So it’s pretty obvious at this point that I’ve been unable to keep this up on a daily or even weekly basis. We play records almost every day, but with both of us working and trying to fumble our way into competent parenthood, it’s been hard to find time consistently to reflect and to write. So I’m going to mess with the format a little bit.  I’d prefer to write more consistently and sacrifice some depth, at least for some of the entries. Time is passing by quickly, and our daughter is changing a little bit every day, and I don’t want to miss the opportunity to document experiences that will then be gone forever.

Hitchcock is a prolific singer/songwriter who first released records with the Soft Boys in the late 70’s, and followed up with a couple of solo records before teaming up with two ex-Soft Boys to form Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians. “Fegmania,” their first album, is a psychedelic alt-pop masterpiece. Aside from the fact that this record is full of truly strange and idiosyncratic pop gems, it’s worth noting that Hitchcock seems preoccupied with the primitive and age-old themes of love and death.   Of course, 90% of our record collection probably consists of various songwriters’ attempts to make sense of these universal experiences, but Hitchcock’s decision to take the psychedelic approach frees this collection of songs from the shackles of the grim or overly earnest tone of most musical musings on love and death, and transforms them into something more playful and absurd.  People who take themselves, or their music, too seriously sometimes balk at this approach, and I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself at times.  But we too easily forget that engaging our imagination and our sense of play is one of the most human things we can do, and can liberate us in so many ways. Imagination is an incredibly powerful tool, too often left to children and scoffed at by so-called “realists.” But it’s what allows us as children to build on our sense of wonder at the world and to engage in play, that most important of childhood activities.  It’s what allows us first as teenagers, and then as young adults, to consider a world better then the one in which we live, and to consider that we might play a part in bringing that world into being.  Its what can make idealists out of largely helpless, alienated, and bored suburban kids, and possibly help transform them into people that make things happen instead of passively watch them happen, people that dream of a better world and then fight for it, on a personal, local, or global scale.  I think that imagination is what helps transform us into activists, artists, musicians and advocates. I often find it odd then, that so many of the leftists/activists/punks I know are skeptical of parenthood. “How could you bring new life into such a fucked-up world,” is the typical question that’s posed to us.  But I’ve found that having a baby and experiencing secondhand her wide-eyed wonder at the world has re-awakened my tired idealism.  I can’t imagine a better way to fight for a better future than to raise a child in opposition to a world that values pursuit of capital over pursuit of joy or pursuit of justice.  So here’s to play, here’s to imagination. Raise your glass.

Hot Track: “Egyptian Cream”

This is the real Elvis. My feelings about the American singer of the same name can be best summed up by the third verse of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” and that’s pretty much all I’ll say about him. Of the huge selection of heartbreak music in our collection, Mr. Costello (née Declan McManus) and his band are perhaps the most compelling to sing of unrequited love.

What I want to write about today is, in a roundabout way, love that is unreciprocated. And here comes the sentimental part, so brace yourselves: I fell in love with our daughter the moment I saw her, when she slid reluctantly into this world, blue, wrinkled, covered in blood & amniotic fluid. I fall a little bit more in love with her every day. I love her with a ferocity that I couldn’t have imagined just a few short months ago. I feel fiercely protective towards her, and end up staring at her for hours on end. For the first time in my entire life, I can actually sit still just holding her. And as I gaze in wonder at her sleeping face I can see hints of my wife’s features, which only adds to how much I adore her. Maybe you’d call it paternal infatuation, something I’ve heard other Dads talk about, but didn’t understand until now. The thing is, she literally doesn’t have any idea who I am. My wife breastfeeds her, and consequently they have a bond so pure that it’s unlike anything else. Their connection is direct and visceral, based on love, but also on dependency, sustenance, and comfort. She can’t really recognize people yet, so I’m basically “the other big person who doesn’t make the milk.” For a five-week-old baby, life is basically about sleeping and seeking food and comfort, which means that I have very little to offer, because feeding is her most basic comfort. It’s really self-centered and selfish of me, but I find myself jealous of the relationship that my wife and daughter share. I feel excluded in some way that can’t easily be reconciled. In some ways I’m hesitant to share this publicly, because it’s a little more revealing than I’m comfortable with, and makes me sound somewhat needy and pathetic. However, the whole purpose of keeping a record of these experiences is to create something that’s honest about fatherhood in a way that’s fundamentally different from most of what I’ve seen published on the subject. So if I look like an ass, so be it. I know that this situation is temporary, and once she understands who I am, I’ll have my own unique connection with her. But for now I’m a little bit heartbroken.

