My parents’ earworms

From time to time I think how odd it is that my children listen to and enjoy my music, that their primary radio source (Radio Disney) consists primarily of remakes of songs from my early 20s, and that they have a strong appreciation for The Beatles, The Who and the Ramones. It’s part of what Bill Griffith long ago called “The Rock’n’Rollization of Everything” — although hip-hop has taken a stronghold in our culture, nothing has defined the last 50 years like rock’n’roll, and its vocabulary is as familiar to my kids as it was to me.

Not so my parents, despite their having been in their 20s during the ’60s. Mom proclaimed loudly and often at the time that she couldn’t stand noise and spent most of her driving time turning down the radio (while I spent most of her driving time turning it up). What little she did listen to was on the easy listening station (and I don’t think they’d even named it that yet.) There were some Johnny Mathis records. There was an affection for “Up Up and Away (In My Beautiful Balloon).” There was some unspeakably awful music from the other side of the Elvis gap played in our house.

My father expressed no musical preferences at all. There were some times when some country music came on the jukebox at the bar and he at least seemed to know it, and when I was older I introduced him to The Stones’ “Far Away Eyes,” available on jukeboxes as the flip side of “Miss You.”

But, in general, to get either of my parents to listen to anything I was interested in? Like pulling teeth, and even when they heard it, they weren’t listening. And the music of their generation? Hopeless. Like, for instance, Burt Bacharach, creator of some of the stickiest earworms of all time, and whose songs were among the few that I can actually remember my mother singing to herself.

Of course, time has proven me wrong on Mr. Bacharach, and the reason those songs stuck with me so often and so long was that they were so very perfect. Complete, musically interesting, lyrically just a little offbeat. They seemed so very much a part of their time, the late ’60s, and yet at the same time had nothing whatsoever to do with what was going on in the rest of the culture. (In fact, there were at least two different ’60s happening at the same time, perhaps more. Not everyone joined the revolution, and some, like my parents, were barely aware it was going on.)

Of course, there was the collaboration with Elvis Costello a couple of years back that really put Bacharach into perspective, and a couple of Aimee Mann songs that were clearly and openly meant to bring Burt to mind. And then the other night, in the middle of one of the Austin Powers movies and apropos of nothing, there were Elvis and Burt doing the sweetest version of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” I’ve ever heard. Unbelievable.

So maybe Mom knew something after all. And my daughter recognizes that Britney Spears’s music is crap, so my work is done.