"Childlike" Music

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I dig Nobukazu Takemura in a big way, but I think the 3rd comp. of his Childisc label went too far in trying to capture/emulate that "childlike" quality. For example, the first track (don't know the artist, sorry) is interesting thru its first half, but then a 3-year old girl starts singing this lullyby thing & it gets to be too too much.

So...

Do you enjoy music that evokes sounds/feelings/sensations/attitudes of childhood? I'm not talking about music FROM your childhood here, but music that uses the signifiers of that outlook (think of J-Pop, Slabco, BoC-style IDM, music box melodies, etc.) What do you like or dislike about music with these qualities?

― Mark, Thursday, 8 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

God bless the new answers that got their own.

― Mark, Thursday, 8 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Rap maybe hasn't explored its kiddie potential enough. (More likely scenario: I'm just not hearing it.) "Double Dutch Bus," early Tom Tom Club (er, sort of in the game), Nelly definitely...surely there's more?

― scott woods, Thursday, 8 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i wish idm would go more towards invoking emotions i actually relate to.

― ethan, Thursday, 8 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I remember having a category called "kiddie music" several years back. Some of the Egyptian "New Sound" (Hanan, Amro Diab, Ihab Tewfic, etc.) music that I have put down in other threads would class under that, and I did like it when I first started listening. It's very bouncy, and I think the clapping in it somehow made me thinking of children's music. Also, for some reason it always made me think of puppets. I think it would make a great sound-track for a puppet show, with lots of clapping little puppets.

I always thought the Fred Frith song "Cap the Knife" (off "Cheap at Half the Price") sounded like kiddie music, maybe because of the Casio 101 used. On the other hand, it seems to be a song about using a dog to kill the president. Kind of strange, actually. On the one hand, the sound is very "kiddie," but there are also lots of samples in it of Ronald Reagan dishing out pompous presidential rhetoric ("a force for good. . .").

Sorry if this is not exactly what you're looking for. I am not familiar with the artists you mention (except BoC).

― DeRayMi, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I always thought that Moe Tucker's albums sounded like "Schoolhouse Rock"....

(And I love Moe's records - don't get me wrong.)

― Dave225, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Rap maybe hasn't explored its kiddie potential enough.

Who wants to hear some five year old boast about how many hoes he's pimpin' and how much his glock makes his pocket sag.

It was bad enough that Old Skull bent punk into unpleasant shapes by singing about "the worst hot dog in 10 million billion years!"

― Lord Custos, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Yeah. I love all those Rave Tunes that sampled theme tunes from SESAME STREET, RAINBOW, etc. Cool things, even though I will only ever admit it online.

― Kodanshi, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Don't forget Hard Knock Life.

― Sterling Clover, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Not Rave!!!

― Kodanshi, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

happy freakin' hardcore

― M. Matos, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Abba

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Jonathan Richman. Every LP past the first Modern Lovers has been full of childlike stuff, most successfully on the JR and the ML.

― nickn, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i still think jad fair rules despite numerous faux pas. and bogdan racyzinski is better than everyone gives him credit for . and daniel johnson.

― bob snoom, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Who wants to hear some five year old boast about how many hoes he's pimpin' and how much his glock makes his pocket sag.

Presumably quite a few people, if Lil' Romeo's success is any indication.

― Tim, Friday, 9 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Though hasn't Lil Romeo's "success" been rather, er, short-lived?

― scott woods, Saturday, 10 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Belle & Sebastian strike me as quite childlike.

― Maria, Saturday, 10 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Check out http://www.jackdiamond.com/cant_define.html "sounds for little ones." They recorded sounds from a theme park called Children's Fairyland & ice cream trucks, etc.

I am sick of the "child-woman" thing played up in Bjork reviews.

― 1 1 2 3 5, Saturday, 10 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

"Skipping" by the Associates: after the hysteria of "Nude Spoons", Billy's inner child comes through.

