Tuplets for Toddlers

April 21, 2023 5:41 AM

SLTwitter from Robert Komaniecki: "I teach college music theory, but I'm also a new dad. I decided to combine my professional and personal identities and make a thread of music for babies where the adult musicians went way, way harder than they had to."
posted by itsatextfile (42 comments total)

Threadreader version.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 5:56 AM on April 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Re Tuplets for Toddlers: I love this video where the various Youtube music luminaries who contributes tracks, are exposed to each other's contributions for the first time - Adam Neely compares. No toddlers have been apparently been consulted to opine on the merits of a 5/3 poly-rhythmic rendition of Incy Wincy Spider
posted by rongorongo at 6:15 AM on April 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Number 4 is, famously, Nyango Star, a mascot character for the city of Kuroishi, it's not a kid's character, and It's Supposed To Do That. It is kind of a tortured pun: 'ringo' is the Japanese word for apple, and it's an apple-growing region, Ringo Starr is the famous drummer for the Beatles, and 'nyan' is the Japanese for 'meow', so: it's a cat-apple mascot that is a god on the drums.

Why did they add the cat aspects? Well, I'll tell you:

...I don't know.
posted by Merus at 6:22 AM on April 21, 2023 [23 favorites]

I think it's an old Schopenhauer quote that "Talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one else can see", but Raymond Scott was one of these people aiming for targets it might be years before anyone else realized might exist.
posted by mhoye at 6:24 AM on April 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

That Thomas theme song is an absolute banger, which was good because there was a roughly three month period when Kid Machine was uninterested in hearing anything else in the car.
posted by joyceanmachine at 6:33 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm smiling, just imagining little kids all over the country going into their parents' rooms or their classrooms the next day and mimicking the Patti LaBelle ABCs song.

Also that wolf in #3, I want to buy his albums. Wow.
posted by martin q blank at 6:37 AM on April 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Mr. Rogers: Just some light jazz for outro music for the kids, please
Johnny Costa: Go completely apeshit on a transcendent piano solo? You got it

I have a 5 year old who was obsessed with Mr Rogers for a solid year. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The Mr Rogers studio musicians had to perform everything LIVE, and every episode was tightly choreographed and filmed live, one take. These guys were seasoned pros from the beginning, they had to be. And yeah, pretty much every Mr. Rogers song has a section for a piano solo, and some of those solos are just bonkers. Shockingly good stuff, just hiding in the middle of a song about how sometimes you don’t want to brush your teeth.
posted by Doleful Creature at 6:37 AM on April 21, 2023 [29 favorites]

The Wheels on the Bus but make it reggaeton <3
Seriously these are all great. I know nothing about music theory but love this kind of glimpses into it.
posted by evilmomlady at 6:38 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I still (gently) rock this honestly fantastic album of child-friendly instrumental NIN covers
posted by FatherDagon at 6:41 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I need to dig back into Chromeo's discography a bit. I'd like to be able to categorize them as consummately wholesome, but so many of their songs are squarely about being horny that I need to doublecheck.
posted by neuracnu at 6:48 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

every episode was tightly choreographed and filmed live, one take.

What!? Seriously?
posted by mhoye at 7:02 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Underdog theme is a classic example of "much better than it needed to be" kids' music. The chorus makes it sound epic.
posted by PlusDistance at 7:05 AM on April 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

That Thomas theme song is an absolute banger

It segues perfectly into “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder!
posted by gauche at 7:16 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Comment removed. Per the Guidelines "Be considerate and respectful". There's no need to admonish people to stop using Twitter.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:20 AM on April 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Love this!
posted by praemunire at 7:25 AM on April 21, 2023

Patti Labelle still did the KLMNOP letter. No no no. Kids think that is all one letter, usually named LMNOP, but again going hard, Labelle added the K.

I'd stan for the '80s tv show theme songs - they ruled, often better than the shows were.

The one I straight-up disagree with is the Fall-Out Boy Spiderman. It's terrible.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:27 AM on April 21, 2023

A friend of mine found that Soothing Sounds for Baby is actually a trilogy of 1962 minimalist electronica albums. "An infant's friend in sound". Rumors that this album is actually Charanjit Singh working under an assumed name could not be confirmed.

