Who says today’s kids don’t have good taste in music?

Our guest poster today is the lovely Devilish Southern Belle. With a tagline like Housework! Teenagers! Rock and Roll!, you know she’s a mama after my own heart. (Except for the housework thing…I’m trying, but man, there’s Twitter!)

In other interweb news, this little corner of cyberspace is now on Alltop Music. I know, it’s very weird. This means I have to write about music more. I can do that.:)

All right, you all know I’m hiding with my laptop, so I’m going to turn this baby over to DSB. Thanks again so much to the three lovely ladies who shared their worlds with us this week…Faith, Susan, and Kim, You Rock. I’m back to my world and posting on Monday.

xoxo, L

I think it’s safe to say that my children began rockin’ out while still in the womb.

When I became pregnant with my first son, grunge was just coming to the forefront of popular music, and industrial was the new alternative. I loved it all! He gestated to the likes of Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, all my old favorite hair bands and 80s metal, classic rock, some blues, and quite a bit of Danzig, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. I just knew that my son was going to enter this world throwing the horns! Well, he didn’t do that, but he did come out using a powerful set of lungs which rivaled anything I’d ever heard at any rock show I’d been to. And believe me, I’d been to a lot!

By the time I became pregnant with my second son, which was not long after my first son’s birth, motherhood had calmed me down just a teensy bit. We (that would be me, my then-husband, and the kids) had also moved back to my hometown, where not many people, even folks our age and younger, listened to much rock music anymore. Yes, I know…what is this world coming to? By default, we heard a lot of the ‘new’ country. To my surprise, some of it I actually liked! So in addition to all the things my first son got to hear while still in utero, my youngest son got to hear the likes of Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn, and a bit of Alan Jackson. And I rediscovered my early, early childhood love of OLD country.

As my boys grew older, they pretty much loved all my favorite music. By the time they were three or four, they were requesting to hear (much to my delight) the Ramones, Willie Nelson, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Alice in Chains. A mama couldn’t have been more proud! I could take my kids just about anywhere they played music and they would impress the adults by knowing the words to the songs most kids didn’t. I’m sure some would call that a lapse in parental judgement given the lyrics to some of the songs. But at the time, the boys were young and didn’t know what lyrics meant. And they didn’t utter one word of profanity if there were any in the songs.

As they grew, all our musical tastes expanded. They were finding their way, starting to be influenced by popular radio and what their friends were listening to, and forming their own opinions about what music is good and what isn’t. The boys and I no longer liked all the same things. That’s okay. No two people like exactly the same things, so I had expected this at some point.

That point for us came when they reached the preteen years, and is continuing to this day. As for my influence on their musical tastes? It’s definitely still there. Sure, they may hate Type O Negative (which breaks my heart!) and I may hate most hip-hop, but we still have a lot of common musical ground. In fact, I couldn’t even list all the music that we all love! Yep. Overall, my kids have great taste in music!