POP’S PICK: Beats me? It’s hard for those born after the time to party like it’s 1999. So I think we’ll be making our own party this weekend, or crashing a few events. Who knows where the weekend will take us.

New Year’s Eve at Willy Bee’s
December 31st, 11am-1pm
Michael Leyden’s Acoustic Corral
Willy Bee’s Weekly Music-and-Brunch Series
Mike plucks the silly strings and plays favorites off “Where Are Your Piggies’” and his new CD, “Gabdern Chicken.” The kids will giggle and the adults find tidbits for belly laughs. Sing and dance and grab a shaker as Michael belts out the tunes on the guitar and harmonica.
Suggested admission: $5/person, $12/family

“WASHINGTON - Domestic violence rates fell sharply between 1993 and 2004, the Justice Department said Thursday, noting that American Indian women and native Alaskan women are far more likely to be victimized than whites and other minorities.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics said that “intimate partner violence” rates fell by more than 50 percent. The decline mirrored a decade-long trend in other violent crimes, and the department did not suggest a cause.” - AP

Use your imagination. There’s a picture of two youngish parents. She’s dressed in a heavy long coat, he’s dressed in an orange quilted parka. They both are wearing ski hats. Their dog - and this is not why I call them new parents - is dressed in a lime green parka. The Bug-a-boo stroller bound baby is probably dressed in a mini-me version of warm outerwear too. They are smiling, as most new parents usually are, for the camera. You can see the shadow of the photographer, and can almost make out his sinister plan in his smoky image the bright sun makes on the gentrified sidewalk. The Vice magazine Do’s & Don’ts caption reads:

“Is there anything worse than new parents? It’s one thing to make sure the baby’s nice and warm but why do they dress themselves and their pets like being “comfers cozers” is a matter of life and death?”

Christmas came early for Devon this year (it’s his third Christmas though he’s only two). It started with gifts on the last day of school (Dec. 22) and followed with gifts on the day after the last day of school (from friends of his mom’s).

He enjoyed giving and receiving gifts at the annual friends and family celebration at his uncle Bruce and aunt Robin’s house in Westchester. “That one for me?” he asked selecting gift after gift from the pile. I was surprised to see that he almost always chose the smallest boxes first. And if it wasn’t for him he would kindly request, “Let me help open it.”

On Christmas morning he woke to gifts under our tree at home (only Charlie Brown had a more dilapidated looking Fir). As he ripped the thin decorative skin from each gift, revealing their plastic or die-cast innards, he seemed a bit primitive, but the result was always wide-eyed glee.

Later in the evening, after a very lazy day, we went to the Bronx to have dinner with the G.Unit (grandma and grandpa on his mom’s side). As you probably already guessed, there were more gifts, and like before he selected the smaller items first.

He snatched the first one from under a tree only marginally better than ours. “That one for me?” he asked. “Yes!” we all replied. And he made short work of unwrapping the blue tissue. His glee subsided when he saw the contents. “What did you get?” we asked. “Mmm,” he said in a melancholy manner, “socks.”

He ran back to the tree and selected another small package. This time he went for the pink tissue paper, “That mine?” “Yes.” This one he opened about three-quarters way. “Oh,” he said. “That’s socks too.” He identified the images on the socks then requested another go at selecting a better gift.

Over to the tree he went again. Small blue package number two was his choice. “This one mine?” “Yes Devon, that’s yours too.” He looked at the unopened gift, probably recognizing that like the other two it was about 10 inches by 4 inches, didn’t have much weight to it and felt slightly puffy.

He carefully picked at the layered wrapping, like discarding the thin outer skins from and old onion bulb. Another small pick, a small break in the wrapping, a large revelation. “Um,” he looked up at his eager audience. “That one’s not mine,” he declared, and then dropped the mostly unopened package on the floor.

After rounds of laughter, we tried to convince Devon that there were other gifts under the tree for him. Gifts that did not involve stretchy cotton, pixilated animals, or cozy foot comfort, but he refused. He simply acted as if he was no longer interested.

Because my wife and I had just unwrapped our gift - a collection of political cartoons by Dr. Seuss - the occurrence reminded me of a page from his more popular work, One Fish, Two Fish :

I like to box.
Oh, how I like to box.
So everyday,
I box a Gox.
In yellow socks,
I box my Gox.
I box my Gox,
In yellow Gox box socks.

I hoped that the largest box under the tree, the one with the undefined shape and bulging wrapping did not contain a live, furry Dr. Seuss creature with the mental capacity Mike Tyson and his predilection toward savagery. As I contemplated this, my earlobe hurt a little. And then it was time for dinner.

