Raw Thoughts

This is a great article talking about a family that incorporates music into their lives. Just don’t be surprised if you go to make a mix-tape for the kids and they have no idea what that means. Classic.
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The marketers behind the Fresh Beat Band, a quartet whose music videos air before episodes of “Dora the Explorer” on Nick Jr., know what they’re doing. My young children have memorized the words to “Here We Go.” I find myself singing it quietly to myself at work. My husband considers it a personal failure that our kids know Twist, Marina, Shout and Kiki but not John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Music matters to Joe and me, and we have put time and thought into exposing our children to the lyrics and tunes that have created the soundtrack of our lives, together and alone. When each of the kids was an infant, Joe made them bedtime mixes that we would play at night, and still do. Our son now loves Ray Charles and Feist. Our daughter can’t fall asleep without listening to “Woody Guthrie’s American Song.”

A few weeks ago, we were all in the kitchen hurrying about before work and school. I had turned on the television to distract the kids while I made them breakfast and lunches. From the show “Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!” I heard the strains of the song “Imagine,” with its lyrics, “Imagine yourself in a castle in the sky/Where polka dot rabbits know how to fly.” (Wubbzy has got some serious chutzpah: Imagine naming a song “Imagine”!)

“Do you think this junk will one day be fodder for our marriage mix tape?” Joe said as he loaded up his briefcase.

This managed to interrupt my son’s tunnel-vision television focus: “What’s a mix tape?” he asked.

If you have kids, you know who these guys are. You won’t find them on Raw Talent Guitar or any other guitar learning program,  but who knows what the future holds for them?

The Fresh Beat Band