Parenting & Family Quote by Fred Frith

Kids are the one audience you can’t bluff, and Fred Frith’s line quietly weaponizes that fact. “Music for kids is never anything but experimental” lands as a sideways compliment: children don’t arrive with genre loyalty, nostalgic attachments, or the social need to “get it.” They listen with their whole bodies, then move on. For a composer like Frith - steeped in improvisation, noise, and the joy of making instruments misbehave - that’s not a hurdle. It’s an ideal lab.

The phrasing matters. “Well, I think” performs modesty while teeing up a provocation. And that tag question - “is it?” - turns the claim into a conspiratorial nudge, as if the listener already knows the truth: the adult world is the conservative one. Adults demand cues and categories; kids treat every sound as potentially meaningful. In that sense, children’s music isn’t a simplified version of “real” music. It’s the rare space where real curiosity is still the default setting.

There’s also a critique hiding in plain sight of how “kids’ music” is marketed: bright, repetitive, aggressively educational, built to reassure parents rather than challenge ears. Frith flips the hierarchy. If you take children seriously, you don’t sand down the weirdness - you lean into it. The experimental isn’t a niche; it’s the starting point before taste calcifies into preference, and preference hardens into policing.