― Robin Carmody, Saturday, 10 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I didn't have a proper childhood so I'm always trying to 'engineer' a false one into my sense of history. So, I appreciate music that can do it good, and I'd say Tyrannosaurus Rex and Daniel Johnston do it. The Shaggs. Maybe only Tyrannosaurus Rex, cause the other two I named do the kind of childlike stuff that relates to the complete openness and simultaneous be alert and watch out quality of the childhood I already had. Shonen Knife, Beat Happening, bands like that are aiming to hard to really get it, it has to be incidental I'd say. "Aiming" for a childlike quality is too brutal.

― maryann, Saturday, 10 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

does anyone remember the happy flowers? they were good. grown men (paediatric nurses, if i remember)playing punk and metal incredibly badly as if they were children. lyrics like "danny pushed me in the puddle" "why can't we eat the baby?" etc etc sung as if they were killdozer - somehow these guys got really overlooked. revisiting childhood without the rose tinted specs

― bob snoom, Sunday, 11 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

That's a little frightening. The "why can't we eat the baby" bit, anyway.

― Maria, Sunday, 11 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Why can't we eat the baby-that's excellent.

― Lindsey B, Monday, 12 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

"i ate something out of the medicine cabinet" ah! thass another goodun. i'll have to dig out the tapes on these guys - such fond memories...

― bob snoom, Monday, 12 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Actually, instead of listing songs that seem childlike, I was curious to hear about your own reactions to this sort of music. Does it make you nostalgic for childhood? Do you mourn a childhood you never had? Does it disgust you that adults seem so fixated on that stage (as I believe Michaelangelo may have indicated in another thread)? And what's up with Japan?

Thanks for the references, though.

― Mark, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

mark...i just bought the new takemura cd used last night so i was mulling over this question a bit...i'm quite a sucker for this sort of thing i.e. "naieve" melodies, child-like qualities in electronic music...whar simon reynolds very aptly described as "those almost out of body experiences--a mysticism of the commonplace, the poetry of the municipal... reveries of parks, walkways, and concrete overpasses, playgrounds with fresh rain on the swings and slides, housing estates with identical backgardens and young mothers pegging wet shirts on a windflapped clothing line, clouds skidding across a cold blue March sky... saplings neatly plotted in canalside recreation areas.... lamposts dimly gleaming through fog..." i can't honestly do better than that (at least this early in the morning, natch), but that's precisely what so much of this music calls up for me as well...it's intensely nostaglic...volk muzak for the commodore 64 generation...boards of canada (whom reynold's was describing) are the most a/effective for me...it's highly manipulative, yes, but oddly unbothersome in this context...perhaps because instead of tugging at the sort of noxious relationship fodder of most indie rock or other things i hate to "identify" with, it's tapping into some of my most precious, jumbled, and clouded memories...traces of tv melodies, filmstrip soundtracks, commercial jingles, toy instruments, storytime 45s on a fisher price record player...i don't know what emotions ethan is exactly looking for in idm, but these are about some of the only ones i can actually identify with, rather than stuttering digital blather of autechre, et al...

― jess, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

very succinct.

― bob snoom, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

that reads really sarcastic. not meant really sarcastic. maybe shoul've posted "ditto" or not at all. at such a loose end just wasting my time on this bleedin calculator television thing.

― bob snoom, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

jess, i'm down wit da boc, but (for this poster) autechre's "pir" manages to conjure the wistful, confused, faded memories of early childhood in a way that's devoid of boc's 'manipulative' ways (bothersome or no)(ps. i also say no). just so ya know it's not all stuttering digital blather (though i like stuttering digital blather.)

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

and bogdan racyzinski rocks.

― bob snoom, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Maybe its a little too obvious, but what about the White Stripes? Jack seems obsessed with early childhood as is evidenced by songs like "Suzy Lee" and other grade-school anthems. I guess they could be lumped in as another band "aiming too hard to really get it" like Shonen knife, but I think it is a little indicative of Jack's mental state.

― Ian M, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

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