Watching a child get into a tune is beautiful but what is this ‘cursive singing’ trend about?
Colm O'Regan: 'This is the first time the youngest has sung with such feeling at breakfast. The lyrics are NOT Miss Rachel.' Picture: iStock.
This morning, I was faced with that question that will affect nearly every parent at some point: How does a child forget to bring their schoolbag to school?
But I’m not getting cross. I think she was distracted. I blame Tate McRae. My daughter spent the whole breakfast singing Tate’s song so maybe she had a lot going on.
McRae, Canadian, was born in 2003. (Let’s leave aside the fact that there are grown-up famous people who were born the year I was already a grown-up.) Tate McRae is big these days.
Her songs are following me around. She has definitely passed the Soap Opera Café Test (years ago, that’s how you knew music had made the leap to the big time if it played on the radio in the café or in Kevin Webster's garage in ).
This is the first time the youngest has sung with such feeling at breakfast. The lyrics are NOT Miss Rachel.
“What's your problem? You think that you're a god? You came and f*cked my life up when you knew that I was lost.” She sings — quite soulfully and relatively tunefully — while procrastinating with her porridge.
She says, “Mmm” for the curse words. I’m happy with that. You can’t protect children from everything. She’s going to hear those words somewhere, in the school yard, on the Luas, watching me watch Cork in All-Ireland finals. So it’s more important that, rather than not hearing them at all, she has a plan.
“You made me hate myself just so that I would love you more”. Who is this child in second class of primary school treating my daughter like a second-class citizen? But there’s no one.
“I just like singing it, Daddy,” she says. And she’s right. We all sang stuff not meant for us as children. I had NO idea what Boy George was on about with in 1983 (I thought he was saying “Become commacomma comma comedian” so it must have had some effect.) “Gimme all your lovin” said ZZ Top. I didn’t know what that meant. Hugs, I suppose.
And yes, there is a generation of people, male and female, who won’t forget the first time they saw Susannah Hoffs of the Bangles. But still, I was probably just gazing deep into her eyes and also agreeing that yes, Mondays could indeed be manic.
No sooner has Tate McCrea fecked off than our eldest orders Alexa to play Lola Smith. She knows it’s not a song about tidying your room.
She says “effing” for the swearing. She’s not too bothered about Lola’s feckless fella coming up stoned at four in the morning. She just likes the video with the cake in it and doing some angry dancing. In fact, both children have recovered from arguments with each other while rage-listening to Lola. Lola does the swearing, and my girls can self-soothe.
It’s fun watching a new brain get into music and why do they like that and what do they sing along to and what leaves them cold and why don’t they want to listen to by The Fall (which by rights should be on the Leaving Cert syllabus).
The only thing I’m slightly concerned about is that they might pick up some of the more strangled vowels from the music they’re listening to. The 2020s have brought a trend called ‘cursive singing’, which is a tendency for the singer to absolutely tear the hole out of vowels.
Lost becomes lowouieust. Crying turns into crwwrwryeyyeinghhdhdh. As if it were the traditional Irish spelling.
But I put that to one side. Watching a child get into a tune is beautiful. You could hang it in the Tate (McRae).
