A corollary of the Some Things Are Not For Me And That's Fine No Really worldview that I've reluctantly settled into in my enveloping dotage, is the understanding and acceptance that everyone's media choices, within reason, are valid. This is a Big Deal for a late Gen Xer - the generation that built its whole identity, all of its social strata and cache, around media choices - the music you listened to, the comic books, movies, sports or shows you watched. It was how Gen X identified itself and siloed itself socially; goths, punks, comic book nerds, footy heads, internecine in-groups created around media choices. You're a yob or you're a wanker, take your fucken choice. So it's a lot for Gen X to accept and even celebrate that people who like Taylor Swift are inherently OK and not terrible fucken idiots, even if they can be a bit punishing to get on the wrong side of in an internet argument.
Your man Beeso and I have been recording ourselves talking about music for ten years, which is a large swathe of our kids' lives. Long term listeners will know we've basically taken different approaches to imbuing our kids with music, curating their experience base, expanding their influences, trying to stop them listening to terrible shit that would make them awful people who would be social pariahs - standard Gen X obsessions. In somewhat of a long-running music experiment which has been catalogued on the show over the years, Beeso has happily inflicted his entire music choices on his kids, including basically every week's worth of albums we listen to apart from the ones with naughty American swearing on them (and even then, if it's Little Simz they'll probably hear it). For a few years we even built a playlist for the boys (incisively titled 'The Boys', long before certain nihilistic superhero satires) which we built on week-by-week with new song nominations from review albums.
I don't think my boys ever heard it, as beyond a few mix CDs and playlists of swearing-lite tracks from acts I liked, it became pretty clear pretty quick that my kids were going to want to discover their own stuff. So I've been much more hands-off in trying to lab-grow my lads' music taste, which is not to say Beeso is brewing mini-mes, but his lads are only just now at the age where they diverge and discover their own way. Mine are a bit older, and we are less a house of communal noise, more each to their own. Lots more earbuds and on-ear headphones, and not intentionally, less of a willingness to share media. Seemingly I give off Gen X music snob vibes even when I'm trying to be supportive about whatever dreadful crap my family are watching or listening to, so nobody wants to tell me about it. Clearly not a me problem.
So essentially I am the control in Beeso's big music experiment, in that my kids have been allowed/encouraged/obliged to just go and figure it out for themselves. It is not what you would call a well-controlled experiment - I would have notes if this protocol turned up for review - but it's interesting nonetheless. Particularly when you get to see the results. As discussed on this week's ep of tripping balls, the younger one and I had a great chance to compare music notes which led to next week's 'joker' album being a classic which he'd gotten into massively on a friend's recommendation - Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Under The Sea.
Yes, apparently I'd sent my little boy out into the world to seek his musical fortune, armed only with a Spotify sub and the truth, and he came back listening to... turn of the century Seppo folk indie jangle.
Oh, and early Kanye. And Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. No, really, it's funny to me that he has somehow independently discovered all the musical acts and styles I have loudly shitcanned for decades (*waves hands at ten years of recordings of us slagging off Kanye*) and now I get to crack-test my newfound readiness to accept and celebrate the validity of everyone's choices, and revisit genres and artists I'd never actually spent any time with. And maybe, just a little, do a bit of gentle nudging. We can get from Pink Floyd to early Led Zep, particularly since he reckons he's not as into the more cinematic later stuff. We can probably get from Kanye to golden-era hip hop, that good shit. Or even just CZARFACE.
Not sure how we get from folk indie jangle to Fu Manchu, but we can have a crack.
The Doctor is OUT.
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