Mister Rogers Sings
album review
by jep clayton
I had been looking for Mister Rogers music when he died… Looking in vinyl shops, in fileshares, mainstream stores. I looked to no avail. And I have to confess that when he died, after the sadness, I wondered if he would experience a revival - a postmortem reevaluation - and if it would then be easier to find them. To my knowledge, that hasn't happened.
I finally skipped ahead, a year later, to the final step in many collections: eBay. A nice man in The Netherlands sent me a copy for 5 Euros, and now I finally have copies of the songs that I've been longing to hear: mmmm. And now I have to talk about it:
Mister Rogers, that strange-ass saint, could write a song. Mister Rogers Sings, the record, rocks - albeit more in a cradle-y way.
The most famous tunes frame the record: Won't You Be My Neighbour (It's a beautiful day in the nieghbourhood…) and It's Such a Good Feeling are musical comfort food. It's You I Like reflects one of his three main messages to kids, all forthright and gentle:
1. Mister Rogers likes us.
2. It's alright to be ourselves.
3. Our being (this is the heavy one, for adults) is constant.This third bit of advice is regularly overlooked, I suppose because the terms we'd use for it are too complicated to say to kids -- but Mister Rogers finds a way to put the idea across. He assures his audience (babies and nostalgic 30-somethings) that we don't need to worry too much about changing in important ways unless we choose to: Wishes Don't Make Things Come True; Sometimes People Are Good (and sometimes not); (what happens) When a Baby Comes.
When he's not singing advice to kids, he's daring to sing their experiences: I Like to Be Told presents a case for freedom of information in families: I like to be told when its going to hurt; when we're going to come home; when something is going to be difficult. I Like To Take My Time argues for the right to do just that.
I'd have picked Mister Rogers for a dad in a flash; at least I got to watch his show. Of course, there's some very un-modern talk about the stability of gender ("boys always grow up to be men"), but he was a minister, and wasn't born in our Entirely Relative Era. This is a man who has chosen to croon like a nerdy Bing Crosby, singing songs about love to babies. What a thing: so cool, and so never going to happen again. Our loss, his gift.
Mister Rogers: Sings 21 Favourite Songs From Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood.
Columbia House/Small World Enterprises, 1973.
Review by jep clayton, BadMonkeyX. January 2004