Baby Music

For my first Father's Day I was given two Rockabye Baby CD's. If you don't know what these things are I suggest you stay in blissful ignorance because you are not missing anything. If you want to waste 45 minutes of your life and do serious damage to your eardrums then read on.

Rockabye Baby CD's are baby styled versions of your favorite music, it can be baby Radiohead, Baby Pink Floyd, etc etc.... I got Baby Ramones and Baby Bjork given to me, the Ramones one was awful and as Bjork sounds like a baby singing in the first place it struck me as rather pointless.

It did make me think though - I am trying to influence the baby's musical tastes to match mine, is this going to be possible? I suspect not but I'll give it a damn good try in order to avoid having a house full of Jessica Simpson sound-a-likes.

When I was growing up, my Mother subjected me to howling gales of opera on a regular basis that it made everyday of my life seem like the closing scenes of Godfather III – moving in slow-mo and extremely drawn out painful death.

Fat men with lungs the size of Sicily spewed songs in Italian that seemed really complex but when you read the English translation would amount to things like:

“I love you Henrietta, let’s get married!”.

“I can’t because I need to wash my hair and I have to pick up the cat from the vet”.

I thought my Mother had put me off opera for life but then I got invited to see a show at the Met a few years back, and despite having to dress like a penguin with a pool-cue up its arse, I actually really enjoyed the spectacle. Now occasionally… very occasionally… I will put on opera music and listen to some Viking lady explain how to catch a fish with a pointy helmet.

My own musical tastes came from my older Brothers (3 of them, all older than me). Only one was still living at home when I was growing up but there was always good sounds coming out his room. Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, Pink Floyd could be heard behind his door as him and his friends jammed it shut to keep me out. I’d lie on the floor kicking the door with all my might listening to “Comfortably Numb” shaking the rafters of the house.

Now that I have a kid of my own I think I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that she will probably view all the stuff I like as old farts music. I'm not going down without a fight though! My hope, and prayer, is that she somehow passes over the teenybopper Britney phase and moves straight into a Goth phase. At least then I’ll be able to connect with her by playing her some of the amazingly large collection of really depressing songs I own. If she likes only shiny happy pop then I am irreversibly fucked.