It’s a universally held fact that music was better in the day. It doesn’t matter which day you’re talking about, it was just better. Our parents complained about the rubbish we listened to, and no doubt their parents did too, just as we think most of the guff our kids generation is in to is rubbish.
So, over dinner the other night, preempting the 10 year old’s any questions session, where he likes to go round the table and ask people an either/or question, I decided to ask the kids what their favourite song was.
The boy, aged 10
I was impressed. I thought he might go for some Nerdest (they do songs based on videogames and are particularly popular on YouTube) or some bloke in a white suit with a plastic bin on his head called Marshmello but he actually picked Wonderwall by Oasis. Wonderwall is 23 years old now, and if a ten year old me had to pick a 23 year old song, it would have been from 1962 and probably If I had a Hammer by Peter Paul and Mary.
Fifi, aged 9
I have to admit I had no idea what to expect from my daughter. She quite often puts on My Old Man’s a Dustman by Lonnie Donegan, and does a little dance to it. Equally she likes current pop and rock. She initially gave one song but then changed it to another, so I’m going to include both here.
Dido I can deal with in the sense that it’s a nice song. Bobby Vee’s Night of a Thousand Eyes though?! It turns out her granddad gave her an iPod Shuffle that had both songs on it and those are the two that she really liked. How awesome is that? Not least because the Bobby Vee video is a bit bonkers.
Ned, aged 6
Although Ned has now progressed to the “confident reader, aged 5-8” section of Waterstones, getting things like song titles out of him still remains a challenge. And it was no different here as his choice was “the song with an elephant in the video”. That doesn’t narrow it down much, so we had to fire up the TV and let him browse the YouTube music videos. Just as well we did as I’m not entirely sure we’d have got to Paradise by Coldplay on our own.
There is something very cool about hearing a 6 year old sing along to pop songs.
The runners up
We spent the rest of the evening playing our favourite songs on YouTube, taking it in turns to pick a song out and make everyone else listen to it.
The kids came up with some great songs:
- Bastille by Pompeii (or the aaaa,aaaa,aaaa song as Ned calls it)
- Symphony of Destruction by Megadeth (the boy was born to this, it’s his anthem)
- Wolves by Selma Gomez and Marshmello
- The Chain by Fleetwood Mac
- All the Small Things by Blink 182
And we had an entire evening without television!
The best thing about the whole impromptu music evening was the lack of really contemporary music, because lets face it, music today is rubbish…