The art critic and journalist Carly Berwick has a nice interview with Mike Kelley, formerly of Destroy All Monsters, about noise music, that postmodern clang of junk ensembles, feedback, and found sound that arty types seem to like.

As Carly points out on her personal blog, kids really dig them some noise music, too. She should know — we are old friends, our kids are friends, and her son is a 3-year-old John Cage, fiercely musical and yet wholly atonal, often with a somewhat prepared guitar around his neck.

It’s not surprising that kids, with their thrashing and banging and offkey singing, would have post-modern leanings. John Cage once called music “not an attempt to bring order out of chaos … but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.” If there’s a better description of the nearly hallucinogenic living-in-the-moment that is the life of a toddler, I haven’t seen it.

I am sometimes confused about how the anarchic music that kids make squares with the neatly saccharine shlock that they consume most of the time. I mean, Carly’s kid may like the Incapacitants, but mine as often as not likes to curl up on the couch to a children’s choir singing “Las Mañanitas.” I think I’m taking the middle road by playing lots of They Might Be Giants (who, it must be said, make fantastic kiddiesongs). But even those are conventional creations. Only a few artists have the creative vision necessary to hold a piano concert that consists of shoving a piano through a wall. A few artists — and every child that ever lived.