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Tate McRae at Dublin’s 3Arena. Picture: Katie Kilgannon <\/p>\nThis 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?<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m not getting cross. I think she was distracted. I blame Tate McRae. My daughter spent the whole breakfast singing Tate\u2019s song What\u2019s Your Problem? so maybe she had a lot going on.<\/p>\n
McRae, Canadian, was born in 2003. (Let\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her songs are following me around. She has definitely passed the Soap Opera Caf\u00e9 Test (years ago, that\u2019s how you knew music had made the leap to the big time if it played on the radio in the Eastenders caf\u00e9 or in Kevin Webster’s garage in Corrie).<\/p>\n
This is the first time the youngest has sung with such feeling at breakfast. The lyrics are NOT Miss Rachel.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat’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.\u201d She sings \u2014 quite soulfully and relatively tunefully \u2014 while procrastinating with her porridge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She says, \u201cMmm\u201d for the curse words. I\u2019m happy with that. You can\u2019t protect children from everything. She\u2019s going to hear those words somewhere, in the school yard, on the Luas, watching me watch Cork in All-Ireland finals. So it\u2019s more important that, rather than not hearing them at all, she has a plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou made me hate myself just so that I would love you more\u201d. Who is this child in second class of primary school treating my daughter like a second-class citizen? But there\u2019s no one.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just like singing it, Daddy,\u201d she says. And she\u2019s right. We all sang stuff not meant for us as children. I had NO idea what Boy George was on about with Karma Chameleon in 1983 (I thought he was saying \u201cBecome commacomma comma comedian\u201d so it must have had some effect.) \u201cGimme all your lovin\u201d said ZZ Top. I didn\u2019t know what that meant. Hugs, I suppose.<\/p>\n
And yes, there is a generation of people, male and female, who won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Tate McRae at Dublin’s 3Arena. Picture: Katie Kilgannon <\/p>\n
No sooner has Tate McCrea fecked off than our eldest orders Alexa to play Lola Smith. She knows it\u2019s not a song about tidying your room.<\/p>\n
She says \u201ceffing\u201d for the swearing. She\u2019s not too bothered about Lola\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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\u2019t they want to listen to This Nation\u2019s Saving Grace by The Fall (which by rights should be on the Leaving Cert syllabus).<\/p>\n
The only thing I\u2019m slightly concerned about is that they might pick up some of the more strangled vowels from the music they\u2019re listening to. The 2020s have brought a trend called \u2018cursive singing\u2019, which is a tendency for the singer to absolutely tear the hole out of vowels.<\/p>\n
Lost becomes lowouieust. Crying turns into crwwrwryeyyeinghhdhdh. As if it were the traditional Irish spelling.<\/p>\n
But I put that to one side. Watching a child get into a tune is beautiful. You could hang it in the Tate (McRae).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This morning, I was faced with that question that will affect nearly every parent at some point: How…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[74266,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-331275","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-colm-o","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}