‘There’s a land that I see
Where the children are free
And I say it ain’t far
To this land from where we are.’
So begins the bouncy title track by the New Seekers from the album Free to Be You and Me by Marlo Thomas and Friends (first released in 1972).
Quite apart from the fact that I’m quite a fan of the plinky-plunky ‘70s sound of this song and recommend you give it a listen, I thought I’d take a moment to think about children’s songs as one form of didactic narrative that children encounter in their early years.
I’ve ransacked the local library’s CD collection (‘records, mummy, what are those?’) and come home with many different child-friendly tune collections to pass the time away. Many these days are touted as being ‘educational’. Baby Einstein, for example, introduces us to famous classical composers via simplified arrangements in Baby Beethoven and Baby Mozart. Simplified classical music - the proper arrangements deemed too stimulating and complex for very young children - is also used in allegedly sleep-inducing CDs such as Music for Dreaming and Sweet Dreams for Children (it seems like a bit of a contradiction to educate - and, presumably, stimulate - children with the same kind of music that is also supposed to send them to sleep). There are collections of the more traditional nursery rhymes and songs, such as ‘B-I-N-G-O’, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’, and ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’, performed by everyone from the Wiggles to your local pre-school to Rolf Harris. Putumayo Kids has a wide range of world and folk music, many with messages of love and peace and ‘why can’t everyone just get along?’ Drawing on the success of simplified arrangements for other kinds of music, there’s also a a growing range of lullaby renditions of famous rawk bands - treat your child to Nirvana interpreted on the glockenspiel or the Ramones played on the triangle! (If Courtney Love had a problem with the Muppets doing a tongue-in-cheek version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in the recent movie, who knows what she makes of these?)
My favourites among the ones that I’ve found so far are the weird imaginings of They Might Be Giants on No! and Here Comes the ABCs (who knew the folks behind ‘Particle Man’ would reinvent themselves as really rather good children’s musicians?) and the compilations For the Kids and For the Kids Too. In the latter two compilations, contemporary indie artists take on classics like ‘Rainbow Connection’ and ‘My Favourite Things’ as well as offering up brilliant new ones like ‘Your Attitude Towards Cuttlefish’ and ‘John Lee Super-taster’. I’ve also re-visited the 1970s' anarchy of The Muppets, and become acquainted with The Wellington Ukelele Orchestra.
So, taken together, what do all these kinds of musical narratives mean for small children? First, there is the familiar Western lexicon of twinkling stars, farmers in dells and putting your left arm in and shaking it all about. Everyone likes to be singing from the same song-sheet at some point in their lives. Second, there is a perpetuation of the kind of music educated people should know about: Beethoven, Mozart, the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Peter and the Wolf, the Dance of the Sugar-plum Fairy (you see where this is going ...). Third, some of the ‘let’s all just get along’ music has some problematic sentiments: on Putumayo’s Acoustic Playground there’s a song about the love train that travels around the world - even Russia and China too! - that sounds patronising, at best, and ethnocentric, at worst. Last, there is more diverse music on offer: songs in te reo Māori and Gagana Samoa, for example. While this is a welcome development on the whole, dropping 'Te Aroha' into a collection of otherwise English songs can seem like the ‘ethnic spice’ (as feminist critic bell hooks has described it in ‘Eating the Other’) in the mix that serves to shore up the position of the dominant culture and its values. Whether we like it or not, whether its overt or not, children’s songs and music are also narratives with an ideological agenda.
At the risk of killing everyone’s buzz a little more - and let’s face it, songs and music are meant to be enjoyed without too much over-thinking - I want to look at the thing that’s missing from a lot of this music: any overt messaging about behaviour. And, in the general spirit of this blog, of feminist messaging about gendered behaviour. Which is where we come back to Free to Be You and Me.
Like me, it is a product of the 1970s. And second-wave feminism.
Without wanting to sound like an infomercial, let me tell you more about it (you can watch most of the tracks off the album on youtube; they appeared in a television special in 1974, so there are visuals to go with the sounds). Actress Marlo Thomas - most famous in the early 1970s as TV’s That Girl, but maybe more familiar these days as Rachel Green’s mother in Friends - was searching for a new kind of bedtime story for her niece Dionne. Thomas says, however, in the liner notes, ‘I was saddened to find that all of her books ... put her and her mind to sleep. I started to look through stores and found, with few exceptions, shelf after shelf of books and records, for boys and girls, which charmingly dictated who and what they must be, colorfully directing new minds away from their own uniqueness.’
I could point out the ideological ramifications of ‘freedom’ and ‘individualism’, particularly during the height of the Cold War, but that would be missing what is both charming and instructive about Thomas’ project. Some of the proceeds from the record went to the newly-established Ms. Foundation to support a range of projects ‘aimed at improving the skills, condition and status of women and children.’ Comments in the liner notes come from Gloria Steinem and Dr Dorothy H. Cohen, the latter of whom says:
Recognizing that the new male and female image will emerge in coming generations if children can be freed from the stereotypes of the past, the many gifted participants in this work have poked fun with undisguised pleasure at attitudes that have been taken seriously for centuries.
In addition to celebrating every child’s creativity, then, Free to Be You and Me was also a feminist project. Other tracks include ‘William Wants A Doll’ (voiced by Thomas and Alan Alda. Yup, thats right, Hawkeye from M*A*S*H), about a boy who wants a doll, but isn’t given one because it would be ‘cissy’. That is, until his wise grandma points out that it’s good for him to have a doll, because one day, he’ll be a daddy and he should know how to nurture a baby (well, okay, it has some limits). There’s also ‘Parents are People’, which lets kids in on the big secret that their mums and dads aren’t just mums and dads, but people too, and ‘there are a lot of things that a lot of mommies can do, and a lot of daddies can do, and a lot of parents can do.’ Another song ‘It’s All right to Cry’, sung by former New York Giants’ footballer, Roosevelt ‘Rosey’ Grier, lets both boys and girls know that it’s okay to have emotions and to express them, because ‘it might make you feel better’ (sidenote: Grier seems to have had a rich and varied career: post-football, he was a bodyguard for Robert Kennedy, and was guarding his wife when Kennedy was shot. He subsequently had a TV career, promoted non-traditional masculine hobbies such as needlepoint and macrame, and became a Christian Minister who works with inner city youth).
Another tells the story of ‘Girl Land’, envisaged as a kind of amusement park:
‘Welcome to Girl Land,
My Good Little Girls
Admission’s a Wink
And a toss of your curls
There’s fun for all
From Eight to Eighty
You go in a girl
And come out a Lady.’
But ‘Girl land’ has been closed down, because ‘it was never much fun’ and ‘always a bore’ and ‘you never get out’.
The simple joy and hope in many of these songs is not only still quite catchy, but almost heart-breaking. At least, to me. Why, you may ask?
Because, if we fast forward forty years to 2012, ‘Girl Land’ has not only been re-opened, but it’s had a fresh, new makeover (I bet Marlo Thomas didn’t have to deal with Playboy-branded clothes marketed at young girls or the internet’s role in the pornification of culture, for example). And mommies, at least, are no longer people, they’re ... well, mommies (unless, of course, they work, in which case, they are bad mommies). William can forget about that doll, and he better not cry about it either.
Rather than‘it ain’t far from where we are’, I’d say that we still have some way to go to that land where ‘you and me are free to be ... you and me’.
