Coop's Listening Minutes

 

  

Usually around the three-month mark of the year I do my quarterly listening report. Well, I totally missed that one this time around. Been busy, as you might suspect. I do hope to do some kind of roundup, maybe not as detailed as usual.

Meanwhile I've been a whole lot less interested in what I'm listening to and a whole lot more interested in what Cooper's listening to. He's three months old, as of Thursday. So perhaps we ought to do a different kind of quarterly report.

As best I can tell, Coop's favorite song of ALL TIME is the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. He gets immeasurable pleasure when I sing it to him, and lately has tried his hand at singing along. He's got the words right; all he lacks is rhythm and tunefulness.

• Ennio Morricone: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Main Title)

For a while there Coop's fussier moments were alleviated by my singing the Lovin' Spoonful's "Rain on the Roof" or the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love." Lately though one of us, I'm not sure who, has grown tired of those songs.

• The Lovin' Spoonful: Rain on the Roof

Coop's latest favorite—rivaling the Morricone—is Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer." We discovered this when some moaner on American Idol took it upon himself to butcher the song into a kind of tortured Nickleballad. Still, the Idol version did enough to put the song in our heads and we started singing it to Cooper. He seems to especially like it when we simulate the booming drums in between all the "Lie-la-lie"s.

• Simon & Garfunkel: The Boxer

We've got an unspoken rule—actually we've spoken this rule a couple of times—that we don't really want to subject ourselves to actual children's music until we absolutely must. And yet we both skirt that rule in strangely contrarian ways. My wife likes to sing "Surfin' Bird," which is stupidly hypnotic and ever repeating and usually hilarious. I like to sing "Witch Doctor" ("Ooh-eee, ooh-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla bing bang"). Somehow these songs are more palatable than Old McDonald.

 

 

Then there are all the fragments of songs and stray lines that seem to crop up with some frequency. When he has gas I like get all Fugee and say "How many farts do we rip on the daily?". When he's got a particularly dirty diaper my Baha Wife inevitably asks "Who let the poops out? Coop, Coop, Coop." When he's being kind of a punk I tell him he's getting "buddy buddy buddy all up in my face."

• Tribe Called Quest: Award Tour
• Fugees: How Many Mics

Comments

[Richard]

Cool. Though I gotta say, children's music gets a bad rap, I think. Raffi, of all people, isn't so bad.

[wifey]

for the record, neither "surfin bird" nor "witch dr." are actual children's songs! just goofy oldies.