Now on to our man Elvis. His early records blended punk, soul, jazz and country in a way that was, and still is, timeless, seamless, and masterful. Listening to his records with the Attractions, you don’t realize that you’re listening to a synthesis of disparate musical styles, and if you do, it’s only perceived at the back of your mind. The most remarkable example of this is “Watching the Detectives,” which on paper is equal parts reggae and surf, but if anything creates the impression of soundtrack music for unreleased film noir, but transposed via time machine and style-machine to the height of the 70’s new wave movement. Via some magic of cadence and inflection, his staccato vocal style managed to sound aggressive on even the most laid-back tracks. The Attractions were obviously influenced by the burgeoning punk scene, yet schooled in the Stax tradition: frantic bass lines complementing the melody, tremolo-laden organ, falling-down-the-stairs drum fills, the works. Also punk-as-fuck in attitude, as you will see first-hand if you can track down the footage of their late-70’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. After having been pressured by their record label to feature their new single “Less Than Zero,” in support of their upcoming album, they started the song, but stopped a few measures into it, when Elvis started waving his hands and yelling “Wait, Wait!” They then proceeded to play “Radio, Radio,” a protest song critiquing corporate control of the airwaves that they had been warned not to play. Although this album is not my favorite of theirs (that distinction is reserved for This Year’s Model), I wanted the baby to hear “Alison.” Also, “Welcome to the Working Week,” is a near perfect album-opener. There are many other masters of the forlorn, the despondent heartbreak song, but Elvis hurls his epithets with a caustic wit that neither Robert Smith nor Morrissey can manage, even at their best.

Hot Track: “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes”

Words To Live By: “I said ‘I’m so happy I could die.’ She said, ‘Drop dead,’ and left with another guy. That’s what you get if you go chasing after vengeance. Ever since you got me punctured, this has been my sentence.”

The most difficult part of having an infant in your house is that you can’t really leave her alone.  If it’s just her and I at home, and I need to make food or take a shower, I need to think very carefully about how and where she’ll be safe if I put her down.  Soon we’ll need to start thinking about who we will trust to care for her when we’re at work or (gasp) out doing something fun and adults-only.  The first time I left her in her swing so I could take a shower it nearly broke my heart (not to mention filling me with not a little bit of anxiety).  I put this record on.

Two separate threads come to mind: one is the question of who we trust to protect and educate this little creature that we brought into the world.  The second is why Fugazi were so seriously exhilarating.  These two threads are intertwined.

Every parent comes to understand certain basics about entrusting other people with childcare. There are limits to what you can control.  For example, regardless of what rules or boundaries you establish as parents, there will be at least one grandparent who will try to spoil your child rotten behind your back.  But having someone feeding your daughter extra dessert once every 2 months is not really a serious problem.  I’m more concerned with values.  I know that this word gets thrown around a lot by religious conservatives and other frightful people, but it’s an important word regardless.  It’s much deeper than politics, at the intersection of heart and head, the crossroads of compassion and intellect.  I mean it in the sense of a core set of beliefs about how to treat others and how to have faith in oneself in a culture that supports selfishness and superficiality.  I’ve already heard too many stories of parents discovering that one of their babysitters has been teaching their child something that they object to.  Of course the world will eventually throw plenty of disturbing ideas in her direction, and she will need to learn how to filter and make decisions for herself, but it’s another thing altogether to have someone you trust indoctrinating your child with silly bullshit.  For example, I don’t want traditional gender roles reinforced by a relative or babysitter, there’s quite enough of that outside of our doors.  Also, we’re raising our daughter vegetarian because of deeply held beliefs: opposition to cruelty and violence, perspectives about humans’ place in the world, our understanding of the economic and environmental consequences of meat production, and of course, the impact on our health.  What if we leave her with a relative or babysitter for the day who decides, as I’ve heard so many times, that “a child can’t really thrive without meat,” and feeds her some?  Not the end of the world, I know, but upsetting to me nonetheless, and a pretty serious violation of trust.  Maybe all of this is unavoidable, especially once children are in school, but I want to believe that we can take responsibility for teaching our child values that we hold dear, and to some degree protect her, for a few years at least, from some of the wretched things that are reinforced by the world we live in.  I believe that how we raise children is one of the ways we build a better world.

