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1. On the ride home from school back in June, my seven year old daughter made an odd complaint: she couldn't get a song out of her head.
Yes: In the process of promoting a school trip to an Orioles game, her teachers managed to afflict her with her first earworm. The song in question was, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
2. Some time in the past month, I had to explain to Pumpkin what a jackpot actually is, after she informed me that her little brother was sitting on it.
3. What you or I might call July 4 or Independence Day, Little Man was calling America Day. We spent the evening of ours on a beachside balcony in Florida's First Coast area watching fireworks.
4. Some time over the past few months, Little Man has taken to ... greeting ... squirrels by yelling "Hello!" and racing towards them. He's fast, but they're faster.
At Disney World, he yelled an insult at a duck (not Donald or Daisy!), but didn't storm after it. He's otherwise a very good-natured little boy, and I have no clue where that came from.
-- CAV
Yo, Gus, you write, "On the ride home from school back in June, my seven year old daughter made an odd complaint: she couldn't get a song out of her head."
ReplyDeleteWe had to take a long road trip recently, so I burned some CDs with treasures from my private stash. One CD had these six songs all in a row. (One of those is thanks to you, of course.) I hadn't realized there was so much earworm power in such concentrated form until we were listening to it in the car, and then my wife was constantly humming all six of them at one time or another all the rest of the trip. (Of course, I had to say out the words for the first one for her, since she doesn't find Jamaican accents so easy.) It was actually a weakening in earworm power for them to be followed by a classic of party jazz like this.
And I got a laugh out of the thought that if I wanted to, I could burn a CD of all the Top 40 songs I hated so much from the 70s, just 79 minutes of unadulterated crap, and skip to the next track five seconds after each track started, laughing maniacally at what I wished I could have done on road trips with the family when I was a little boy, but why would I want to waste a perfectly good blank CD? It's not like I'm a waiter at the Rice Faculty Club, after all...
Snedcat,
ReplyDeleteOof! Regarding top 40: you and me both.
I directly blame hearing that format all the way to and from our family vacations for why I just didn't bother with music until I was older. Even the songs I would later decide were okay or even that I liked were way the #$^$ overplayed. This was much like Miller/Budweiser and (actual) beer for me. I didn't drink beer until grad school, and am now known as someone who likes "weird beer".
Gus
Yo, Gus, you write, "Even the songs I would later decide were okay or even that I liked were way the #$^$ overplayed."
ReplyDeleteAlmost exactly my position. Some I did like a lot back then, mostly Motown and that sweet sweet Philadelphia sound, but even there, it was only select songs. And so many of the ones I did like okay were overrated to the heavens by people around me, which is guaranteed to make you feel a bit not with the program, which really didn't bother me most of the time. But yeah, once I discovered classical music when I was 15 and went my own way finding the music I fully liked, life was much more enjoyable.
(And here's a thought to make you feel even more culturally deprived. If you'd been in Brazil in the 70s, you'd have gotten songs like this all the time on the radio, by a woman who was a mononomial before Madonna ever dreamed of the honor, and that's just sticking to fairly mainstream pop.)
And yeah, some of the music I abominated then I like okay now. Johnny Cash, for example, I liked a bit then (a few songs more than a bit) and very very much now, even when singing Neil Diamond; Carole King, Bill Withers, and Eric Clapton I listen to with much less irritation now, and have long since decided Janis Ian was (is) in fact a superlative singer-songwriter (of course, in her case only a couple of her songs were overplayed, and even then they were pretty good). On the other hand, I am definitely a dude who still can't abide the Eagles (well, "One of These Nights" and "Witchy Woman" I enjoy on rare occasions, but the rest of their oeuvre not), and I still consider Manilow the utmost depths of a musically abysmal decade.
Snedcat,
ReplyDeleteMy parents didn't do country music, but that was (and is) a hard sell for me, whatever its musical merits -- because it reminds me of various types of white trash I occasionally encountered.
I am extremely glad my parents valued education, and that I grew up in a city.
Gus
Yo, Gus, you write: "My parents didn't do country music, but that was (and is) a hard sell for me, whatever its musical merits -- because it reminds me of various types of white trash I occasionally encountered."
ReplyDeleteIt has some of those associations for me, but in central Texas in the 70s it was more like the water you swim in, and most of it I just disliked in general, and in fact still dislike. (And like I've said to you before, I love bluegrass...as long as it's instrumental. Once voices got thrown in, it so often turned into incipent country. Though I will say that some of Grampa Jones' earlier songs are darned funny.) Partly it's the whole musical language--can't stand steel guitars 99.9% of the time.
A chuckle though: I read a pretty interesting tirade online somewhere several months ago about how so many white people say "I like any kind of music...except rap." Then, the tirader continued, you discover that by "every kind" they mean Top 40 pop and hard rock/metal. I had to laugh because I've worked with people like that: "But you mean you don't like Poison? Whitesnake?" Thinking to myself: "Thank you for listing two more to avoid." Out loud: "Not really, no." Then they came back, apparently genuinely puzzled, "But who do you like then? Belinda Carlisle? She's good." And me, trying not to yawn, "Yeah, a couple of her songs are okay. My mother loves her."
It's true too that rap and country usually get listed as musical no deals by certain types of people who turn around and listen to hard rock of various sorts that I like even less than rap (if only because it was so much harder to avoid in my social circles); it's enough when they start in on their favorites to make me say, "Man, that stuff's nothin', and I mean nothin', compared to NWA." (I had a neighbor in grad school, a consultant scientist, white as flour and with a pony tail, who loved hip hop and entertained me with some of his favorite lyrics, and I have to admit, without the accompaniment they sounded pretty entertaining. In turn I introduced him to the best ska he hadn't heard of. Definitely a mutually beneficial exchange.) But yeah, rap remains like country to me in the sense of, "Well, Johnny Cash is good, I like him," or "Well, I like what I've heard of De La Soul. They're pretty good."