Billboard magazine just announced its first Greatest of All Time rankings,
a collection of the bestselling songs, albums and artists in music history. Curiously,
at number four of the Most Billboard 200 Top 10 Albums by Artist list – below the Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand,
and The Beatles, but ahead of Bob Dylan, Madonna, and Elton John – is Kidz Bop
Kids, a group of, well, kids that has racked up 22 top 10 debuts since 2001.
That is the fourth-highest rank of any
artist in history. The
group also holds the title for the most
Top 10 debuts of any artist this
century.
If you’re not the parent of a child under the
age of 12, or under 12 yourself, you may be asking, who or what are the Kidz
Bop Kids?
Kidz Bop is a brand of compilation albums –
30 thus far – featuring kids on the cusp of their teenage years performing kid-friendly
versions of contemporary radio hits for a grade-school audience. Created in
2000 by a pair of record executives who realized the lucrative potential in providing
music parents would approve for their children, Kidz Bop has snowballed
into a pop force to be reckoned with, as its Billboard ranking attests. According to the brand’s website, for the
last five consecutive years the Kidz Bop Kids have been the “#1 Kids’ Artist”
in the U.S.
Kidz Bop achieves this not only by
emphasizing bouncy, danceable fun, but by sanitizing the lyrics of popular
music, which as any parent knows are rife today with sexually explicit and foul
language inappropriate for anyone, much less children. Pop culture has become
so sex-saturated that it’s a massive relief for concerned parents to find and
feed their children the innocuous (albeit vacuous), clean-cut musical entertainment
of Kidz Bop.
But in a Slate article titled “The Kidz Are All Right,” associate professor of communication Myles
McNutt complains that the Kidz Bop music phenomenon is becoming “increasingly,
oddly conservative,” by which he means the brand is not only cleaning up
naughty lyrics but is also shying away from “addressing issues of identity and
struggle in contemporary society.”
In 2011 Kidz Bop removed explicit
references to issues of sexuality, race, and ethnicity from Lady Gaga’s
“Born This Way.” While this may have pleased parents, McNutt complains that it
is an example of Kidz Bop removing “any semblance of cultural meaning that
disrupts the identity-free world” the company promises. He feels that
Kidz Bop is in a position to help introduce
meaningful concerns regarding social and cultural identity to children, in a
media space where these ideas could be raised productively, but doing so
threatens their reputation as a safe space for even the most protective parents.
Call me conservative, but I don’t believe
explicit song lyrics are an especially “productive” way to raise questions of
social and cultural identity. I also don’t believe most kids younger than twelve
– the Kidz Bop target audience – even need
to be wrestling with what McNutt calls “issues of identity and struggle.” They
need to be having fun and going to school (or better yet, being homeschooled)
and allowing their childhood to develop naturally without having “meaningful
concerns” introduced to them by pop stars who themselves are too young and
immature to be charged with that responsibility.
McNutt and others like him who lament Kidz
Bop “conservatism” seem to want to rush kids into some sort of social justice
consciousness. There’s nothing wrong with a little innocence. I’m a father of
three little girls, and I’m not looking forward to the time when they begin to
lose their beautiful innocence. Of course, that’s an inevitable part of growing
up, and one of my jobs as a parent is to guide them through that process in a
way that allows them to adjust to that loss in an emotionally and
intellectually healthy way – and that means doing so at an appropriate time in
their lives, without having to compete along the way with the questionable
messages in Beyoncé’s or Katy Perry’s lyrics.
Kidz Bop may have conquered the pre-teen pop
world, but McNutt states confidently that “No matter how conservative the brand’s
lyric changes become, contemporary music will always contain deeper, richer
cultural meaning.” Of course it will, but this begs the questions: What deeper,
richer cultural meaning is being imparted, and is it appropriate for children?
Considering the decadent state of contemporary American culture, I’d say the
answer to the second part of that question is no.
Music certainly can be an empowering, even
life-changing refuge for children and teens struggling with new emotions and
self-discovery. But kids deserve better than to be guided through that
self-discovery by the likes of Lady Gaga, Nikki Minaj, and Miley Cyrus. I’m not
a fan of Kidz Bop – there are many great songs out there that don’t require
editing for profanity and that don’t steer kids toward a premature obsession with
identity politics. But for a few years before teenage angst kicks in, let kids
be kids, and let them bop.
From Acculturated, 11/20/15