Now, on to the mighty Fugazi. If I were to pick one set of songwriters who I’d trust to pass knowledge on to a young child, it would be the genius tag-team of Ian MacKaye, Guy Picciotto, Brendan Canty, and Joe Lally.  Seriously, for well over a decade, any time we might be tempted to become embarrassed of punk rock, or to entertain the notion that we’d somehow outgrown it, Fugazi would release something new, and we would be reminded of the potential to create something beautiful, intelligent and challenging out of instruments and outrage.  I really believe that they defended the covenant of punk and DIY for years; not only with the music they made, but also with the way they conducted (and refused to conduct) business.  They were like our wise uncles, our radical clergy or even our cool babysitters, showing us a world of possibility.  The band was about music and ideas, not merchandise.  As a result, they didn’t make or sell t-shirts.  Shows were always all-ages and inexpensive, and there were no secrets about how money was handled.  They took responsibility for violence at their shows, calling it out and policing it, and more than a few times refunding the door price to some overly-aggressive macho drunk and escorting him out, even when they were playing large venues.  They were men singing about sexism, punks critiquing the assumptions and rituals of our subculture, D.C. residents showing us a glimpse of life in the capital. They defied the musical and behavioral conventions of the day and could’ve cared less about whether they made enemies or friends doing so.  The first time I ever played a show in Europe was opening for Fugazi in Prague in 1995.  The band walked it like they talked it onstage and off, honest, accessible and generous to the last.  They lent us cables and straps because we lost some crucial luggage, and I watched Ian deal with the promoter and the show accounting in the lobby of the venue, out in the open, setting aside a large amount of money for a community arts center they had encountered on the way. Values. The experience has informed how I’ve thought about being in a band ever since, underscoring the importance of ideas and actions as well as music.  This particular album seems to be nobody else’s favorite, but I love it.  It closes with one of my favorite anthems ever.

Hot Track: “KYEO”

Words To Live By: “Don’t you know that things have settled down but silence is a dangerous sound, we must, we must, we must keep our eyes open…the tools they will be swinging, but we will not be beaten down.”

Because sometimes you’re in the mood for beats, but not lyrics.  And sometimes sound conveys something that words can’t.  It takes most of us quite a few years before we start to grasp this possibility, that we can communicate without words.  Our intuitive response in most situations is to say too much, when just a look or a touch would suffice. Often simply acknowledging that we really don’t know what to say is really the most honest and useful choice of words.  I cringe when I think of all the things I’ll probably say to our daughter that would be better left unsaid.  The brusque or hurtful things said in moments of anger or frustration, the times I’ll inevitably rush in to try to make things better, when all I really need to do is shut up and listen.  The times I’ll interrupt, or run my mouth without listening first.  As a psychologist I realize that words can be our most powerful tools, but being able to tolerate silence is just as important.  So here’s to the artists who recognize that words can sometimes be unnecessary.

Producer/DJ/MC Madlib has been one of my favorite artists since first hearing Quasimoto on Peanut Butter Wolf’s My Vinyl Weighs A Ton. By the early 2000’s, current hip-hop’s fixation on materialism and misogyny had left a bad taste in my mouth, but once I figured out that independent labels like Stones Throw and Definitive Jux were releasing rap music that was every bit as fresh, dynamic and exciting as the material that I’d found so engaging in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I got pretty obsessed, tracking down every release I could find. Madlib was one of number of artists that was busy proving that underground hip hop artist were pushing musical boundaries in a way that was far more sophisticated than anyone in independent rock music.  Madlib is most famous for his collaborations and various alter egos, but here he appears as himself. For this release, he was given access to the Blue Note back catalog, and produced an album full of remixes of Jazz classics.  The record is nearly perfect, and I’m so grateful that he didn’t make the mistake of inviting various MC’s to rap over the tracks.  That’s the mistake RZA made on the retail version of the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and it ruined a potentially incredible album.

Hot Track: “Andrew Hill Break”

Words To Live By: ……

We named our daughter after several strong women from the history of music, literature and politics, women who weren’t easily intimidated or backed down.  Women with big personalities and big mouths.  This album will be her first exposure to the voice of one of my favorite tough ladies from the punk pantheon.  Siouxsie was part of the infamous Bromley Contingent, a crew of kids from the London suburbs that followed the Sex Pistols around, stirring up controversy and helping to expose and popularize punk fashion in the movement’s early days.  A Lot of people lump Siouxsie and the Banshees in with Goth music, but although they may have influenced the Goths, they always had far greater dynamic range than Bauhaus or the Sisters of Mercy. I recognize that a true music snob would balk at drawing attention to a singles collection over any individual album, but there are few (most notably this one and the Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady) that are impossible to separate from a time and place in my youth that was so formative and important.  The same goes for Sarah, although our individual experiences with this music were obviously very different.  I’ll always associate this record with my friend Shannon, a fellow music obsessive who attended this elite all-girls prep school and would regularly rock the boat by showing up with a shaved head & wearing a men’s suit, or some other synthesis of forward-thinking fashion sense and I-don’t-give-a-fuck.  I saw her as fearless, during a period of life when most people, myself included, cared about nothing but what their peers thought.  A lesson for our daughter.

