the problem with "Fruit Salad"

I was 7 years old when I heard “The Thunder Rolls” for the first time. I loved it, but I remember thinking it was a song about the perils of severe weather. I could sing all the words long before I had any idea what they meant. The first inkling I got that there was some deeper mystery to the song was a line near the beginning, “He's heading back from somewhere that he never should have been”. I had thought before that he shouldn't have been there because it was dangerous because a huge storm was coming. But something started nagging at me that maybe he was doing something dishonest, not just stupid.

After that, I started listening harder, searching for clues. Eventually I realized more or less what, “but on the wind and rain a strange new perfume blows”, actually meant. And that blew my prepubescent mind. I started thinking this was a treasure trove of information about the most intimate and complicated of adult relationships. I listened that much more intently after that. I wanted to wring every last drop of knowledge about how to be a grown up out of it. So thanks to Garth Brooks, by the age of 8, I was contemplating with a decent degree of accuracy, the emotional complexities of sexual relationships.

Compare that to “fruit salad” by the wiggles. I hear kids singing this song everyday. They love it. But they also love eating straw fulls of chemically colored sugar, so I think it's safe to question their preferences. There's no depth to “fruit salad”, no hidden meaning, no complexity.  Most importantly, there's no incentive to think. When the kids hear it, they immediately understand all the words. It doesn't leave them curious.  It doesn't inspire them to seek out new information and start imaging recombining what they have in new ways.  It destroys their ability to be creative.  When you start eating a lot of junk food, you stop appreciating the flavors of healthy natural foods.  And when you start listening to the wiggles, you stop appreciating mystery and nuance.  Just like junk food circumvents the benefits of nutrition, the music made for children circumvents all the socio-emotional-developmental benefits of art.  It's candy for the ears.

The problem with “Fruit Salad” is it has no nutritional value.