A Musical Education

Most of the time, things are peachy-keen on Papillon.  Most of the time.  But I have a particular objection to puns and inventing hilarious new lyrics for popular songs.  Inevitably (and possibly because of this), Erik has great talent in this area.  He is a master of the jingle-bells-batman-smells style of songwriting, and the girls eat it up with a spoon.  He and the kids have rejigged many a song, and some endure years later.  But I have gotten used to the “classics”, as it were, and I try to ignore them.  The novelty soon wears off, at least for Indy and Stylish.  But musical repetition of any sort – rude or not – is always popular around here.

For this reason, I always heave a little sigh when new music makes it aboard.  It is too tempting.  And so, I had to close my eyes and grit my teeth when my cousin introduced us to “Gangnam Style” last weekend.  (I know, we are the very last four people on the planet Earth to have even heard of Gangnam Style.  We reside somewhat outside the loop of popular culture these days.)

Erik immediately found the video on youtube.  And he and the kids watched it.  And watched it again.  And again.

“You are eating up all of our precious bandwidth!”  I cried.

Hoots of laughter.  I shook my head.

Very quickly, the girls were doing a version of the dance, accompanied by shouts of: “tootin’ Gangnam style!”, which they (and their father) found hilarious.  This has now morphed into: “Tutankhamen style!”, which even I find a little bit funny.  And every half hour or so, I hear the song drifting down from the cockpit, and they are at it again.

When they aren’t practicing their Korean, the three of them are singing: “Istanbul was Constantinople / Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople...”.  As you might guess, we reached the Turkish attack on Constantinople in our history text a few days ago, and Erik immediately launched into the They Might Be Giants tune.  Stylish still has trouble with the chorus, and sings: “Even old New York was once New Hamersterdam,” despite my best attempts at correction.  Still, it could be a lot worse, and it is somewhat sweet to hear a four-year-old sing: “Why did Constantinople get the works? / That's nobody's business but the Turks.”  The two of them will remember that bit of history for the rest of their lives.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear that we're back to Tutankhamen style.