There was a moment, some years ago in a St Kilda summer, when our family was driving along a busy street, the car windows down, belting out Eric Carmen’s Make Me Lose Control. I had one of those out-of-body experiences parents sometimes get, where you get a clear view of your younger, cooler self looking on in a state of acute embarrassment and despair.
How the hell had this happened?
There is no better way to examine your own prejudices than attempting to raise children engaged in cultural things. Taking their lead has led me to strange territories, including ballet, medieval festivals and the Gruffalo stage show. But as we enter the hinterland of adolescence, music continues to be the most revealing and unpredictable of journeys.
Full disclosure – I am a recovering music snob. My introduction to journalism was being a “rock journalist” (imagine the thrill of that business card) for Cream magazine in the early noughties. Having misspent much of my youth behind the counter of record stores, I was one of those (mostly) young men who saw High Fidelity as a kind of secondhand memoir. Oh, how we judged you for your love of mainstream pap.
And yet. The wonderful thing about kids and music is they like what they like. No child is born with an innate sense of cool or cringe. And, being kids, they tend to like fun things. When ours were of an age to move on from Play School records, we let them roam free at local op-shops and choose CDs for their cheap boombox at home. For $1, we ended up with an eight-disc set of Best of the 80s. This proved to be life-changing.
I had no nostalgic love for 80s pop. When I was developing my own music taste, my idea of upbeat pop was Morrissey imagining his girlfriend in a coma. Good times! But suddenly our lives were soundtracked by Tears for Fears, A-ha and Bananarama. I knew it was serious when our eldest chose the Beach Boys’ Kokomo as the soundtrack to her final kindergarten presentation.
I am grateful for the new music and artists our kids have since discovered. Their ever-changing playlists (a source of much conflict on car journeys) have introduced me to diverse acts from Chappell Roan via Raye to sea shanties and modern folk. But the greatest gift has been the chance to realise how wrong I was about music I already knew.
It turns out Queen isn’t tacky and overblown but joyous and extraordinary. Belinda Carlisle didn’t perform disposable fluff but some of the most perfect pop songs ever written. Likewise, the Bangles. Cyndi Lauper? Genius. Cheap Trick? Actually quite good.
And who knew that Bowie’s richest period wasn’t the albums Hunky Dory to Low but the first three tracks of Let’s Dance? (With an honourable mention for his and Jagger’s drunken singalong version of Dancing in the Street.) Who knew? The kids knew.
What is interesting about this generation of kids is how omnivorous and eclectic they are when it comes to music. The streaming age means almost all of music history is available to everyone, all of the time.
New music no longer dominates the old. It’s no harder to hear Eddie Cochran’s Twenty Flight Rock than the Weeknd’s Blinding Lights.
The tastes of their parents no doubt play a part – there’s no getting away from how many 80s-themed parties and discos our kids have attended – but their musical world seems far wider than that of my parents, whose music library fitted neatly on to a single, narrow shelf.
The algorithm also plays its part, of course. Given our family shares a streaming library, I am long resigned to my recommended listens and favourites being corrupted by the children’s choices. But I try to remind myself they are not polluting the river so much as widening the banks.
Outside the house, I am conscious that other algorithms are influencing their listening habits in the same way radio and television once influenced mine. Our kids aren’t yet on social media, but their current playlists are informed by music heard at various sporting events (the Killers, MGMT and Summer of ’69 tend to be on high rotation).
I certainly wasn’t listening to music from 40 years earlier when I was 13. More nostalgically, I miss the musical subcultures that were so important and so rigidly defended when I was coming of age. The contained bubbles of popularity allowed by social media enclaves don’t seem quite the same.
But that was my journey, not theirs.
Our kids have been able to build musical identities out of the very best pop, rock and, uh, however we’re classifying sea shanties without being pinned to the zeitgeist. Sometimes that involves Olivia Dean, sometimes Eric Carmen, sometimes a forgotten track from The Transformers: The Movie soundtrack.
Music may not define them in the way it defined many of my generation, but they still know a good tune when they hear one.
So, yes, listening to music through the ears of my kids has taught this old snob to listen without prejudice or embarrassment. Because it turns out that serious and important music doesn’t always last, but the fun stuff goes on for ever.
• Myke Bartlett is a writer and critic
