The Return of the Random Ten

Special Guest Randomizer Edition


All Kid Z wanted for Christmas was an I-Pod Nano. So she got one. I loaded about half its 2 Gig capacity with music before setting it under the tree. One of my computer mini-crashes disabled my MP3 program, so I've shuffled Z's Pod to bring back the ten on Fridays.


“Call Me Beep Me,” Christina Millan
“Fade into You,” Mazzy Star
”All for Swinging You Around,” The New Pornographers
“I Miss You,” Bjork
“Kissing the Lipless," the Shins
"Radio Free Europe," REM
"You’re Still Standing There," Steve Earle w/ Lucinda Williams
"Come Back to Me," Vanessa Hudgens
"The World at Large," Modest Mouse
"Maps," Yeah Yeah Yeahs

As you can see, I loaded some typical tween stuff (C. Millan, V. Hudgens.) I also gave her a bunch of songs she heard me play and liked (TNP, Shins) and, frankly, songs she should hear because I say it's good for her, dammit. I suspect I'm like many in my generation in wanting my daughter to have precociously cool music taste while bracing myself for some mass market monstrosity like the '07 version of the Spice Girls.

All this would have worked if we had gotten Z a shuffle. Wanna hear Ashley Tisdale? You gotta sit through this Otis Spahn song first. By the way, hear the way that propulsive piano line drives the song? That's Chess Blues, baby. But no, we got the nano. While I want her to learn to love Billie Holiday in the same way I want her to learn to love sauteed collard greens, she can skip right to her Hannah Montana dessert.

All of which has actually worked out better than I hoped. Her big thing is High School Musical now which, if you don't have a tween girl, Oh. My. God. But since HSM is structured as a classic movie musical, she's actually gaining some apppreciation for the form. Not that she's begging to rent, say South Pacific right now, but give it time.

Similarly, she's a little obsessed with the movie National Treasure. So much so that she asked to go to the National Archives to see the Declaration of Independence and spend her vacation money on her own copy at the museum store. But now it's gone beyond that thing that was in that movie. She read the display descriptions, and checked out the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta as well. In fact W overheard her tell a teacher it was her favorite part of the trip.

Plenty of teen/tween culture seems like total crap, but you never can tell when it will lead to something a little more real.