Justin and Me

Like many parents, Alec and I fell into the “kid music” trap when C.C. was very little.  And, once you are in, it’s like quicksand.  Really hard to get out, especially once you start taking the little bugger to Music Together classes, where they give out CDs featuring classics like “Little Liza Jane.”  It was years before I stopped humming, “Hello, everybody.  So glad to see you” when I walked into my own classes.

But we made our way through those years with heavy doses of Dan Zanes, Pete Seeger, and Leadbelly.  And then, slowly and cleverly, Alec began to integrate the grownup music—Springsteen and Dylan, Neil Young, Guns ‘N Roses, and the Gourds.  He did it with patience and perseverance, working through the initial protestations until the kids were belting out the Cure’s Friday I’m in Love from the backseat every Friday after school.

But now, for the first time, one of our children has come home with his own request for music—something he has never heard in our house or car.  Milo got a ride to soccer last week with his friend Jonas’s mom.  Jonas has a sister, Sarah, who is nine and is VERY into…Justin Bieber.  When Milo came home, he told Alec he had something to tell him, in private.  He pulled Alec’s ear down to the level of his mouth and whispered:  “Daddy, Justin Bieber is okay.  He’s pretty good.”  Perhaps he had heard us mocking JB a couple of months ago when Bieber came to Barcelona.  In truth, I had never heard a Justin Bieber song, so it wasn’t really fair to judge him.  Or if I had heard one, I couldn’t put the song together with the singer.

Alec clued me in and, the next day on my way to school with the kids, I baited Milo. 

“So, Milo.  What are you listening to these days?  I just downloaded this new CD and I can’t stop playing it. Does that ever happen to you.”

“Well, there is someone I like, but I want to tell you about it in private.”

This is interesting, no?  Somehow he intuited that it might not be cool to be a Bieber fan.  But I didn’t want him to feel embarrassed about what he liked so.  After school, when C.C. went to the park with Elke and I asked Milo if he wanted to read The Cat in the Hat, he said, no, he wanted to listed to Justin Bieber songs on the computer.  So we did.  Lots of them.  And then I asked him if he wanted me to buy one of the albums for him. 

I enabled the problem I currently have.  Because ever since then, Milo has been walking around the apartment every waking moment, my iPad tucked under his arm blasting My World 2.0 like some kind of modern day, miniature Radio Raheem, albeit less political.

Although the content of Milo’s obsession does not derive from Alec’s and my musical tastes, Milo inherited the practice of playing one song, or one album, over and over and over and over directly from Alec.  Alec is somewhat more conscious about subjecting the rest of us to whatever he is playing in an endless loop on any given day—he does it in the car, or in his office wearing earphones.

When Milo came into the kitchen for breakfast on Monday clutching my iPad, the strains of “Baby, Baby, Baby Oh” signaling his imminent arrival long before he stepped over the threshold, C.C. ran to my bedside table for some earplugs.  I want to support the development of my son’s musical taste, but I’m not ready to plug him into headphones, because that, too, is a slippery slope.  I don’t want him to know just how easy it is to tune me out from now until he’s of age.  And yet I am also unprepared for JB to become our constant background music.  The kids know that I am sensitive to noise, any noise, even noise that I like.  So perhaps we will just have to establish some limits—hours in which JB is allowed in the public spaces of the apartment and hours in which he must stay in the kids’ room.

I should admit that I’m not really one to talk.  I listened to my Barry Manilow Live! double album constantly, and way past the age when it could be remotely considered cool.  Alec, on the other hand, asked his parents for a Johnny Cash album at the age of 5, and followed that up with a request for the Beatles White Album.  But we can’t all be that cool.

I asked Milo if maybe he might like his own iPod—he could use it this summer on our long car trips, and we could load it up with his favorite books and music.  “That would be great, Mom,” he said.  “Peter has a nano, and so does Talia.  There’s three things I would want to put on my very own iPod.  Justin Bieber, the Ramones, and Lucinda Williams.”  There’s still hope.