It's nice to see Thread Reader App working again. Apparently it got unsuspended after Twitter destroyed its API program although it's not at all clear how long that might last.
posted by Nelson at 7:46 AM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

...okay, that "Big Bad Wolf" song is now STUCK IN MY HEAD.
posted by praemunire at 7:56 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Silversher & Silversher had some real bangers: Tailspin, Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers, Gummibears… epic discography.
posted by Headfullofair at 8:06 AM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Blippi's early stuff where he collaborated with Nickie Notes blows it out of the park, too. Blippi doesn't sing, don't worry.

I recommend Firetruck. Boats is also great.
posted by keep_evolving at 8:08 AM on April 21, 2023

I'd stan for the '80s tv show theme songs - they ruled, often better than the shows were.

Charles Cornell on the G1 Transformers theme
posted by praemunire at 8:16 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is one of those truths that the internet periodically discovers. Kids love music that goes hard. It's not "going way harder than it needs to", this is how hard you have to go to stand out in kids music.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:28 AM on April 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

the works of Raymond Scott were not in fact created by Raymond Scott, but by another man of the same name

he's been using the stage name "Brian Eno" for a while now
posted by echo target at 8:30 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

this is how hard you have to go to stand out in kids music.

But a lot of this kind of children's programming is, how shall I put it, a commodity. Filling up the time around commercials so Mom can take a shower in peace. Maybe slightly less egregiously so than in the 80s, but still. It's mostly not lovingly hand-crafted gesamtkunstwerk. So it's unexpected to find the frustrated artist breaking out in the interstices.
posted by praemunire at 8:36 AM on April 21, 2023

Ctrl-F Ozomatli.

WHAT? Nothing? Yo - time to leave the Balloon Fest, there's a Moose on the Loose

(Also glad to see that TMBG got their due in the rest of the thread.)
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 8:37 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

The underdog theme is also what Rza sampled for "wu tang clan ain't nothing to fuck with"
posted by lkc at 9:18 AM on April 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I know the whole thing about the Bluey theme being weird rhythmically... but is it really a bar of 5/4, or a bar of 4/4 with a fermata? (Sometimes I will ponder this every seven minutes or so for an hour.)

Also here's Row Row Row Your Boat in 4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 6/8, 12/8, 5/4, 5/8, 10/4, 7/4, 7/8, 9/4, 9/8, 11/8, and 13/8. I'm not going to opine on which one is right.
posted by madcaptenor at 9:18 AM on April 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's weird that the Pointer Sisters's Number Song isn't included in this list. Maybe it's so obvious that including it would just be a waste of time? Musicians spend entire, fruitful careers trying and failing to achieve even one tenth of the funkiness of that song.
posted by saladin at 9:37 AM on April 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

NRBQ sneaks in some lovely chord changes in Always Safety First.
posted by kurumi at 9:42 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Adam Neely on what the time signature of the Bluey theme song is (YouTube).

"4/4 with a fermata" is the analysis that makes the most sense to me, but I only took a semester of high school music theory, so I'm not the person to ask.
posted by Jeanne at 10:14 AM on April 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

there’s even an in-depth YouTube video about how hard the Thomas the Train Engine them song goes, if you really want to nerd out.
posted by KGMoney at 10:19 AM on April 21, 2023

Iceland has a tradition of children's music that goes unnecessarily hard, e.g. five kids' albums appeared on a list of the hundred best Icelandic albums that was made in 2009. For instance, to name one disc from 1977 that gets spun quite often in my household, Lög unga fólksins (e. The Songs of the Young People) by Hrekkjusvín (e. Bullies) was written by two of the main folk-rock musicians of the 70s, Valgeir Guðjónsson and Leifur Hauksson, with texts by poet and novelist Pétur Gunnarsson. That last bit is crucial, because Pétur wrote the lyrics first and sent them by post to the musicians. The texts didn't really fit any traditional music structures, so they had to come up with fairly strange musical settings, but absolutely went with it. They also called in all their friends to play the music, so it all sounded good, but if you think too much about the musical structure you get a headache. Kids love it, mind you.

I live in Finland, so we listen to a lot of Finnish kids music, and the Finns absolutely go way harder than they have any need to. Hirsilaulu is a traditional Finnish children's song, and here it is played by the widely beloved Mimmit group, whose version slowly morphs into a freakfolk dissonancefest before ending reasonably normally. This is probably the most extreme they've gotten, but in general it's worth perusing their catalog for awesome children's music.
posted by Kattullus at 11:42 AM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Kids love music that goes hard.

"You could lose your purse, or you could lose something worse on the subway"
posted by The Bellman at 11:43 AM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think it's an old Schopenhauer quote that "Talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one else can see", but Raymond Scott was one of these people aiming for targets it might be years before anyone else realized might exist.

