From "Keep yourself alive" to "Everything at once"
Or how to escape Rhymeland!
My daughter was no different from other toddlers. Endless replays of Cocomelon songs meant I used to often catch myself humming those tunes.
To break the monotony, I did try to get her hooked to other music. She took a liking to Naadan Parindey from Rockstar.
The pandemic struck a few months later. Being locked up at home with busy parents meant a lot more TV and a lot more Cocomelon!
There were 3 other older kids on the floor, all sub-12 years old back then. I instituted some music and dance time and started playing songs by Queen and a few other bands.
The song we kept repeating a lot was “Keep Yourself Alive”. It turned into a pandemic anthem for us!
My daughter kept asking me why he had to take his shirt off! But I am proud to say that I turned them into fans of Queen. One of the other kids soon started Ukulele classes and this may have played a small part in it!
But there were other forces at play. The oldest girl in group introduced them to Taylor Swift, Katy Perry (A lot of booming Rooooaaaaaarrrrrs!) and K-Pop.
Soon BTS took over the playlist! Dynamite anyone?
On one particular 10-hour drive to Goa, we listened to Stay Gold some 23,951 times! At one point I was wondering if sticking with Cocomelon would have been better.
She would sing along in almost-perfect Korean! Note to self: The world underestimates soft power.
So overall, BTS has beaten Queen for my daughter, but we took a few detours along the way.
We had a pit stop with sea shanties. We started with Wellerman (the Nathan Evans version) well before it became a craze on Insta Reels.
But Drunken Sailor was the initial favourite for repeat listening! I had to answer questions like what does “Shave his belly with a rusty razor” mean!
Later on she moved on to The Last Shanty. This is a song about all the ways in which “A sailor aint a sailor aint a sailor any more”. It is a lament for the disappearing of the old ways and an ad for the coolness of new technology, sometimes in the same line!
Somewhere along the way, I introduced her to a couple of songs from Iron Maiden, Fear of the Dark and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. She managed some sing-along vocals for these as well.
She would stare at the cover art as it played on the TV. I don’t think her nightmare rate changed much though!
She got into music and dance classes at school a few months ago. She learnt a neat piece of choreoraphy set to Can’t Stop the Feeling. She danced to this number at my cousin’s wedding!
And then one day, when driving in the car, she asked for a song called “Everything”. It took a while for us to nail it down. Everything at Once, by Lenka. She presumably learned this at school.
It is funky and decribes an existential crisis! So this time, I was the one taken in by the song. The style and the music were not my type but the writing hit close.
Right now, we have stumbled onto the confidence boosting, Unstoppable. I turn to it in about half of my solo drives as well!
The YouTube algorithm inevitably plays Thunder by Imagine Dragons soon after. This one we have repurposed for reading time!
Whoever is reading a “somewhat” rhyming word (like wonder or hunger) would just sing it in “Thunder, Thu..thu..thu.. thunder thunder” style!