Apparently Ian has a great deal of musical talent. We just figured this out. Oops. I’m dealing with it now. We’re signing him for all sorts of music lessons, including one place that specializes in teaching kids classic 80s rock. It puts them in a band after a few lessons.
To get Ian ready for the rock music school, we pulled out our old Who and Stones albums. And, yes, we still have albums. I surprised my husband by knowing all the words to Quadrophenia. Ian and I are listening to Queen right now.
Apt. 11d 
Quadrophenia is awesome. It comprised a good portion of turntable time in my teens. (And John Entwistle’s basslines are still the gold standard)
LikeLike
School of Rock? We have a daughter who’s really involved at our branch. They do a fantastic job. Everybody has fun at their shows (except my mother in law, who wears earplugs. She though the live music at our wedding should have been turned down, though). More enjoyable for the parents than any activity my kids have been involved in.
LikeLike
Very cool. We have completely indoctrinated our children in 80’s (and pre-80’s) music.
LikeLike
Yes, School of Rock. We checked out the studios last weekend. It was totally inspiring.
I was really into The Who at some point. Went to several concerts and have a bunch of albums. We stopped listening to music when Ian was little, because he had weird sound sensitivities. Yesterday, I played ten bars of music on the keyboard using a beginners book. He played the whole thing back to me perfectly in one try. It was freaky. Let’s see what he can do with lessons. Hopefully, his other issues (attention, OCD) doesn’t interfere.
LikeLike
One of my other daughters recently started playing keyboard, and she spent the entire summer teaching herself how to play music from Mario Galaxy, Legend of Zelda, and other video games. She wouldn’t have put the effort in for other kinds of music, I’m sure, though my husband tried to claim that some Satie piece was similar so she should play it. I don’t know if you’d want to encourage that though–it seemed a strange thing to do to me, but then she attended some sort of anime convention–in costume–with a friend last week and played it on a keyboard they had there just for people to play music from cartoons and video games, so I guess other people do it (sidenote: I feel like I barely understand my children anymore. Their lives bear no similarity to the life I lived at their age).
LikeLike
I’m guessing lots of parents think that. Mine certainly do, but then they were filling oil lamps and bringing the cow home as chores.
My kids lives are different from mine, too, much more organized and competitive. But, I think there are always fundamentals that don’t change and the challenge is to look for them. Often when you think through texting, or comicon, you can find analogies in our world.
LikeLike
Ian’s first music downloads have all been the music to video games, too. I’ve been meaning to do a post about teenagers and pop culture. Jonah doesn’t know a thing about any of the people at the VMAs. I know more about pop music than he does. He and his friends are totally into YouTube celebrities. Things we never heard of.
LikeLike
My kiddo loves to hear about the 80’s as ancient history. We watched the “Hey Mickey” video the other day (which, I think, looking at it, was actually taped on video). He asked how we watched those things in the old days without you tube (yes, those old days 9 years ago). And, he asked me if the other cheerleaders on the video were men. I guess cheerleaders look different now.
LikeLike
The same with my kids. I don’t like the youtube celebrity thing; some of them seem really awful to me.
Also, if my kids are anything like other kids (they probably aren’t, but if you look into all the cosplaying and the anime stuff going on I don’t know…), Japanese culture is going to be much, much, much more influential on U.S. culture in decades to come.
LikeLike
How exciting for Ian!
LikeLike
Laura said:
“Apparently Ian has a great deal of musical talent. We just figured this out. Oops. I’m dealing with it now. We’re signing him for all sorts of music lessons, including one place that specializes in teaching kids classic 80s rock. It puts them in a band after a few lessons.”
Oops indeed.
C is exactly the same age, I believe, and we just started her on guitar this summer. There were a number of weeks where I scheduled her for 3 30 minute lessons, which is a little nuts, but I wanted to see how far she could go going all out.
I can’t follow everything, never having had lessons myself, but she apparently really shines with regard to finger placement.
“To get Ian ready for the rock music school, we pulled out our old Who and Stones albums. And, yes, we still have albums. I surprised my husband by knowing all the words to Quadrophenia. Ian and I are listening to Queen right now.”
C’s guitar teacher asked her to choose a song to learn. She chose Scarborough Fair, which turns out to be really hard, but she’s picking it up, bit by bit. I got her a Simon and Garfunkel CD and I’ll probably get her Beatles stuff as she continues to work.
C’s teacher is a mellow Hispanic guy my age who has the great virtue of having four (FOUR!) daughters, 5-15. Mellow is really good for C. The teacher takes everything in stride, especially at the beginning where she was complaining a lot about fingers getting sore. He was really good about shifting between exercises to prevent too much wear and tear on the fingers.
The only thing is, heck if I know how we can afford $100 a month for guitar lessons. Goodbye, Starbucks–I’m going to miss you sooooo much!
LikeLike