What Songs Do You Force Your Children to Love?

On the intergenerational transmission of fandom

There are so many ways to think about the different periods or epochs of my childhood. I can separate eras of growing up by what my favorite sitcom was (I graduated from Silver Spoons to Family Ties to Wonder Years to Seinfeld); by which younger sibling had most recently been born; by whose lunch table I sat at; by what music was on the radio. But the one I have been thinking a lot about is what music we listened to together, as a family.

My parents had two cars, but only one was big enough for all four, then five, then six of us to fit in together. It was a 1985 (I think) Plymouth Voyage minivan, red with the fake wood siding. It looked something like this:

And it had a tape deck, as cars did back then. And from the moment we got it, we played tapes in it. On long family trips, my dad controlled the tape deck, which was fine, as he had—and still has—good taste in music. And when we found a good tape as a family, we would play it over and over again.

The one I remember best is Paul Simon’s Graceland. That unbelievably awesome album came out in 1986, and my dad, like so many old Simon and Garfunkel–heads, bought it as soon as it dropped (to use a word nobody would have used back then). And we played it in the car every single time we got in the car, for about six months. I can still sing the words to the entire album—not just “You Can Call Me Al,” but the title track, “The Boy in the Bubble,” “Under African Skies,” and more.

There’s a lot to say about Graceland: the comeback of Simon, whose solo career had waned; the accusations of cultural appropriation because of how he incorporated South African beats and instruments (which he paid South African musicians to perform); the amazing performances with Ladysmith Black Mambazo; the Chevy Chase video.

But what I remember best is how that album became, for the better part of the year, the soundtrack to family car trips.

When I first had children, I realized pretty quickly that, like (I would assume) most music-fan dads and moms, I wanted my children to like the music I liked. It didn’t seem like a crazy or quixotic hope. My dad had passed on a good bit of his musical tastes to me: Motown, the English folkies Steeleye Span, Paul Simon. Why would my children not grow to love R.E.M., the Jayhawks, and Lyle Lovett?

And it all seemed like such a simple project: play stuff in the car, around the house, at bedtime, and they would just get it. It was all so undeniable, the greatness of one’s favorite bands—unless our children were real dummkopfs, they would get it. How could they not? I remember talking with one friend of mine, an old college classmate who had her first baby at around the same time Mrs. Oppenheimer and I had ours. She and her husband had bought the Rockabye Baby Lullaby Renditions of Radiohead to play their daughter at night.

I never dug Radiohead, and lullaby Radiohead seemed especially cruel, so I was not on board with this. But I got the sentiment. They wanted to raise a little Radiohead fan, who would someday graduate to the gobbledgook of OK Computer. I have fallen out of touch with that friend, but somewhere her daughter is a college freshman, and maybe she is blasting “Karma Police” in a protest encampment right now.

Anyway, for a long time, I thought I had failed. My children do love music. One of them has the lyrics to about 1,000 pop songs memorized. Another is a violinist who has been teaching herself piano and guitar. A couple of them are deep in Swift-y fandom. But only one really digs what I dig; only one of them wants to go to the concerts I go to. Let me put it this way: only one of them knows who the Decemberists are.

And yet … things seem to be looking up. They began looking up just this morning, in fact. My youngest daughter, who mostly subsists on a diet of Taylor Swift, said to me, as I cleaned up last night’s dishes, “Dad, what is that song that starts, ‘She’s a good girl …’?” It took me a split second, and then I said, “You mean ‘Free Falling,’ by Tom Petty.” And then we stumbled through the first verse together:

She's a good girl, loves her mamma
Loves Jesus and America too
She's a good girl, crazy bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too

And not five minutes later, my son, who is six, walked past me, trying to pull on his winter coat, singing a line of Dawes: “May all your favorite bands / Stay together!”

In fact, things are looking up with all of them. The violinist/guitarist has been teaching herself Noah Kahan. The pop-music-Star 99.9-radio obsessive somehow knows the lyrics to Tears for Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” as I discovered when it came on the radio the other day, and we both sang along. She still prefers Beabadoobee, but hey—Beabadoobee is pretty great. (According to Wikipedia, Beabadoobee “has cited Elliott Smith, Mac DeMarco, the Moldy Peaches, Pavement, Mazzy Star, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and Daniel Johnston as her musical influences.”) And the eldest—she hits up The Heavy Heavy concerts with me.

How has this all happened? I don’t know. Maybe the algorithms are sensing some deep genetic encoding, feeding them music based on that encoding, and thus will someday lead them back to me; maybe I will bump into them smoking weed and generally being inappropriate at an Avett Brothers concert that I didn’t know they were going to until they ended up seated three rows in front of me. Maybe it’s luck. As with most matters of parenting, I matter less than I’d like to think I do; I am probably off the hook for what goes right as well as what goes wrong. But today, with Tom Petty still earworming in my ears, I am just pretty happy.

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The best attacks on me this week

On an unrelated note, if you were at all interested in my critique, a couple weeks ago, of David Brooks’s column about feeling at once Jewish and Christian, you should check out some very smart replies, taking me to task, at Arc.

Happy reading, and enjoy your weekend.