Tunes that won’t alienate your kids
Five rules for creating a playlist for the moments between web surfing, video games and movies
In the era of iPhones, laptops, portable PlayStations and in-car Blu-ray players, you’d think music would be the least important distraction on a family road trip. Instead, it’s just the opposite. While those devices contribute to the preservation of your sanity, they also mute the communal aspect of a family road trip.
Here are five rules to creating a playlist to fill the gaps between web surfing and movies you can only see
from the backseat. 1. Trust the pros: Rather than trying to convince your 8-year-old of the genius of They Might Be Giants’ “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” consult someone who’s made millions from identifying which adult songs appeal to children.
With almost 30 volumes behind it, Kidz Bop — the series featuring kids performing the hits of the day — has an unerring knack for spotting music that will, at the very least, be tolerated by more than one age group.
Volumes 27 and 28 hold down two of the top three spots on Billboard’s kids-album chart. No. 29, due this month, includes a pint-sized version of one of the songs of the summer, “Shut Up and Dance.” The grown-up original, by Walk The Moon, is a good place to kick off your road-trip soundtrack. 2. Go to the movies: There probably isn’t a parent on the planet who’d want to be trapped in an enclosed space with a copy of “Let It Go” from Frozen and a child who knows about the “repeat” button.
There is, however, Guardians of the Galaxy, which introduced millions of pre-teens to the Jackson 5 (“I Want You Back”) and Blue Swede (“Hooked on a Feeling”). And few things say “family road trip” more memorably than a car full of people chanting “ooga-chakka.”
Another cinematic possibility: Furious 7’ s poignant “See You Again,” whose “family’s all that we got” refrain is tailor-made for those delightful 100-kilometre interludes when somebody isn’t talking to somebody else.
In fact, someone has actually uploaded a one-hour loop of the song to YouTube, perhaps for this very purpose. 3. Avoid Billy Joel: “It goes without saying that you have to prepare music for the road trip. And it really doesn’t matter what that music is . . . As long as it’s not Billy Joel.” That’s No. 3 on comedy writer Sam Green- span’s list of “11 Things That Will Kill Your Road Trip.”
It’s also not really a knock against Joel. It’s just that, outside of most of his hits, Joel’s music can be kind of depressing.
Or, as Greenspan puts it, “You can’t sing along to him, you can’t bounce to him . . . you have to just sit there and listen like you’re being sung to by a professor reading from his mostly boring memoirs.”
All of which is a long way of saying, avoid loading up your travelling soundtrack with multiple songs by your favourite artist.
No other member of your family is likely to appreciate your fixation. 4. Resort to the instant singalong: The most popular singalong songs, according to science, are Queen’s “We Are the Champions” and the Village People’s “YMCA.” (This would apply, by the way, to bars, where scientists apparently prefer to conduct such research.)
But if you’d like to venture beyond the obvious (not to mention into this century), “Wagon Wheel,” an ode to spontaneous travel, is the ideal springboard.
Born in the early-’70s as an unfinished Bob Dylan song, it was completed by Old Crow Medicine Show and subsequently covered by everyone from Darius (Hootie) Rucker to Irish heartthrob Nathan Carter to Brit collective Mumford & Sons.
Take your pick. 5. Pander to your pet: When all else fails, program for your pet. And by pet, we really mean dog, since cats couldn’t care less what you do at home, let alone what music you choose for a road trip.
If you believe “dog whisperer” Cesar Millan, the music dogs actually prefer includes seagulls, frogs, the wind and “the sound of food when falling on a plate.”
Assuming you’re even less inclined to listen to that than to a couple of hours of Billy Joel, there’s always Elvis’s “Hound Dog” or, for more adult tastes, the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
We would add Cat Stevens’ seemingly innocuous “I Love My Dog,” in which the future Yusuf Islam declares, “I love my dog as much as I love you/But you may fade, my dog will always come through.”
Hopefully you won’t be singing the same tune by trip’s end.