My wife and I recently gave our five-year-old daughter an iPod. It’s an old, old, old, old iPod, from back in the days when iPhones didn’t even exist yet. The kind that comes with a click-wheel. It’s been sitting in a drawer in our house for over a decade, but now that my daughter can read, it seemed like the right time to give it to her (if she couldn’t read, she wouldn’t know how to put on the songs she wants).
Our original plan was to fill the iPod with all the songs she loves, plus some others that we thought she might like, and then let her have it, but after tracking down an appropriate charger cord and plugging it into our MacBook Air, I quickly discovered that the old iPods don’t work with today’s Apple Music service (which powers all of our music nowadays), so we aren’t able to add anything new to it.
That means my five-year-old daughter has an iPod filled with over a thousand songs from mine and my wife’s old CD collection, the stuff I put on my gum-drop iMac back in the days of “Rip. Mix. Burn.” The first thing she wanted to listen to after I taught her how to use the click-wheel and what “alphabetical order” means was (and I’m super proud of this) the Grateful Dead.
Later in the evening, after I taught her how to put it on shuffle (and what “shuffle” means), she came over to ask me the name of the song she was listening to. I told her to read it off the screen, and she read, “Back in Your Head” by Tegan & Sara, a tune from 2007. My daughter loved it! She ended up pausing the song, stripping down to her underwear, raiding her dress-up clothes, donning a dress that makes her look like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and dancing around her playroom like…well, like a five-year-old girl who is thrilled to dance to music she loves.
I started thinking about this little girl’s musical future. Because the only radio we listen to is Vermont Public Radio, she doesn’t have access to all of today’s teeny-bop music (unless it’s something that my wife and I are willing to listen to as well — Taylor Swift, for example, or the Moana soundtrack). Instead, she’ll have over 1,000 songs that WE love.
I can just picture her sitting in the back of our car, or cuddling up on her bed, or dancing in the living room, headphones on, the little wire trailing around her, her tiny hand wrapped around this relatively heavy, solid black iPod filled with unknown songs for her to explore and discover with no cultural context to disturb the purity of the music itself.
I’m so excited for her to figure out what SHE likes in that eclectic mix of songs that includes everything from the Afro Celt Sound System to Zap Mama, from the Beastie Boys to Wynton Marselis, from Claudio Villa to Van Morrison. There’s songs from Phish and from the Grateful Dead, but also compositions from Mozart and live performances by Bela Fleck & The Flecktones. She’s got access to rap, jazz, rock, the blues, reggae, pop, classical, folk, and music from around the globe, from San Paulo to Rome to Mumbai.
We’re building an adult with musical taste here, and this old, old, old, old iPod may be the magical tool we need to get the job done right.