- written by Leny Kravitz, edited by Big Poppa

Mr. Cab Driver won’t you stop to let me in
Mr. Cab Driver don’t you like my kind of skin
Mr. Cab Driver you’re never gonna win

But Ms. Baby Sitter she is black like me
Yet Ms. Baby Sitter wont take my money
Cause Ms. Baby Sitter assume I’m uppity

“As more blacks move up the economic ladder, one fixture — some would say necessity — of the upper-middle-class income bracket often eludes them. Like hailing a cab in Midtown Manhattan, searching for a nanny can be an exasperating, humiliating exercise for many blacks, the kind of ordeal that makes them wonder aloud what year it is.” - NYTimes

The event’s stage is a small square of industrial carpeting; the venue, a store in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. The turnout is great and as the in-store gets underway it doesn’t take long for the scene to get ugly.

Fans elbow their way to the front and jostle for space next to the stage speakers while others yell incoherently from the audience. One fan, so enthralled, gives into the urge to get up and run circles around the stage with his arms outstretched turning him, for a brief moment, into a human airplane.

This scene is typical at any Uncle Rock performance.

Though his name might suggest it, Uncle Rock is not one of the erstwhile drug dealers turned gangster-rappers affiliated with the Roc-A-Fella music label. He should also not be confused with Uncle Kracker or Kid Rock, though initial confusion with these entertainers is understandable due to the similarities in performance names.

Uncle Rock makes music for a young, under drinking age, crowd – think Kelly Clarkson followers but prepubescent, or Blink-182 fans but more childish – and he has a blast doing it.

Pixelsurgeon had a recent chat with Uncle Rock who, like most superheroes, has a second secret life as Robert Warren, husband and dad. After the usual pleasantries we began discussing more meaningful subjects: music, mayhem, and manic, pint-sized fanatics.

Dez: I know it’s only and bend on the classic standard-issue first question, but what music can you remember from your early childhood?

Beatles, Janis Joplin, Grand Funk Railroad, Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Simon & Garfunkel, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, the soundtrack to Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, Carole King, Donovan, Carly Simon, Don McLean, the Mamas and the Papas, and lots of AM radio stuff like “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes”, “Go All The Way” “The Cover Of The Rolling Stone”, “Spiders and Snakes”, “Backstabbers”, “Seasons In The Sun” and “Mandy”.

Do those early memories influence the music you make today, or do you feel more influenced by what’s popular and current?

Indeed it does influence my music. I’m a sucker for a more-hooks-than-a-tackle-box melody and a funky beat. But punk, new wave, garage rock, country, and even disco - all of which I got into in my teens and twenties - inform my work just as much. Some modern flourishes get in there too - loops, samples, and digital chicanery.

What music do you play at home for your son?

My son Jack hears everything. His mom is a music writer and she gets tons of promos and we listen to most of them. There’s lots of classic/alt country in the house, and quite a bit of punk rock. He has started to show an affinity for the latter, but mostly neo-punk-ish like Green Day and The All American Rejects. But he will bust out at the top of his lungs with everything from “My Girl” to music from “The Nutcracker” to the Spice Girls’ “What I Really Really Want”.

In the car he hears lots of Outlaw Country and Coffeehouse (singer-songwriters) on Sirius. And sometimes we play the kids’ channel Kidstuff, which used to be intolerable but has really improved. The Wiggles and Barney and their ilk never did anything for him. He would scream when they came on. But it may have been because his parents were groaning. I think that’s a big influence on really little kids, by the way - the reactions, or lack thereof, of their parents.

What’s your feeling on ‘adult’ music vs. ‘kid’ music? There is all this concern about what kids should or shouldn’t listen to. Profanities notwithstanding, is there really a difference?

Not as much as the marketers would have you believe. Aside from the fact that obtuse navel-gazing, erotic longing and/or profane lyrics are few-and-far-between (but not unheard-of, especially on the playground), I see a preponderance of sweetness in music that is specifically targeted at kids via mass media (just as there is a lot of aggro-music targeted at young boys and men, and adult contemporary targeted at… adults). This stuff sells, obviously.

Whoever cooks up the images and the presentation has done ample research and clearly assumes (correctly, it would appear) that, for kids’ music, parents have pretty narrow expectations and maybe some anxiety about what the powerful medium of music might bring to their little ones’ ears.

I find this fascinating; whereas there is a long tradition of darkness in folk music, fairy tales, children’s lit, poetry, and even Pixar, for some reason the big bucks have not gotten behind modern music with shadowy elements. Darkness is rife elsewhere, from Cartoon Network to reality TV (which lots of kids watch with their folks).

