musical education, pt. 2

Munchkin entered first grade at the height of the pandemic. Facing school closures and restrictive social bubbles, we homeschooled him for part of the year. Being the one to teach our little man to read and make sense of arithmetic remains one of D’s most rewarding parental memories. We never formally “game-schooled” — there is a movement that incorporates strategy games into homespun learning curricula — but we did (and still do) play a ton of board games with Munchkin, helping him develop logic and strategic thinking skills through gameplay. Had he been a little older, we may well have incorporated a song-based module into his curriculum as well. The little man is now approaching the end of fourth grade, and D’s music class is very much in session.

One of the challenges with living overseas is that certain gaps relative to what our kids might have learned in U.S. schools are inevitable. For example, Munchkin’s social studies classes over the last 2+ years have been conducted entirely in Spanish and have focused exclusively on Costa Rican history. He knows all about the battles of Rivas and Guanacaste, for instance, but remains hopelessly clueless about many basic tenets of U.S. and world history. Motivated initially by a desire to shape Munchkin’s musical taste, D has been pleasantly surprised to discover that some of his favorite artists provide a fun and potent remedy to Munchkin’s knowledge gaps.

For instance, one of Munchkin’s favorite bands right now is Rage Against The Machine. There are times when D simply cranks up the volume, and he and Munchkin rock out together, but just as often D pauses the songs to discuss their meaning. There have been hourlong car rides in recent months during which D and Munchkin only get through a couple of songs, spending the rest of the commute dissecting the lyrics. S set Munchkin up with a Spotify account, which helped accelerate this process, as the Munch likes to scroll through the lyrics while listening to his favorite tracks on repeat. Seeing him thus engrossed makes D think how the more things change, the more they stay the same: when D discovered rock music at roughly the same age, he used to study the liner notes that accompanied his cassettes, rewinding the tapes to repeat his favorite songs.

Of course, not every artist Munchkin enjoys merits such a close listen. And in some cases, the lyrics he has already committed to memory are ones whose meaning we’ll leave for him to discover on his own when he grows up a bit. For example, Munchkin loves Cypress Hill on par with RATM and frequently can be seen bopping his head while singing how he “won’t mess with the big 4-0,” how the “pigs wanna blow [his] house down,” and how he’ll “hit that bong and break you off something…like Louie Armstrong playing the trumpet.” He’ll be in for quite a surprise a few years down the road when the meaning behind these words suddenly comes into focus for him.

Among the joys of sharing one’s passion with one’s progeny is the ability to live vicariously and experience a slice of one’s youth anew. For D, this means not only rediscovering musicians he used to love but to whom he stopped listening ages ago, but also gaining a fresh perspective on once favorite songs. In some cases, this happens when Munchkin memorizes and then regurgitates song lyrics D never fully discerned in his youth. In other cases, this happens when D curates musical selections for Junebug, who at six is much further along her path of musical discovery than D was at her age.

For Junebug, who is drawn to danceable Latin/pop songs and D’s ska/punk collection in equal measure, D winds up playing a lot of female-fronted bands. The Loving Paupers, The Interrupters, Save Ferris, Sonic Boom Six, Rude Girl Revue, and the Fugees headline Junebug’s current playlist, which also features a heavy dose of singer/songwriters, such as Julieta Venegas, Hollie Cook, and Amy Winehouse. One of Junebug’s earliest questions when D started DJing for our kids was how many girls there were in each band D put on. Playing female artists is a strong way to answer the question behind this question — to underscore in a tangible way that girls can do anything boys can. It’s also given D a new appreciation for many artists to whom he listened but whom he didn’t properly hear in his angsty teenage years.