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SteelyKid, Space-Babies, and Transformative Music [Uncertain Principles]
As previously mentioned, SteelyKid has started to get into pop music. In addition to the songs in that post, she’s very fond of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” like every other pre-teen girl in the country, and also this Taylor Swift song:
I’ve seen a bunch of people rave about this, but honestly, I found it pretty forgettable until I read Jim Henley’s Twitter exegesis in which he shows that the song is really about the tryst with an alien that left Swift with a faceless hybrid infant. That is, a blank space-baby. Now I can’t get the idiot song out of my head.
Anyway, a week or two ago, I actually went onto Amazon and bought a bunch of the tracks that she sings along with in the car– “Centuries,” “Roar,” “Blank Space,” “Shake It Off,””Lips Are Movin’,” “Happy,” “Let It Go,” “Everything Is Awesome,” a few others. We loaded them onto her tablet, and she immediately curled up on the couch with headphones, and started playing them over and over to learn the words, singing along.
I posted the obligatory grumpy-dad tweet about buying these tracks, but really, I don’t mind. For one thing, her singing along is novel enough to be cute, and has produced some brilliant mondegreens– at one point, I swear she sang “‘Cause I love the players, and You! Love! Croquet!,” and I almost put the car in a ditch laughing.
Beyond that, though, a lot of these songs are actually pretty good. I’m still not a huge fan of “Blank Space,” but other than the cringe-worthy break, “Shake It Off” is pretty good. And the chorus of “Lips Are Movin’” is basically a Motown song– not their very best, maybe Holland, Dozier, and Holland with a hangover and a tight deadline, but it’s pretty good pop songcraft. I will continue to try to steer her away from the crappy and creepy stuff (*cough* Pitbull *cough*), but I’m pretty okay with most of what’s on the Top 40 station at the moment.
The main reason I’m kind of happy about this, though, is that the singing along with headphones is such a classic proto-pop-music-nerd thing to do. It’s the music fan equivalent of watching her toddle across the room the first time. And as a giant pop-music nerd myself– I still do the thing where I sit in the car in the driveway waiting for a really good song to finish– I find it heartwarming to see.
I especially enjoyed it when, on the same car ride as the “rattlesnake painting” conversation, she explained to me that she sings along with the songs even when she doesn’t know the words, because she likes the way the music makes her feel. Yes, honey, that’s it exactly. Welcome to my world.
I bring this up not only because the goddamn space-baby song came up on shuffle play again, and now I’ll be earwormed with it all morning, but because in another, un-linkable , corner of my social-media universe, a friend who is prone to such things made another dismissive post about pop-rock music. This one was about how when he hears people talk about a great song or album he always expects it to be a brilliant and transformative thing, but it just sounds like every other pop song to him.
And, you know, that’s pretty much my reaction to classical music– people rave about the timeless brilliance of whatever, and I do my best to listen politely, but really, it all makes me want to pull out my phone and check Twitter. For that matter, as much as people talk about jazz as a religious experience, it’s never done all that much for me– I played in the jazz band in high school, so I can appreciate the technical artistry of it, but it’s just not my thing.
And yet, I’ll sit transfixed by crappy cell-phone video to find the awesomeness of a new-to-me song by my favorite rock band:
(Seriously, that’s awesome, and makes me wish I lived in a place where I could see more of their live shows…)
And, the thing is, all of those things are transformative in their own way, for different people. Some people find transcendence in Beethoven, I prefer loud guitars and sharp lyrics.
Which is another piece of why I get torqued up about lousy defenses of “the humanities,” that fall back on an elite consensus about what’s Important. Because if you want to claim a universal human impulse toward art, that’s fine, but insisting on the universal appeal of particular works is a bad place to go.
As I said last week, I remain uncertain about what I’d actually like to see as a defense of “the humanities,” but I suspect it starts with something like this. Not with name-checking to flatter the presumed taste of an elite audience (which is not necessarily universally shared), but speaking to the human impulse to find transformative experiences in all kinds of places. Because in the end, transformative art is wherever you find it. Sometimes, that’s in a concert hall with a symphony orchestra, sometimes it’s on the couch with headphones and a song about a space-baby.
So, while I’m happy that for the moment SteelyKid’s nascent musical taste fits reasonably comfortably within the bounds of what I like, I guess the really important thing here is that she’s finding significance in music of whatever type. Because in the end, it’s that process of finding and feeling that makes a more complete person. And I’ll try to keep that in mind even when she enters a rebellious teenage phase and gets really into Italian opera.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2015/03/04/steelykid-space-babies-and-transformative-music/
