Watching children trying to act like adults is depressing. This is
why I do not endorse belly-button-baring
T-shirts, rolling
backpacks, or exposing Hannah Montana’s naked shoulder. And while I
know there were probably bags of money waiting for the kids of Kidz Bop
Live backstage, it didn’t make watching them gyrate their hips and do
their best impressions of 30-year-old pop stars last Saturday at the
Moore Theatre any less terrible.
Kidz Bop is the children’s version of the popular Now That’s What I
Call Music series. Many people revile it for butchering, watering down,
and moralizing Top 40 songs—a typical Amazon.com review reads, “On Kidz Bop
10, the Kidz Bop Bratz killed Madonna’s ‘Hung Up.’ Because of this,
they must die.”
But some people appreciate the “Kidz Bop Bratz,” especially when
they cover great songs. I’ve been to grown-up parties where their cover
of Modest Mouse’s “Float On” played, and it’s bizarre to hear children
singing the same lyrics as Isaac Brock, their tiny falsetto voices
creating new harmonies, adding a spooky new dimension to the life of
the song.
Kidz Bop songs initially sound like the ultimate ironic pop
compliment, a YouTube parody of epic proportions, but the producers of
Kidz Bop aren’t aiming for parody. They’re in the simple business of
selling other people’s pop songs to kids, and they’ve been incredibly
successful. You don’t want to know how many people buy the CDs, but I’m
going to tell you anyway: Kidz Bop has sold over 10.5 million albums.
The Kidz Bop Live concert at the Moore, though, was only about
one-sixteenth full. While waiting for the show to start, the boy to my
left repeatedly hit his mother with a
multicolored light stick
(“Please don’t do that, please don’t do that, please don’t do that” she
responded). The father to my right plugged his ears with his fingers
before the music even started (something I’ve never seen someone do
before).
The lights dimmed. An 8-year-old child walked onto the stage,
exuberant, and pointed to the second-floor balcony, where exactly zero
people were sitting. There were strobes. A beach ball blazoned with the
Kidz Bop logo came close, but did not quite hit my face.
Curiously, most of the children onstage don’t actually sing. Adults
sing next to the children and play instruments behind them. The
children are talented enough to do backflips, but singing Rihanna, I
suppose, is a complicated beast.
Confetti is sprayed into the audience with a noxious gas. A
little-girl audience member stares at me, a blob of confetti hanging
off her head, her mouth gaping open, and says, “Hi.” She readjusts her
blob in a strobe-lit daze and continues to stare at me until I turn
away, afraid.
Later on, there is the unsurprising binary of repetitious,
gender-specific shout-outs. “All the boys in the house say yeah,”
someone yells over the microphone. “Now all the girls in the house say
yeah!”
The music, of course, is not meant for critic’s ears. The pruned,
Bopped-up pop songs sounded like a Chuck E. Cheese ad and looked like
an episode of Wonder Showzen, the short-lived MTV late-night
show where children were lured into saying very adult things.
“Umbrella” has nothing offensive in it, but it somehow sounds even less
offensive when children are singing it. It sounds like an elementary
school predance party, like a drama camp finale with a $50,000
budget.
Kidz Bop exists in its own world, like
Disney-themed media
products—low-hanging fruit most music journalists look past for
their own good. Entertainment Weekly gave Kidz Bop 8 a
“C-,” just to remind readers that Entertainment Weekly cares
about good music. People seem to agree that children’s entertainment is
best ignored, unless it offends or reveals something fascinating to
your brain while under the influence of hallucinogens.
I somehow thought I would laugh during this concert. But no. Irony
shmirony. There is nothing funny or ironic about children singing the
backup parts for a watered-down, painfully out-of-tune Rob Thomas song.
There is nothing funny about Kidz Bop.
Parents know this. Parents know Kidz Bop is terrible. And yet, they
laugh as their kids sing along, entertained at least by their own
children. After the show, I tried to snag a parental interview. One
father saw my notebook and came right up to me, a big smile on his
face, and said, “Wasn’t that just awful?” 