Last night we had a major family emergency that meant I had to run out with my 10-year-old at 8 p.m. on a Sunday: He and his sister had had a mishap with the Xbox, scratching the disk for “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and rendering it inoperable. Thankfully, we located a Game Stop that was open that late, and sanity was restored.

On the way home, we were listening to music in my car. One song in particular caught Dietrich’s attention. (Yes, my son’s name is Dietrich, as people keep inanely asking me, “Your son’s name is Dietrich?”)

“Who’s this?” he said.

“Sonic Youth,” I said. “Why?”

“This is the most awful song I’ve ever heard.”

“Well, your mother would agree with you. But your sister and I like it.”

“It’s awful. What’s wrong with it?”

“The guitars are purposely tuned ‘wrong,'” I explained helpfully.

“Yeah, but what about her voice? She sounds terrible.”

Hm. One person’s “terrible” is another person’s effect. Just last week I had forced one of the designers at my company to purposely “misdesign” a client’s ad so it would get more attention. In this way, I like to think I have some distant kinship with Picasso, who applied those “rules” of his art before he broke them. But none of this made any impression on my son, or, at least, not any positive impression.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I just want this to end!” Again, it was almost as though he were channeling his mother, who has been known to casually reach over and turn a dial, any dial, to remove the offending noise.

So now I think when I get home I will share this news with Dietrich: His new favorite band, Sonic Youth, has just recovered some stolen guitars. Guitars that were stolen 13 years ago. So now they can make even more of this discordant, irritating, off-key music.

That is, if the band hasn’t broken up, as it apparently has, in the wake of the divorce between bassist and “singer” Kim Gordon and guitarist and singer Thurston Moore. Even if that’s the case, though, there’s a whole back catalog I can introduce the kid to. And wait ’til we get to Captain Beefheart!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2012 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Music, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.