinth ST), iggy pop's Lust for Life, Grimes, and jazz.

Plus the Frozen OST, and i also made the mistake of taking her to see Trolls.

I'm pretty sure I posted this at the time on the photos thread - but this is what Lulu did (then aged 8) to my fridge one Saturday morning around 6am. It's still all there, just a little curled at the edges now.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7664/17263179311_71909601f9_b.jpg

my 2 year old loves Pentatonix. help.

xp that is amazing

my kid loves the Steven Tyler song on the Polar Express soundtrack so much that I'm afraid to let him hear Aerosmith

http://www.theonion.com/article/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that-will-put-h-26132
^ This is a v real fear. My 8 & 6 year old have a pretty consistent playlist of Carly Rae, Katy Perry, 1D, Little Mix, Taylor Swift etc etc which they pick from school dance classes, youtube etc. Actually got much more into Taylor as a result. But they do pick up on things from spotify, R6 etc - currently like Sacred Paws, xx, and bizarrely QT, as well as Bowie, Prince and, as they insist on calling him, Iggy Pop-Pop (pop-pop being their slang for fart aiui)

i don't currently have kids but i'm not gonna front, the idea of raising a child who might one day boldly proclaim her love for mary timony on the family fridge is tipping the scales towards a 'yes' on people-making

I will repeat

My kid and his friends all listen to Sublime.

― how's life, Wednesday, April 12, 2017 8:46 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

through no fault of my own.

ow a wiley
indie ball

perfect rendition of Wuthering Heights from my 2-year-old

Requested cyndi lauper this morning (?) and 'be quiet orange one' (bjork)

watching Han loving Cabaret yday was a treat

okay the sublime factor is tipping me back towards a 'no' on people-making, thx how's life

I'm just saying it's a gamble.

i dunno if i have the stones to roll those bones dude

Mine figured out how to use AudioShare to record & import sounds into Sector today without any help from dad

or mom

lulu otm

For the past few weeks my 2yo has required that I rock him to sleep to a cover of the Thompson Twin's "Hold Me Now" by someone named Eden XO. Asked for it twice last night.

Maybe I've just gotten used to them, but I don't mind the Music Together CDs too much. I'd definitely take those over Music for Aardvarks.

my 2 year old loves Pentatonix. help

My 2.5 year old was totally obsessed with their Sesame Street numbers song cover, he called it POW and demanded to watch it repeatedly a couple months ago. Then it just stopped. Same thing with the Truck Tunes videos on Youtube, though sometimes he does sing some of those songs randomly while playing with trucks. He's also at the stage where he's starting to sing all the time, mostly classic kid hits that he hears at daycare which is funny as shit because he sort of plays with the melody and the lyrics aren't all there yet.

He really isn't interested in any music that I play around the house, though sometimes he'll dance to dancehall reggae stuff, and will sort of shake his head back and forth when I listen to Slayer or Metallica (he also does this same motion when I grind coffee at the store).

But he loves watching it - we'd take him to university events with the marching band and he would just go nuts yelling DRUMS TUBAS TROMBONES! and talking about them for the next couple days. He also is really into watching some episodes of Austin City Limits (Iggy Pop, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Paul Simon) and will sometimes play his kid drum set along while watching.

we briefly had Pitch Perfect 2 on and she was not enthralled at all so that bullet has been dodged, for now

bullet dodge didn't last long. ruh roh

Should we have a thread for our progeny and their app creations? ref the IMM thread on making music with an ipad

Happy to just put that stuff here. Here is what Ben made recently:
https://soundcloud.com/djisbister/bip-05-reflection-by-benjamin-isbister

KRFT is amazing.

ac/D.C.'s "TNT" was an early favorite of my boys. They also ask me to play it on guitar at home and the younger one seems eager to learn it himself. It's damn simple so a good starting point.

Ha! Owen just started learning Thunderstruck last night.

Whoa DJI that really is a p cool track!

that track is pretty darn good! also i initially misread your name as DJP and i thought it was one of his little guys making it.

My daughter plays a game with me where she holds my hand by the wrist and uses it to make me slap myself with it. Today it occurred to me to show her the Losing My Edge video and she got a real kick out of trying to make me slap my face at the same time James Murphy got slapped.

One more: https://soundcloud.com/djisbister/weather

My 13 yo is obsessed w k-pop. Actually obsessed is an understatement. HALP

From my youngest: "Have you ever heard of Imagine Dragons? They're pretty much my favorite band now."

my 6yo told me his top 5 list of favorite singers:

5. Coolio
4. Weird Al
3. They Might Be Giants guy
2. Lin Manuel Miranda
1. Whoever sang that song we heard in the car today that goes "Mmmm mmm Everybody mmmm mmm"

lol @ both. i always thought imagine dragons was something only a kid could like.

My almost six year old is WAY into BTS and is going to learn korean so he can join the band when he turns 14

Her road to Imagine Dragons fandom came through the world of Minecraft animations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjXFX2v7flk

my 11-y-o had a BTS phase that lasted about three weeks. he's now listening to popsmoke. ffs

slippery slope

Any recommendations for apps or interactive websites for kids to start to learn the basics of music? Note values, rhythm, rests, and on from there... Seven-year-old will be starting his first piano lessons in a couple of months and I would like to give him a better foundation before he starts. I've taught him some of it but I'm no music educator. Barely a musician at all.

Or even youtube videos or series of good quality?