The Sound Of Music/MotherF*$#! I'm Awesome!

Music was not a big part of my life growing up...the generator (yes, a generator) wasn't on during the day and at night, it was busy with things like dishwashers and washing machines..so the radio or the record player (yes, a record player) wasn't in use a lot.  When it was on and not overloaded I listend to two things--Blondie and South Pacific...maybe I had a thing for blondes, who knows?

In high school I listend  to The Cars.  And I went to my first concert, Rick Springfield, when he played the Jackson County Fair where I was showing cattle in 4H. ("Jessie's Girl", sigh).  College was even more pathetic.  By the time I met my husband, way after college, I had 5 cassettes (yes, cassettes), the two I remember were the Counting Crows and Billy Joel, Glass Houses. I just didn't understand it's importance to and for people.

As mentioned here before, my husband is exact opposite of me, so he came into the relationship with a lot of knowledge, experiences, opinions and records/cassettes (hundreds, if not thousands)...I thought it was hot, but I also felt like a total loser because more than half the time, I had no clue what he was talking about...ahh...love.

But it was last night, laying down in the dark, trying to get my daughter to go to sleep, when I realized that for our kids, music is a constant.  In fact, it's hard to get away from in our house--from the Bose in the bedroom, to the iPods, to the big stereo downstairs, to the mobile iphone speaker stations that travel around the house, to the iPod boom boxes in each of our kids bedrooms....at any given time, there are 3 or 4 places in the house all with different music playing.  For someone who grew up 'quiet' it can be overwhelming.  As a parent, it can also be both wonderful and painful.

The wonderful comes from listening to my son falling asleep to the Beatles, Bob Marley, The Clash,  Ethan Lipton & The Ethan Lipton Orchestra, Coldplay, and a bunch of stuff I don't know (yeah, big surprise there); or listening to him play his electric guitars (he has 4) while he sings his own compositions ("Psychotherapy Sister" was an interesting tune).  He and his friends are doing ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down" for their schools talent competition...I just hope their hair and outfits dont' distract too much from the music. 

The wonderful also comes from late nights reading with my husband while listening (Richard Thompson, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, "Please Read the Letter" ) car trips while singing (John Prine and Iris DeMent, "In Spite of Ourselves") and goofing around and dancing with the kids ("My Sharona" and anything by the Dropkick Murphys).

Regardless, it is amazing, and I can see it helping to form their personalities, and for my son especially, giving him a venue for venting as well as figuring--and providing a deep connection with his father.

So, while I've learned to love music, enjoying the spreading of my wings, so to speak, I was curious about it's role in people's lives.  As usual, to the bookstore I went.  Two books caught my eye and as I read them, my interest.  The first was Musicophilia:  Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks.  A great blend of musicology and science, Sacks uses his typical tales of others to highlight all of the different ways we are a musical species.  Some of the stories are simple, some are fantastical, but all relateable on some level.  It enforced for me just how important it is for kids to grow up with music in their lives.

The second book, The Music of Life by Hazrat Inayat Khan, is from the Sufi perspective and while I had to read many sections twice (I read too fast and was missing important things), and am typically very wary of religious/philosophical books, I found parts that made sense to me on both an emotional and rational level--the law of rhythm, the creative process and the emotional power of music.  I have no idea if whether it's correct, vis-a-vis Sufi teachings or any of that, but it was worth the read.

By the by, while searching, I also ran across another book, The Music of Life:  Biology Beyond the Genome, by Denis Noble.  Not about music specifically, he writes about the "symphonic interplay between genes, cells, organs, body, and environment".  I've only started it, but so far, it's keeping my interest...and I found the cover art beautiful.

Ahhh...so yes, I've covered the wonderful part.  Now onto the painful part.  Simple...my iPod on shuffle, I wasn't paying attention to what was on (we've all been there), until my children starting signing along with an artist called Spose and his great and funny (seriously) song, "I'm Awesome".  Yeah, it starts loud with a pretty big BAD word.  Which they loved, while my husband laughed and I cringed...yet another BPM (bad parenting moment). 

Sigh, you take the good with the bad and just hope the bad never leaves the house.