*Note: There’s an update at the bottom of this post. Funny story – Back on September 7, acclaimed children’s musician MISTER G unfollowed The Rock Father on twitter. I have no idea why he’d do that, but I use a service called “JustUnfollow” to keep track of such things (interesting social experiment), so I returned the favor by unfollowing @MisterGSongs. Then I tweeted about it.
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Odd. @https://twitter.com/mistergsongs”;>mistergsongs unfollowed me. And I was just about to review his new album, CHOCOLALALA.
— The Rock Father™ (@therockfather) https://twitter.com/therockfather/status/244145893207584768″; data-datetime=”2012-09-07T18:51:31+00:00″>September 7, 2012
Since I’m not sure why Mister G would unfollow me, I can only assume that the power of my rock was too mighty for him to handle. It happens sometimes, and you can’t fault those that can’t hang with getting out of Dodge when the power of the rock overwhelms them. In reality, sans a couple of RT’s, Mister G hasn’t posted an original tweet since June 9, so it’s possible that he doesn’t understand how to properly use the twitter platform to reach new listeners or connect with reviewers and media outlets in the not-very-large world of music for children and families. That’s unfortunate, because Ben Gundersheimer’s new album, CHOCOLALALA is pretty good. It’s really too bad that his 246 followers on twitter probably don’t even know it’s out, since there was never any release week tweetage to alert them that it hit iTunes on September 15.
The bilingual, Latin-flavored CHOCOLALALA hits the sweet spot for attention-span by bringing in the 11-song set at just over 25 minutes. The production is excellent, the music catchy, but unfortunately, I don’t speak fluent Spanish (sans what I’ve learned from Brujeria albums), so my understanding of the lyrical content is fairly limited. The bottom line is that the language barrier doesn’t matter when the music is good, and when presented to children it can broaden their developing horizons.
Will some scoff at my posting of this article as a “review”? Probably.
UPDATE: A few short hours after publishing this post, I heard from Mister G. We’re now connected on twitter, and G has stated that his “Rogue interns have been summarily disciplined.”
The Rock Father Rating: 3.5/5 Stars
FTC Disclosure: A copy of Mister G’s CHOCOLALALA was provided to The Rock Father for the purpose of review consideration. The opinions presented above are that of James Zahn with input from a toddler.
