Thurston, Roky and the Sesame Street avant garde

Leave it to Thurston Moore to have a better idea about how to raise your kids than you. The Sonic Youth guitarist and vocalist earlier this month gave a Sunday-morning dissertation on white noise – to children aged eight to twelve. The lecture was part of the Avant Garde Preschool, a project started up by New York advertising and design mogul Andy Spade that aims to teach children the basics of abstract thinking. Spade gets friends working in various fields with a skew towards creating outside ‘normative’ boundaries to hold short courses in his office space in NYC that parents can take their spawn along to. The opening event was run by stencil artist Karen Kimmel, who held a class for four- to eight-year-olds focusing on “the exploration of colour, shape and form”.

Of course, the whole concept reeks of New York artists whose kids don’t really need the education because they’re going to grow up to be Burberry models or junkies or both anyway, but the Catch-22 remains that if you can imagine convincing your five-year-old to give up a weekend morning of watching Dora The Explorer to go hang out with a strange old man (however eerily youthful looking) who’s going to talk for an hour about a noise signal that has something to do with density and distribution and is really hard to listen to and maybe relates to what music is but sort of not really but maybe, then your work is probably already done.

The Avant Garde Preschool idea does bring up the question of ways in which parents, or society or whatever, can go about introducing young people to abstract concepts about music and art and instil in them the freedom to make their own decisions about where they can take those concepts. On a basic level, which is what is arguably needed for young kids, there are, of course, available forums for introducing music and art outside widely used forms. One of the most obvious is Nickelodeon’s Yo Gabba Gabba!, a stylistically ‘retro’-leaning television and stage show that has incorporated performances by ‘indie’ acts such as Low, Of Montreal and The Clientele (though didn’t choose local acts nearly as interesting when it last toured Australia – it’s touring again soon). Then there was the 2002 album recorded by former Blue’s Clues host Steve Burns, Songs For Dustmites, produced by The Flaming Lips guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, an album only toddlers who forwent afternoon nap time to scour Pitchfork reviews probably heard.

Outside formats marketing themselves as ‘indie kids’ concepts and accidental heroes, though, there are even more – or maybe less, depending how you look at them – obvious examples. How about Ren & Stimpy, an at times visually demanding animation that challenges concepts of ‘children’s humour’ and the simplicity of character relationships in a cartoon format? Or Oscar The Grouch and his Sesame Street song I Love Trash? Placed in the context of popular music in the western world, a scrappy puppet singing in a man’s gravelly voice about how much he loves rubbish could be seen as a pretty good place to introduce ideas of the ‘avant garde’ (without getting into what ‘avant garde’ really means to music or culture in 2010, or ever, or whatever).

But maybe all of this is over-thinking it. There’s a great clip on The 13th Floor Elevators co-founder Roky Erickson’s website in which Okkervil River’s Will Sheff interviews him in relation to the album Erickson and Okkervil River have recorded, True Love Cast Out All Evil (out Friday through Spunk). Sheff has obviously done his research and is interested in the concepts behind the decisions Erickson has made musically and, at one point, about what he thought when he first heard Tommy Hall playing the jug in 13th Floors. Erickson responds: “He just said that’s what he was doing. He said he found this old inebriate bottle and cleaned it all out, got all the spider webs and flies out of it and said, ‘Boy that’s gonna be good for, you know, whistling into it or something’.” Sheff asks, “Did you think, ‘This is going to be really weird,’ or did you just sort of roll with it?” to which Erickson flippantly explains, “No. I thought it could be a good idea.”