|
|
|
Toddler-inappropriate songs
Got Feedback?
Subscribe now: RSS news feed, plus free headlines for your site |
You are here: Home :: What We Think :: Toddler-inappropriate songs
Toddler-inappropriate songs
  It isn’t my fault that my nearly 3-year-old grandboy is learning inappropriate songs. It’s SpongeBob’s fault. The SpongeBob SquarePants theme song is bad enough. We hear it many times a day on rainy days. Ian likes me to sing it every time it comes on, from the “Are you ready kids?” all the way to the doodle-dee-doo at the end. When I write “Ian like,” you may want to read it, “Ian demands.”  Then, at certain scene changes during the show, they pipe a silly little melody that Ian, along with most of the kids watching the thing, would never recognize. But I do. I’ve written before about my problem with songs that play over and over and over again in my head, and eventually force to sing them. That’s why, an hour or so after exposure to SpongeBob, I often sing, “Whaddaya do with a drunken sailor?/Whaddaya do with a drunken sailor?/Whaddaya do with a drunken sailor/Earl-eye in the mornin’?” I generally manage to stop myself after the “shave his belly” verse, and before I get to the one about the Captain’s daughter. But the only way I can stop myself from singing a particular song that has become obnoxious, is to find something else to sing. Unfortunately, the music programmer in my brain is theme-oriented.  So, after singing an aborted version of “Drunken Sailor” a few times, I inevitably find myself singing, “Oh, the Ee-Rye-ee is a-risin’/and the gin is getting’ low/An’ I scarcely think we’ll get a drink/’til we get to Buffalo/ ‘til we get to Buffalo.” That one has to be stopped before the crew hoists the cook on the pole as a distress signal, and cracks the nigh mule on the head – too much violence.  So then my feeble brain segues into, “I wish I was a powder monkey (cabin boy, gunner, bos’n, etc)/aboard a man o’ war/” The refrain to that one is blameless, being only about Sam having gone away aboard a man o’ war, but I have to stop before the end because the lyricist had some nasty things to say about the Cap’n’s wife, who was evidently unpopular. Then it’s “Tell me what their names/Tell me what were their names/Did you have a friend/on the good Reuben James?” That one is free of foul language, but contains some pretty dark imagery, so I stop before the whine and rock and explosion, and the “cold ocean floor.”  Every time I sing that, by the way, I wonder whether anyone would remember the sinking of the Reuben James, a convoy escort that was the first U.S. ship lost in WWII, if Woody Guthrie hadn’t written the song. He originally intended to write a song that contained all the names of the sailors lost on the ship. I don’t know why he didn’t. Maybe because shortly after the Reuben James was sunk, the U.S. entered the war, and the deaths mounted so rapidly no amount of songs could remember them all.  Then it’s on to, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which is a little scary. Sometimes I toss in “Sloop John B” to sort of lighten the mood, although there’s an awful lot of drunkenness and fighting and getting fits in it. And that exhausts my seafaring and shipwreck repertoire, forcing it to take some other path to madness. “On a cold winter night/not a star was in sight/and the north wind came howling down the line … “ There goes the poor, unnamed engineer, hurtling to his death in the “Wreck of the Old Number Nine.” He is followed by poor Steve, who was found in the “Wreck of the Old 97” with his “hand on the throttle/scalded to death by the steam.” Lovely. Then there’s “Casey Jones (The Brave Engineer)” who promises to run his train “’til she leaves the rails” because his load of mail is eight hours late, and dies when he rams a passenger train and nothing is ever said about the people on the passenger train, so I’m not sure that qualifies as brave, but never mind.  The thing is, that song leads inexorably to the Grateful Dead’s version of “Casey Jones,” which ends the same way but blames the wreck on cocaine and says nothing about bravery, which is perhaps more believable but still not a song for a 3-year-old. Yesterday, through terrific concentration, determination and with an iron will, I blazed a path our of the overgrown ship- and-train-wreck genre. “Her name was Lola/  |
Latest articles in What We Think
|
Copyright 2006-2008. All rights reserved.
i