The exception would be Disney signing Dan Zanes - that strikes me as a bold move in a new direction. I think they’re putting out They Might Be Giants, too. But quite frankly, the fact that much of the edgier, all-inclusive music remains at the fringes is not a bad thing. It’s a great time to be making music for which there are few actual hard/fast rules, where you don’t have to worry about competing on megalithic radio stations, and where the technology makes recording and promoting easier than it’s ever been.

I read somewhere that the two things so-called kids’ music can’t address are sex and death, but I wrote a song about The Day Of The Dead (called “Picnic In The Graveyard”) and it’s one of my most popular. Sex as a topic is pointless mainly because kids won’t know what you’re talking about, but also for other, obviously charged reasons. It opens a landscape they don’t yet have the tools to understand, for starters.

Having said that, there are plenty of songs not specifically targeted at kids that kids respond to - be they love songs, folk songs, hip hop - that have lyrical aspects that most would deem inappropriate, but even if the kids don’t grasp the content, they can still be drawn in. I sang along to suggestive songs when I was a tot (”I Want You/She’s So Heavy” from Abbey Road, “Black Boys” from Hair, “Brick House” by the Commodores to name a few) and I had no idea what I was singing about. And I survived.

I picked my son up from a playdate not long after Outkast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” was released, and the six-year-old kids were singing the explicit version of “Roses” at the top of their lungs. There’s a two-year-old at my job (I’m a preschool teacher) who LOVES James Brown and Gnarls Barkley and Donovan, all of which she was exposed to via her folks. She sings “Sex Machine” but she calls it “Six Machine”. A good song is like a virus - no one is immune, regardless of the song’s marketing, intent, and content.

Take away the images, the videos, the presentation, and the marketing of, say, the Wiggles and Barney and you’d get melodies and beats reminiscent of folk music and classic rock. And if Tom Waits covered “Fruit Salad” everyone would think it was so cool. Barney’s flagship songs “I Love You, You Love Me” and the theme to the TV show are, respectively, “This Old Man” and “Yankee Doodle.” I’d wager that when people make fun of those songs, they’re really actually making fun of the cloying, annoying show, not the song.

Like Dan Zanes - whose “Parades and Panoramas” had some great sea chanties and drinking songs on it - I prefer to call what I do “family music”, or “rock of all ages”, but both of us get labelled as kids’ music anyway. I think it’s interesting that the term “family” has become somewhat pejorative.

Music has become more and more a place to separate one’s self from others, to identify one’s tribe as distinct from another- and that’s big business. I’m not interested in that. I’m more interested in music’s power to bring people together, which is considerable. And I see a need for that now like never before. It seems a no-brainer, but sometimes people are still quite surprised when they come to an Uncle Rock gig and say “Wow. I had fun and so did my kids. Who knew this was possible?” I did. Volume is another thing. Generally, kids don’t seem to appreciate excruciating volume.

During your shows you invite kids up to the microphone. Have your ever been upstaged by a toddler?

All the time. But that’s really part of the gig. It’s not so much about me as it is about what happens to everyone when I play. But I’ve started playing places with actual stages so I’ve been doing less of that. I don’t want anyone getting hurt.

You do a fair amount of superhero songs. If you could create a singing superhero, what would he/she be like?

Captain Courage, but he would be afraid all the time. To bring home the fact that courage is not about a lack of fear, but about accepting, welcoming and overcoming fear.

Speaking of fears, do you ever have nightmares of screaming toddler fans chasing you and you tripping and falling, and then suddenly turning into a giant ice cream cone and the kids trying to devour you but getting giant brain-freezes and then you getting away as they hold their cute, little heads in pain?

Oh. My. God. What a great idea for a song.

Uncle Rock is currently touring metropolitan cities in the good old USA promoting his new CD Plays Well With Others.

+ also published on the PixelSurgeon website

“As Madonna gave way to Britney, whatever self-determination that message contained was watered down and commodified until all that was left was a gaggle of 6-year-old girls in belly-baring T-shirts (which I’m guessing they don’t wear as cultural critique). It is no wonder that parents, faced with thongs for 8-year-olds and Bratz dolls’ “passion for fashion,” fill their daughters’ closets with pink sateen; the innocence of Princess feels like a reprieve.” - NYTimes

At Devon’s Bronx preschool he’s learning stuff he would probably never learn from us. Such as, Christmas is all about “Baby Jesus birthday!”

“Today, as the mother of a young child, I’m the one who’s busy trying out new recipes for the holidays, and my son is my kitchen helper. But I now find myself hesitating to pass on that bowl I once savored so much. I’m a nutritionist, after all, so I’m more aware than most people of the warnings about raw batter, homemade mayonnaise, and egg-laden sauces like Caesar dressing and Hollandaise sauce.” - Y! Health