RUINING music for your children with terrible songs at formative moments is an important part of parenting. How did your parents do it?
New age music for important conversations
Meeting your dad’s new, younger girlfriend to the tones of Enya’s Orinoco Flow was probably intended to be soothing but instead left you with a virulent hatred of anything ‘spiritual’, as well as a festering dislike of your stepmum that continues to this day.
Folk music for Sunday evenings
Sunday evenings were made infinitely worse with the addition of the kind of folk music where every stringed instrument in existence is being played at once. For your parents it recalled the mellow days before Dylan went electric and they smoked jazz cigarettes. For you, it was tantamount to child abuse.
Classic rock on long car journeys
Every car journey would be soundtracked by Fleetwood Mac with your dad drumming on the steering wheel like a tenth-rate Phil Collins. Now you are old enough to realise Rumours is a classic, but can’t listen to it without flashbacks to the existential ennui of a Saturday afternoon spent in Homebase.
Jazz music in the evenings
Before you were allowed out, you had to listen to whatever your parents played to lay the groundwork for the sex at least one of them was hoping to have that night. If this was jazz, you are probably disturbed enough to have a therapist on speed dial.
No music
If you grew up in a house where the Archers’ theme tune was the closest you came to music, then your parents’ tuneless world was the ultimate sacrifice they made. Unfortunately, you are now f**king up your children instead by putting on Born Slippy and raving around the kitchen.
