Music wars

My kids have, well, eclectic tastes in music. This is being pretty diplomatic, especially for Stormy, who has taken to listening to complete emo crap lately.

I know I used to drive my parents nuts with my music, too. Master of Puppets is made to be listed to at full volume, obviously, but I don't think this was obvious to my mother every morning for a year before school. I don't think she was relieved when I switched to the Use Your Illusions double album set either, especially since I skipped the more folksy songs.

So I try to have some degree of understanding. It's pretty bloody hard to be understanding when Stormy is singing along massively out of key with some new awful band called JetLag Gemini.

I single out Stormy because his music is the least tolerable. At least, however, somehow I've gotten him into thrash. We were both banging our heads to Machine Head's latest on the way home today, so there are brief reprieves from the torture.

There are no such reprieves with Colby. He, like me, can't carry a tune in a bucket. Imagine an asthmatic rhinoceros singing showtunes and you have Colby. He has a habit of memorizing bits of songs that Noah and Gabriel listen to (we'll get to those jokers in a minute) and then bursting into song. His other favorite pastime? Using lines from musicals to carry on a conversation.

"How was your day, Colby?"

"Disappointing."

"Really, why?"

"The caterine company laid me off."

"Colby, stop quoting Avenue Q! Seriously, how was your day?"

"(singing) I lay...in bed...all day long...feeling...melancholy..."

"Arghhh! Never mind..."

You think I'm kidding. Try talking to the kid. It might not be so bad if he knew more than 3 lines from every song.

Of course, his sparse knowledge of Broadway musicals is a direct result of his oldest and youngest brothers' obsession with modern showtunes. Fortunately, we're not talking Hello Dolly or South Pacific here. Gabriel has memorized most of the songs from Avenue Q, Spamalot, and Evil Dead (the musical); he's working on The Wedding Singer.

Gabriel's biggest disappointment of 2008, besides not being able to get his favorite female classmate under the mistletoe, was missing Spamalot when Noah and I saw it Hartford. And, promise not to tell my wife, but he was thrilled when I put the entire Evil Dead Original Cast Recording on his iPod. It includes his favorite song, "What the Fuck was That?" He knows not to sing that one out in public, but every time it finishes, he smiles from earbud to earbud and says, "I just love that song." I have to admit that it is pretty catchy.

I'm not sure which is more YouTube-able. That or listening to him sing "If You Were Gay" with Noah. Gabriel always insists on singing the part of Nicki (Avenue Q's moral equivalent of Sesame Street's Ernie). This is OK, though, because Noah has completely mastered Rod (a flamboyantly gay and closeted parody of Bert).

Noah has three things on his Zune. Musicals, Weird Al, and The Presidents of the United States of America. His musicals go a little deeper though. The Drowsy Chaperone (but only because it has Sutton Foster in it) and [Title of Show] frequently make it onto his playlist.

And then there's me. I was in my glory the other night at a Metallica concert (thanks to Laura and Jason for thinking of me when they had an extra ticket!), banging my head the whole time, and finally, belatedly, discovering Machine Head (and, in fact, rediscovering the entire modern thrash genre).

It's not all metal for me. Sometimes I'll break out some industrial goodness like Nine Inch Nails or the Prodigy. When I really need to get work done, out comes hard trance or hard house, the bass thumping in time to my typing.

We won't even talk about my lovely Luddite. I have just one word for you and then I can't bear to say any more: country.

We use our headphones a lot.