Beware of stage mothers: kid core

I'm all in favor of all-ages shows. It gives teens a place to go and supports live music.

I also like the fact that musicians are starting to make music for the toddler set because (1) it extends the careers of the musicians and (2) encourages family-friendly shows.

However this article disturbs me. This isn't about kids making music on their own. It's about grooming kids for show business and sounds just like the adult-run cultures of children's sports, kids' modeling, and child actors. The idea of stage mothers in the rock business brings to mind all the worst of the above and more. The music business can be exploitive enough as it is, so the idea of families getting into this in a big way is not a pretty picture.

Sure, it's not new that we've had parent-run rock families (The Jackson Five and the Cowsills come to mind), but we've treated those families like freaks. I don't want it to be normal for ambitious parents to groom their kids for tours and MTV showcases and the like.

Agents, managers, record deals for 10-year-old kids. No. Please, no.

Mama Was a Riot Grrrl? Then Pick Up a Guitar and Play - New York Times: "...New York’s burgeoning under-age music circuit, where bands too young for driving licenses have CDs, Web sites and managers.

“'Oh my god, there’s like a huge, huge kid-rock scene here,' said Jack McFadden, known as Skippy, who booked the show at Union Hall. 'It’s really very indicative of Park Slope, since so many of the parents who live around here are hip and have these hip little kids that they dress in, like, CBGBs T-shirts.'

"It makes sense: in this family-friendly part of Brooklyn every other brownstone seems to house creative professionals who urge their children to march to — or become — a different drummer.

"Nearly every weekend 10- to 17-year-olds play shows in the afternoon at bars like Union Hall, the Liberty Heights Tap Room in Red Hook and Southpaw in Park Slope, which has begun a teenage rock series, the Young and the Restless. In Manhattan there are all-ages shows at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa, Arlene’s Grocery and afternoon Death Disco parties at Cake Shop on the Lower East Side."

Meet Park Slope Kid Band Care Bears on Fire -- New York Magazine: "A windblown bar on a desolate corner in deepest Red Hook seems like an ideal place for New York’s next big rock scene to be germinating—until you notice all the Subarus and Volvos parked on the street....

"Welcome to the age of the rocker mom. Kids who might otherwise have their parents ferry them to the soccer field are now being enthusiastically chaperoned to dive bars. Rock, once the realm of outcasts and dangerously attractive miscreants, is practically a curriculum choice. In Park Slope, after-school classes are offered at private and public schools, and Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls (an offshoot of Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, Oregon) is in its second year. On the syllabus are the classics: Ramones and Clash and Pixies songs that youngish parents revere, and that their offspring have been hearing since birth.

"Rather than being cause for rebellion, grown-ups are rock mentors. Several, in the great tradition of Jack Black, have even become coaches, teaching teens and tweens the rudiments of rocking that normally take several alienated years to fumble through. Nowadays, punk isn’t just sanctioned by parents and school teachers; it’s good, clean fun."

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