Hot Track: “Love in a Void”

Words to Live By: “Too many fools blocking my motion, clouding my eyes…Love in a void. Too many bigots for my liking, too many critics, too few writing.  Rabid dogs that aren’t biting.  Love in a void.  Jaded reputation on which you’re staking, lots of money for the making, for all the stars they’re just faking.  Love in a void”

I know, I know…this might seem like a weird album to go out of your way to play for a baby, because it may be one of the sexiest records of all time.  Inappropriate, you say?  Well how exactly do you think babies are made?  Despite my passion for hardcore punk, indie rock, and hip-hop, I start almost every day with a Motown selection.  I remember having a conversation with Palaitis about how, in retrospect, we both wish that we’d learned to play bass from listening to the Motown session players instead of Minor Threat.  So there.

Hot Track: “Lets Get It On”

Words to Live By: “We’re all sensitive people…”  He sang this with a straight face by the way, heart on his sleeve.  So fucking earnest that it wouldn’t even be out of place on the Embrace lyric sheet.  Seduction anthem or proto-emo? You decide.

Another one of Sarah’s picks.  I have to admit that I mostly slept on this band.  Despite the fact that I love Chris Thompson on the Fury EP, I never checked out the Monorchid’s first album, a split release between Dischord and Simple Machines, because I had decided (mistakenly, it turns out) by the mid-90’s that Dischord Records had basically shit the bed.  This premature assumption came about thanks to mediocre releases by Holy Rollers, Severin, High Backed Chairs, Branch Manager, and Smart Went Crazy (we’re all going to keep our mouths shut and agree to pretend that the Grey Matter reunion album never happened, OK?).  So while I got busy obsessing over pop-punk and DIY thrash, and ignoring what used to be my favorite record label, I totally missed the monster that was the Monorchid.  Dissonant, manic, tightly wound yet constantly threatening to unravel, with just a little bit of a riot grrl swagger to it.  Words spit with spite. Fantastic. I could have seen the Monorchid at least a dozen times and didn’t. Ignoring bands because I felt betrayed by a record label was a puerile catastrophe of minor proportions, but there’s a bigger lesson here.  What I’d like our daughter to learn from this more than anything is how much you can miss out on when you make snap judgments based on limited information, and prematurely close yourself off to things.  Oh yeah, thanks to McKee for getting me to start paying attention to Dischord again by turning me on to Q and Not U.  I am in your debt.  That does not mean I’ll be buying you drinks.

Hot Track: “Alias Directory”

Words to Live By: “Beached on the shore of an island called predictable. Behind: a trail of dirty dishes and dirty underwear. Ahead: a punctual lapse of taste and conviction, prompt consent to one’s own moral depantsing and to a lot of unnecessary and expensive medical operations.”

Sarah picked this one out, one of her favorites.  Because the music is sort of campy and deceivingly simplistic, I thought it might appeal to our infant daughter.  I remember when Devo had a minor hit with “Whip It” in 1980.  This band always fascinated me, what with their science fiction chic and coordinated outfits.  I had always got the feeling that there was something to decode in Devo’s presentation that wasn’t immediately apparent, something in the matching uniforms and robotic musical aesthetic.  When I was 12 I found it both fascinating and creepy at the same time, equally attracting and repelling.  Like most bands that create their own mythology (Kiss, Wu-Tang Clan) I ultimately found them irresistible. Later I came to understand the element of social critique in their manifesto of “de-evolution,” which claimed that the human race was actually regressing instead of evolving.  A compelling theory.

I thought that this record made our daughter smile, but Sarah insists that’s just the face babies make when they have gas.  I guess that means we need to put on 3^rd Bass sooner than later.

Hot Track: “Gates of  Steel”

Words to Live By: “Twist away, now twist and shout. The earth it moves too slow, but the earth is all we know. We pay to play the human way, twist away the gates of steel.”

The first few days after we got home from the hospital was just a blur of Motown, Latin Jazz, and the Beatles.  Just whatever records were already pulled off the shelves and sitting by the turntable.  Nothing really deliberate, just what was within easy reach.  Too many guests, not enough sleep.

