Different Notes For Different Folks
What happens when adults and youth clash on musical taste.
Across the generations, when music styles are brand new and foreign, there is a tendency for some adults to forbid their kids from listening to songs they don’t understand or cannot explain.
In the following three personal family examples, I discuss music's power in forming emotional attachments and captivating young audiences. Youth will resort to innovative lengths to listen to novel sounds because music is a part of their cultural identity. The article concludes with strategies for understanding, educating, and communicating musical tastes between adults and their kids.
The Beatles
When my Mom, Sheila, was in Grade 9, The Beatles emerged as a radical band of misfits with weird haircuts — guaranteed half brothers of Satan himself. Charles, my Mom’s father, was a staunch English patriarch who dominated and inspired fear in his household. No one was to touch the AM dial on the radio. And under his roof, Sheila was forbidden to speak of such Beatles, let alone play with one in the back garden.
Mom was cunning. If she couldn’t watch the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan show, Sheila knew she was about to miss out on a cultural phenomenon. And since Sullivan himself was also spawn…