I first learned about these Raymond Scott albums in the 1990s from Incredibly Strange Music, Volume 1. To be more specific, I learned it from the interview in the book with Mickey McGowan, whom I later learned was the first person to be interviewed in the book. If I recall correctly, Mickey remembered how he acquired his first copy of one of these Raymond Scott records & actually found several typewritten pages from a prior owner inserted in the LP jacket about how this music was simply too good and too sophisticated to be wasted on infants alone.

When I moved to the Bay Area for grad school, I got to meet Mickey McGowan in real life at area record shows & he is probably the most formative influence on my musical taste ever. He got me interested in so many different things--exotica, lounge music, beatniksploitation, psychsploitation, soundtracks, spy jazz, ambient music, bird calls, cartoon music--but children's music was a major part of that too. Sparky's Magic Piano was a major discovery of that time, with its talking keyboard anticipating the era of vocoders and even autotune.

One reason that children's music can go so hard and so weird is that children's music is primarily composed by adults, but because they're adults, they're no longer a child any more. The basic idea is that you are composing for an audience that is completely alien to what your experiences are like now. It's like composing for space aliens. But when a composer just somehow gets back into the mental space of childhood, there can be so much creativity there that the probability is higher that the end product will be good.

Better yet, children can be a remarkably receptive audience for avant-garde musical ideas, because they don't have preconceived notions or rules about what music should and shouldn't be yet. And since they're not adolescents yet, they haven't gotten into cliques about where you pretend about what music you like to get along & they can just get into what they like at that moment. I remember going to an exhibit about Dadaism at one of the museums at Washington DC, where I saw a completely mechanical performance of George Antheil's "Ballet Mechanique" performed by no human hands. I thought it was amazing, but what I loved even more is that I was watching this 10-year-old sitting in lotus position on the floor & I could practically see how his mind was being blown sky high by this performance. You could see the lightbulb go off and the wheels turn inside his head: "You mean, music and art can be loud and disruptive!" That's awesome.

Play some musique concrete to your parents or grandparents & they might not get it. Play some musique concrete to an 10-year old boy or your 8-year old niece & you may be surprised that they totally get it.
posted by jonp72 at 12:26 PM on April 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Kids absolutely love music that goes hard but they also sometimes hate it. My oldest, as a toddler, would just have me put on "Ace of Spades" on repeat and run in circles until she was worn out. But try and put on some Ornette Coleman for these philistines? Cue the waterworks. Three kids in my house and they all loathe free jazz.
posted by potrzebie at 3:39 PM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

the Finns absolutely go way harder than they have any need to
And now I know the provenance of Iiro Rantalaʻs genius -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bdSfmYdJ8o

As my wife remarked, the winters are long and dark in Finland.
posted by Droll Lord at 3:40 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

That Chromeo clip is from Yo Gabba Gabba!, a kids’ show that existed solely to answer the question, “What if a kids’ show went endlessly hard?” Animation about a character designed by Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer? Mark Mothersbaugh doing segments in which he draws? Biz Markie teaching kids to beatbox? Jack McBrayer and Paul Scheer telling knock-knock jokes? Chromeo being on that show is the tiny tip of a deep, deep iceberg.

Our youngest kid has little memory of watching it, despite being obsessed with it. We recently showed them a clip of it and it blew their mind.
posted by sgranade at 8:33 PM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Basically most of the Backyardigans, since Evan Lurie from the Lounge Lizards was in charge of it. The song castaways has had a lot of love not long ago.
posted by umbú at 9:14 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Am I the only person who thinks The Doodlebops were way better than they had to be?
posted by mikelieman at 5:05 AM on April 22, 2023

Pretty much all of Phineas & Ferb's music, ranging from homages to Busby Berkeley musicals to a pastiche of the Lovin' Spoonful, is written by Bowling for Soup.
posted by jonp72 at 3:06 PM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Pretty much all of Phineas & Ferb's music, ranging from homages to Busby Berkeley musicals to a pastiche of the Lovin' Spoonful, is written by Bowling for Soup.

Bowling for Soup performed the theme song, which was written — along with almost all of the other songs in the show — by show creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh (and their friends).
posted by Etrigan at 3:58 PM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Phineas and Ferb committed to a musical number of some kind in nearly every episode, which you can only do if you have a songwriter on staff, and you probably want a couple.
posted by Merus at 7:38 PM on April 22, 2023