I put on Strictly Business just to reminisce with my brother about what a classic album it is. I’d been thinking about EPMD a lot lately, after having recently discovered that their 1997 comeback album Back In Business is actually pretty amazing, despite my (admittedly hypocritical) doubts about the value of reunion records.  I thought it might be a good place to start in terms of introducing my daughter to hip hop, less obvious than Low End Theory or By All Means Necessary, but in every way a classic of the genre, heavy with the funk and rock breaks that came to define this music in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  EPMD weren’t the greatest MC’s in New York, but the use of samples on this album is way ahead of its time.  In fact, this album contains samples that would make both Jay-Z and Nas famous in the next decade.  I watched our daughter’s face carefully after I put this on, not knowing how an infant would respond.  As much as I dislike most children’s music and felt pretty steadfast in our resolve to expose her to the music that we love, I was also afraid that the more aggressive stuff in our collection might irritate her. I at first mistook her response as giving me the stink-eye. But then I realized that she just hasn’t figured out how to open both eyes at the same time yet.

My little brother, who in 1988 schooled his know-it-all elder sibling on Boogie Down Productions and Feminism (while I was narrowly preoccupied with Agnostic Front, Dag Nasty and beer), is definitely responsible for opening my eyes to some of the ideas and aesthetics that led to a broadened understanding of the possibilities of punk and hardcore, and as such is at least partially responsible the quality and diversity of my record collection, and my own tenure as a “musician”.  Hats off to him.

Hot Track: “You Gots to Chill”

Words to Live By:  “I’m so swift and that’s an actual fact, I’m like Zorro, I mark an ‘E’ on your back.” – Erick Sermon/EPMD

Parenthood.  Of the countless challenges faced and met in this life so far, this is probably the most exciting and daunting undertaking of all.  It promises to change us irrevocably and test us in ways that we had never considered. I felt elated, but also unworthy and unprepared. Being a reader and lover of books, I sought wisdom in that medium, but was repeatedly disappointed.  Almost everything that I read reduced fatherhood to some ridiculous sports metaphor (“approach fatherhood like a full-court press,” one such book advised) or similarly debased or dumbed-down the male experience of becoming a parent (another book suggests that, by virtue of our gender, we are responsible for the audio-visual equipment, and counseled us to be prepared with extra batteries for the camcorder. For this we’re expected to part with $11.95 and squander increasingly scarce bookshelf space?).  I was looking for something less trite, more substantive. Even the one book I was able to find that treats the topic with intelligence and sensitivity is entitled “Home Game”. I guess they felt that they wouldn’t fully appeal to their market niche without some reference to athletics.  Of course I complained about this state of affairs to my friends ad nauseum, and in response, some suggested that maybe I should write the book I’d been so desperately looking for, a book about fatherhood for men whose frame of reference stretches beyond ESPN and Tivo.  I’m a psychologist as well as a musician, and while that might mean that I have some of the skills needed to offer helpful insights into fatherhood, it doesn’t make me a writer.  Just because I’m good at complaining, doesn’t mean that I can offer anything better.  I also recognize that I probably don’t have the stamina to make it through the process of writing a book. Completing my 120-page dissertation was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my adult life, and I certainly don’t want to attach such toxic associations to the task of documenting one of life’s most important transformations.  I’m likely to either abandon ship halfway through the venture, or obsess over every last word so that the writing process drags out interminably.

At some point I realized that the wisdom and insight that’s seen me through the most formative experiences has almost always come from music, not literature.  It’s always communicated something that words alone cannot. Given the central role that music has played in my life so far, (amplifying my joys, soothing my defeats, serving as foundation for my growth) how exciting might it be to expose our daughter to this most powerful and universal of art forms?  It occurred to me that we could play a different record every day, provide the soundtrack for her awakening senses, let her develop a vocabulary of sounds and feelings, and rediscover things about myself and my own history along the way.  I found that the question of “which record to pull off the shelf today?” seemed to have more weight to it.  I approached the question more seriously, because she is hearing everything for the first time.

I decided to structure this as a journal or blog that documents the music that we play for our daughter.  I’m going to try to expose her to a different piece of music every day, although based on what I’ve seen so far, there may be days on end that are just too hectic. Of course, I don’t expect the reactions of a newborn baby to be particularly nuanced, as she currently seems to have an emotional range limited to the following: Eat, shit, sleep, and yell.  As she gets older it will be exciting for me to see how she responds to music, as her ability to communicate becomes more sophisticated. Anyway, I expect that something interesting will emerge from the process.