There’s no accounting for taste and if you need proof, acquire a three-year-old. Sometimes my son’s preferences amaze me in their quality. His recent delight at Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker stands as one of the highlights of my parenting life. But he is also, lamentably, a child, which means he sometimes enjoys things I can’t bring myself to compromise on.
Friends who receive WhatsApp videos of him vibing to, say, Dutch electro may be surprised to learn that his actual tastes are closer to the DayGlo stylings of songs about apples and bananas, or startling morality tales concerning monkeys jumping on beds, frogs sitting on logs and so forth. They don’t need to know this, to know that I have failed, given up even. I allow and even encourage his own tentative steps toward forging his own cultural path.
His favourites are mostly doggerel, of course, but I put up with it because I am a caring and supporting father who will withstand such terminal complacency since it’s wrong to yuck someone else’s yum – a lesson I learned from a particularly clever ladybird on another of his favourite TV shows. The alternative would be worse: sending him into school this September with an alienating discography of 90s techno in his head, while all his pals want to discuss the relative motion of bus wheels. What good is it for him to be artistically correct, as he pulls a sandwich from his In Our Time lunchbox, if it makes his friends think he’s weird?
There is, however, one exception to this détente between us. I speak of a Netflix cartoon named Morphle, which has slowly destroyed my capacity for tolerance entirely.
Morphle is a small, shapeshifting creature who can turn into anything wished by his friend (owner?) Mila. This he does in a series of episodes that are so gratuitously long and meandering I’m fairly sure some of them last a full fortnight. Every character looks like one of those off-brand toys you find in poundshops, with names like Transmorphers or Dinosaur Legend Power Men. Each has the odd, weightless texture of an inflatable, and every character moves through space with the uncanny spring of a bouncy castle in a strong wind. The animation of their movements is so repulsive, I can only compare its effect on me to food poisoning.
And yet it delights him. It gives my son, my beautiful son, true and abundant pleasure. What kind of snob am I to deny him this? What kind of monster?
‘No’ I tell him when he asks for it, feeling my gorge rise at the thought of another 20 minutes stretched to six hours by its cultural poverty. He objects, but I hold firm. He will reject the next jungle mix I proffer out of spite, and maybe I’ll deserve it but, with all apologies to a certain clever ladybird, there are some yums which can absolutely get yucked.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
