My favorite Scientologist & musical concerns

Damn, the new Beck album is good! I brought it to work today, ostensibly to rip it, but I put it on instead of Launchcast and am rocking out at my desk. I'm definitely listening to it at the gym at lunch -- not only will it make the cross-trainer more palpable, but I am actually looking forward to going to the nasty over-heated downtown gym. (It's in the second basement and has always been too warm; now that I'm preggers, I loathe going there.) Now that's some great music!

This leads me to one of my bigger concerns about impending parenthood. So many parents seem to loose all musical taste as soon as junior is born. Now, I understand I will be too busy to go to clubs and too strapped for cash to buy 10 CDs a month, but does that mean that children's albums will become my new soundtrack? Do I have to listen to that crap?!

Really, do children respond more to hearing other children sing in stupid sing-song voices out-of tune, a la Barney, more than they do to genuine music? But yet so many parents abuse themselves, and their children's delicate ears, by playing that shite over and over. Why would my kid be more interested in an overwrought Disney love song than a Beatles love song? I know parenthood involves sacrifice, but there are some sacrifices I am just not willing to make.

There is some good children-focused music out there. There must be. But what's wrong with just good music? I'm not going to play speed metal for my babies but, if you want songs with words, what's wrong with Simon & Garfunkel or Johnny Cash? Or, frankly, opera? Eli probably lives in fear that I will turn his children into opera queens, but isn't that better than them growing up to think Britney Spears is acceptable? Wouldn't a child boogie down to Stevie or Sly as much as some dorky children's album?

My other parental musical pet peeve (ok, one of my others, I have a whole litany) is this Mozart for Babies crap. You know, a parent reads an article about how classical music is good for a child's development, so they buy one or two "Best of the Classics" CDs and play them over and over. Honey, that's not going to develop your children's brains, it's going to give them a complex straight out of A Clockwork Orange every time they hear Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I enjoyed classical music as a child because my parents listened to a lot of it. Recordings, the wide variety on the radio (this was the 1970s, before the classical radio station genocide), my dad playing it, and going to children's concerts at the library. Just as children who see their parents reading are more likely to become readers, children whose parents listen to music are more likely to love it. It's all about demystification.

Oh, and I played an instrument. Everyone in my school had an opportunity to pick an instrument and play it (I was fortunate and supplemented by private lessons). This was a public school. From what I understand, this is no longer common in elementary schools, either public or the kind for which you pay $15,000/year. Even if music wasn't reinforced constantly at home, I would still have been exposed to quite a lot more than most kids these days. Music is crucial to brain development, but it has to be stimulating. A couple lame CDs won't cut it.