Passing on the music you love to your children can be a challenging task sometimes. You want them to develop who they are independently, but if you love music, you have a deeply seeded desire for them to join you in what you love. Sometimes your kid loves something because you love it. Sometimes you genuinely love something because your kid loves it.
My kid is halfsies on the music I love. They rarely pass on a chance to listen to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away with Me” as we get on the I4 express lane, but they are also not interested in Neko Case. I took my kid to her elementary school dance, where the DJ said “I’m gonna play your parents’ favorite song!” and my child looked up at me, with such honesty and excitement, and shouted, “Tightly?! Tightly!?” which I have told her multiple times is my all-time favorite song. I had to laugh, imagining what an elementary school dance playlist centered around a 2002 Neko Case song would sound like.
I am very interested in how people hear music, especially now how children hear music. How they come to understand it. And how kids can still have anthems in an age where much of what they hear is in 15 second snippets that are audio filtered past almost all recognition. As mentioned, I teach elementary school, and I promise you that kids still have many songs they can sing all together, knowing every word, sharing a common experience in one of the most beautiful ways I can think of. And I promise it’s more than just “Baby Shark.”
My fifth graders this past school year, whom I loved dearly, had many synchronous jams in class to Rhianna’s “Diamonds” and thanks to the power of YouTube, TikTok, and Stranger Things, rocked eighties classics like Tears for Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God).”
My own kid hears currently hears music mostly through YouTube, and mostly through those fifteen second snippets. My child is brilliant & wonderful, and while I often say that sometimes kids have trouble defining what music they like, not to mention naming artists and song titles, my child can remember lyrics nearly perfectly after hearing a song only a few times. They can match pitch with tremendous accuracy and they know all about their favorite artists, currently including BlackPink and Olivia Rodrigo (with the natural smattering of TSwift in there). We buy CDs, both from our local store and for $0.50 at the library. We listen to the radio, and my kid complained for a few weeks that every time we turned on the radio, we heard Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em.”
One of my child’s favorite songs this year has been “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan. At the start of the year, I had no idea who he was, and was astonished to see his name as a headliner for at least one major summer festival. It seemed otherworldly to see a festival bill of Noah Kahan one night, Foo-Fighters in the same slot the next. In January, I finally heard “Stick Season” on the radio, and it caught my attention because it was the first ostensibly pop song that I heard to outright say “COVID.” It was refreshing, in part because it feels like our entire culture has collectively forgotten what we’ve all endured, and what our children have had to miss out on, because of the pandemic. To hear a young man sing about “COVID on the planes” on a Top 40 radio station in 2024 felt like the opposite of gaslighting.
I wasn’t about to go out and buy his t-shirt, but I really liked the song. I haven’t even listened to anything else of his. But Kahan isn’t mine. Like my child, I also love Olivia Rodrigo, and i know that elder millennials have staked claim to her music, although she is definitively Gen Z. But Kahan is indeed not mine. My generation had Dave Matthews, who I know to many music fans is still patently uncool but to many of my friends is still their absolute favorite. 40% of my primary group chat goes into a tizzy when DMB summer concert dates are announced each year. I’m okay with giving unto Gen Z, and more so, Gen Alpha and my kid, what is theirs and claiming what is mine.
However, we had a moment with Kahan in May. My kid was planning on singing “Stick Season” at an Orlando Girls Rock Camp open mic night. A couple of days before, I decided to burn another half day at work, sign my kid out early, and go pet stingrays at Sea World. My child had been going through it with a lot of things — social anxiety, school anxiety, and all of the extra stuff Gen Alpha will have to face that we never did. We needed the time & I was glad I did it.
On the ride home, we were listening to the radio and “Stick Season” came on. My kid had been singing it to me a lot, worrying about whether it would be okay to sing “drink alcohol” as a tween onstage. My child tends to look out the window on long car rides, looking at everything she can soak up about the landscape, and I wonder how they process it all. But when we heard “Stick Season,” instead of getting excited and squeeing over the song, I turned behind me to my child, and looked as she sang the song quietly under her breath. We listened to the song without speaking, without a loud singalong, just experiencing the song together, in the same space. A miniature phenomenological study.
I don’t know that I can possibly explain it fully, but listening to the words “my other half is you” with my child in the car, as they looked steadily forward and mouthed the lyrics, and sharing that experience, it felt like something had been passed on. But it was not me from me to her. It was from her to me. A love, a longing for life to begin, almost, was passed on to me in that moment, and we didn’t need anything else expressed except the simplicity of each other’s company.
For that I will always love this song. I hope that Noah Kahan does not turn out to be a scumbag, but even if he does, I’m grateful that my kid and I had that moment.
And yes, kid sang it onstage two days later, at a local venue, with a self-styled “y2k” hairdo, and did a wonderful job. I was a proud parent, but I was already a proud parent. And I hope everyone can experience musical bonding moments with their children in a similar way.