Musical Differences

I like music. (Yes... these are the kind of intimate truths I reveal in this blog. Hold on tight.) So do both my children. They dance a lot and both have distinctive and hilarious moves, so it's fun to have music on as often as possible. The problem is, what to listen to? Generally a 33 yr old seems to have quite different taste to a 4 yr old and a 2 yr old. And there's a very small sweet spot of tunes that they like to dance to that don't make me want to push my fingers into my ears until they touch.

The be fair, my default musical type is melancholic acoustic folk, which never moved a person to dance (other than metaphorically through a lonely, existential malaise) so I was always going to have to visit the outlying regions of my taste to find tracks that ticked all our boxes.

Similarly, my 4 yr old girl's natural bent wasn't helping our cause. JLS Breathe Again got a lot of airtime in our house before I just had to tell her that we couldn't play it any more. Because the boys who sang it were sad that we always had it and they never got to listen to it. (Don't judge me until you've listened to it ten times in a row.)

We've since hit on a pretty steady stream of tunes that we all like and which stimulate a bit of dancing fun. Unfortunately nearly every tune we agree on seems to contain some level of inappropriate content. 
Out of habit, respect for the way the artist intended it to be heard, or just because I subconsciously really like naughty words, I never remember to click on 'clean version' when buying. This has effectively sentenced me to ten years of hastily making-up similar-sounding clean lyrics and singing them loudly over the offending words. Every time. (Sooner or later, one of the kids is going to ask me why so many songs have a duck in them, or why tractors never get a mention yet people often sing about diggers.)

Here's just a small sample of our favourites from the last couple of years:

Mumford & Sons - Little Lion Man

-- Sample lyric change

"I really mucked it up this time, didn't I my dear?" 

[Easy rhyme. Plausible lyric. No problem]

-- Typically-induced moves

Little girl: Soldiery-style marching at increasing pace; leads into frantic banjo-driven twirling & flailing

Little boy: Knees bent, leaning forward, feet rooted to the spot, clenched fists, doing a frantic 'the twist' motion with arms and bum

Katy Perry - Last Friday Night

-- Sample lyric change
"We went peeking in the park; 
lots of skipping in the dark; 
then had an apricot bar" 
[More challenging rhyming. Strange-but-believable-ish-when-you're-4 lyrics]

-- Typically-induced moves
Little girl: Non-stop spinning around. Falling down dizzy
Little boy: Knees bent, leaning forward, feet rooted to the spot, clenched fists, doing a frantic 'the twist' motion with arms and bum [Why change a winning formula?]

Nicki Minaj - Super Bass

-- Sample lyric change
"This one is for the boys in the polos; Riding their diggers in the moguls" 
[Easy-ish rhyme. Makes very little sense, but no questions have been raised as-yet]

-- Typically-induced moves
Little girl: One hand on hip, one hand in hair, gyrating turns
Little boy: Knees bent, leaning forward, feet rooted to the spot, clenched fists, doing a frantic 'the twist' motion with arms and bum [Doesn't work at all... at least he's enjoying himself]


Azealia Banks - 212
-- Sample lyric change
"I guess that bun getting eaten" 
[Doesn't rhyme with the original word, but solid lyric and scans fairly well. Has side-effect that we do now tend to buy more buns]

... by the way, admittedly I sometimes zone-out and 'enjoy the sound' rather than properly listening to the lyrics, but how did I not notice that this was in no-way child appropriate??
-- Typically-induced moves
Little girl: Lots and lots and lots of wiggling
Little boy: Knees bent, leaning forward, feet rooted to the spot, clenched fists, doing a frantic 'the twist' motion with arms and bum [Starting to worry about him a little bit]


Learned Wisdoms
#36: Just because the singer's got a Mickey Mouse t-shirt on doesn't mean absolute filth won't come out of her mouth. You should really notice this before your little girl has hit replay video for the third time.