Musical Maladies aka The Discotheque Deception

Life is filled with experiments here. Living life here, or anywhere, is something that is met with both successes and failures, and instinctively people modify or experiment with their surrounding to isolate the successes. Example: if you want to lose weight, you’ll experiment with your diet. You want to increase gas mileage, so you’ll experiment with buying the expensive octane.

Here, our experiments are oriented towards improving our lives–how do we positively reinforce the kids study habits, how we can increase their work ethic, how we can solve conflicts and arguments, how can we get them to take care of their clothes. These often differ from my experiments, which are oriented towards improving my life—which street vendor sells the best food, how do I get the villagers to wear clothes, how do I get the village ladies to stop offering themselves to me in marriage, how do avoid confrontation with their fathers after they offer themselves to me in marriage.

My most recent experiment was simply this: How do I get them to like my music. If you remember the music posts, there are several conditions to liking music. While I’d love to play them some Toby Keith or Coldplay or Mumford & Sons, there are things that would immediately prevent them from liking it. The things are 1) they aren’t African, 2) they aren’t Michael Jackson or Celine Dione, and 3) none of those artists have committed any major criminal offenses.

Unless loving America too much is a crime, in which case Toby Keith is Guilty with a capital “G”.

My hypothesis was that the kids would accept music if they believed it conformed to their prejudices. I couldn’t in good conscious tell them the artist was MJ or Celine, and telling them something like, “Check out this next artist, he set fire to a kitten shelter” didn’t feel right.

Didn't feel right in the slightest.

My only alternative was to tell them this artist was African. But then, as if the odds weren’t already on my side, I decided to tip them overwhelmingly in my favor.

A few weeks ago on a Saturday I hooked up some speakers and told the kids I was going to play a CD by Lucky Dube. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Lucky Dube (pronounced “doobie”, and yes, it’s the name given to him by his mother) was a South African soul/reggae singer and hands down the most famous artist around these parts. When I told the kids who it was they got up and started dancing along and singing and partying.

The next Saturday, I did the same thing. I hooked up the speakers and told the kids I was going to put on a CD by an American singer named Ben Harper. I told them they’d like it because it has got some reggae influences. By the time the CD hit the third song most all the kids had left and gone to bed… an hour before their normal bedtime. The music was disinteresting the kids, nobody danced, and they asked to hear Lucky Dube again.

But for every scientific experiment, there is a mad scientific experiment. And TJ got to be the mad scientist in this one. In my attempt to prove that their musical prejudices exist I pulled the ‘ol switcheroo on them. You see, the first week when everybody was singing and dancing and rejoicing to the sounds of what I said was “Lucky Dube”, what they were really enjoying was them musical delights of one Ben Harper. And the second week? You guessed it. What they were told was American Ben Harper was in reality the modern African legend and demi-god Lucky Dube!

Evil and twisted, I know, but I wanted to prove my point. And what was their reaction after I broke the news to them? I don’t know. I haven’t told them yet. Now that I’ve found the key to breaking down their musical barriers I’m going to exploit it to no end. And I think I’m going to keep the real identity of Lucky Dube/ Ben Harper a secret. Just like I didn't tell them Bruce Wayne really is Batman after we watched a Batman movie last month.

Not pictured: The real Batman.

The only kid here who has absolutely zero musical prejudices is Felix. He’s the guitarist in the band and we regularly bond as I will play records that blow his musical mind away. But actually, I take that back. He has one musical prejudice. He assumes that every live album he hears is a recording of a church worship band, because who else could get a large crowd together all singing the same song at the same time? This being case, he told me that one day he wants to visit whatever church Led Zeppelin plays at.

Me too, Felix. Me too.