Kid Rock

By Marrit Ingman, Brain, Child. Posted May 30, 2004.

"We're not going to listen to kids' music," Jim had asserted when I was pregnant.

"We'll listen to a little of everything," I agreed.

"Kids' music is okay if it's cool," he affirmed.

"Cool like 'Free to Be You and Me'?"

"Yeah, like that. Except, you know, cooler."

"Right. Yeah. We're definitely going to do that."

"We're going to listen to our music."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

When I was a child in the 1970s -- a time of ever-so-many benevolent lies -- it was all just music, suitable for everyone. Everybody soft-pedaled everything. We had songs about drugs and sex and urban riots. Yet they were so cheerful and goofy about it. I mean, there are a hundred dead police officers in Paper Lace's "The Night Chicago Died." I watched Diana Ross perform "Love Hangover" on The Muppet Show, flanked by giant squiggly Muppets who looked like marabou boas. It was no big deal somehow. I can remember riding to my grandmother's house listening to "Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band, thinking it was some horrible song about a picnic with fireworks. Everything was on a need-to-know basis.

But let's just say that the music in my adult collection is not particularly coy.

"The lyric thing is getting to be a problem," a friend of mine confessed. "I was zoning out driving a while back and then realized my kid was singing along to Ween, 'Don't shit where you eat.' "

"This happened to us, too!" another person piped up, "But it was 'Wavin' my dick in the wind'!"

I'm not trying to be censorious. It's great to sing about your nads. But when your toddler runs around in public parroting remarks about having his dick out in the wind, you imagine the Child Protective Services caseworker sneaking up behind you, scribbling furiously.

On the other hand, even when it was lyrically appropriate, our child didn't necessarily appreciate our music -- a common enough pitfall for parents. Why, I remember rolling around the Houston suburbs as a child, belted into our brown-on-brown custom van with Don Williams crooning "I Believe in Love" in the eight-track player. I despised my father's groaning old balladeers. How could I have known that 25 years later, I'd be nostalgic for my own father's vintage torch-and-twang?

Bring on Iron Man

One of my first victories as a parent was Black Sabbath. I was exhausted and medicated for postpartum depression, so I began lifting the baby, whom we called Baldo, over my head and intoning, "I am Iron Man!" I'd plop him on the couch and stagger across the room, Ozzy-like, trailing my arms behind me for our mutual amusement.

It stuck. When Baldo was old enough to speak, he'd pipe, "Iron man!" in his little toddler falsetto. He'd sing the riff. I wept tears of joy and blogged furiously. We even convinced him that if he ate enough lima beans, he would transform into Iron Man, replete with heavy boots of lead. Then I explained that Iron Man doesn't really need vengeance from the grave. He can use his words!

"Are you doing any kind of music classes?" asked our friend Mark, who's kind of a corporate fast-tracker, whereas I am from the Planet of Slack.

"We're learning 'Iron Man!' " I beamed. He gave me a funny look.

"I'm going to teach you how to rock," I told the boy one morning over cereal. If children were taught from birth how to rock, they could rock twice as hard by the time they became rebellious adolescents, having mastered the fundamentals of rocking!

I'd pegged Baldo as a drummer by the way he bashed household items rhythmically, but I reconsidered when I realized how sensitive and rashy he was, how he shrank away from other children and clung to my legs at the park, yet how he was shyly charismatic. "You can be the reclusive singer-songwriter with semi-confessional lyrics," I told him.

We began with the three essential rock vocal flourishes. "Ow ow, doo doo, whoa whoa," I said. "That's our first lesson."

"Whoa whoa" was easy enough. I'd already taught him to identify adult women who were not "Mama" with the help of "She's a Lady."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, lady!" he'd sing when a jogger passed by. Whoa, whoa, whoa, lady indeed. The essence of rock, distilled into four words, three of which were the same word. Perfect.

Then it was on to the White Stripes.

"The hardest button to button!" I sang. I pointed. "Now you!"

"Ow ow," he whispered, smiling shyly.

"It's pain! Belt it!"

"Ow ow," he giggled.

Next was the rock-and-roll count-off. First we had to learn to count to four.

"One and two!" he'd yell.

"How about 'One, two, three, four!' "

"One and two and two!"

"What comes after two?"

"One!"

"Okay, we'll work on it. Then you can experiment with funny rhythms and stuff." I was imagining Thom Yorke at the beginning of "Polyethylene."

Toddler Troubadours

A coffeehouse in town began hosting free kids' music on Sunday mornings. Avid supporters of local musicians, we'd drag ourselves out of bed, get dressed, and schlep across town for the occasion.

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