Introducing: They're Taking Over - A Series About Kidz Bop

I did, and it didn't cure my depression.

If you are of a certain age in the United States or United Kingdom, you have almost certainly heard of the Kidz Bop (or "KIDZ BOP") franchise. It may have been an annoyance, a laughingstock, a key memory from your childhood, or even all of the above at one point or another. What started as an order-by-mail 2-CD set became an international phenomenon, at least until the streaming era of music cut it down to a smaller size. The story of Kidz Bop might be the story of music in the 21st century. As you may know, I am inextricably drawn to hot messes, so it was inevitable that I would find myself snout-deep in this particular slop. And because I can't half-ass any stupid thing, I ranked all 1,311 songs from the fifty-three mainline albums to date. Therefore, I had no choice but to embark on a quest to blog about every single one of those mainline albums. And that is precisely what I plan to do, here on Giant Bomb dot com, a website about video games.

If, however, you are not familiar with Kidz Bop, the central premise is "children singing covers of modern hit songs". As you will soon see from the first entry of this series, there are severe flaws with this premise. The first fourteen albums feature adults as the lead singers (with a few notable exceptions), and it wasn't until KIDZ BOP 16 that the kids (hereafter referred to as "Kidz") fully took over. You may also wonder how they addressed the lewd content of the majority of popular songs. This is a way more complicated subject than I thought it would be going into this project, but if you need a one word answer: poorly. Regardless, Kidz Bop is a legitimate phenomenon, although its star has waned in recent years for a multitude of reasons. Even now you can Google search "children's music", and four of the top seven hits will return links to Kidz Bop content. The music video for the Kidz Bop cover of "Dance Monkey" has over 288 million views. They were popular enough to create a Flash-animated series named Kidz Bop Comic Adventures in 2006 (which I will of course have to watch someday), and even a Wii game. On this very website, Albummer covered Kidz Bop 3 in an episode. Because Jeff Bakalar didn't have the courage to keep that crew around at Giant Bomb HQ for the other fifty-two albums, I must finish the fight.

You may have questions, and we will certainly get to those. But this entry serves as an introduction to the series, as well as the form each entry will take. It may evolve over time, particularly as the franchise changes owners with different ideas for what Kidz Bop should be. But at the start, I'll provide some background for the album and/or context for the time in which it was released. I'll pick out highlights of songs worth discussing, whether they be high- or lowlights. I'll discuss the incomprehensible censorship decisions in each one of the albums, a phenomenon so widely known that it got its own webpage. I gave each song in my ranking a rating for Apathy and for Derangement, which I'll detail more as we move through the albums. And of course, I'll conclude each entry the same as an Albummer episode: by picking out what I feel are the best and worst song of the album. I plan to release these blogs on a biweekly cadence, and I hope that others are as amused and baffled as I was by the end of its run.

Now, onto the "Frequently" Asked Questions:

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: Beyond Kidz Bop being this weird glimpse into a culture parallel to ours, I've long been a trash music aficionado. It's always felt too easy to merely dismiss KB as bad versions of Billboard Top 100 hits, though that is certainly often the case. Maybe if KB had been some early Aughts oddity that petered out after a handful of albums, that's exactly what it would be. But nothing gets fifty-three entries without being at least somewhat worthwhile, and I'm happy to say that the series was much weirder and funnier than I thought it would be going in.

Q: Seriously, why are you doing this?

A: You wouldn't climb only part of Mount Kilimanjaro! And after completing such a climb, you would certainly want to talk about it whenever the opportunity presented itself. Especially when no opportunity presented itself, and people were silently begging you to talk about something, anything else! Also I ran a poll for my friends a couple of years ago, and they picked this over ranking songs by The Beatles.

Q: Fine. What makes a given Kidz Bop song better or worse than the others?

A: The most significant factor is often the base quality of the song, though this can help the KB version if they offered me a more tolerable version. For example, I personally can't stand Owl City, but the Kidz' version of "Fireflies" was one of their better efforts. Conversely, a hack job or inability to hit the notes of the original singer can ruin a great pop song. The level of inappropriateness for the lyrics escaping censorship was also a major factor, as that really makes it fail the whole "sung by kids, for kids" mantra of the series. Mostly it was the vibe I got from listening a couple of times.

Q: Has the production quality of Kidz Bop gotten better or worse over time?

A: The first few albums are terribly produced, in a way that strongly suggests that the series creators found six of the most blackmailable adults and hijacked a school bus full of third graders, then forced them all into a Nashville studio at gunpoint. The production skill did get steadily better, and being able to tune everything to the same four kids from KIDZ BOP 16 onward helped a lot. Whoever is doing the instrumentals for the EDM songs needs to find a new calling, though.

Q: Are there more, less, or the same percentage of way-too-adult songs repurposed for kids in awkward ways over the course of the franchise?

A: I would say the same, generally, though it's wildly inconsistent. In the most recent album at the time of writing this entry, they covered "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" by Shaboozey, but they worked on it for two years to make it KB-appropriate. Why they didn't just decide that particular song wasn't for them is completely beyond me.

Q: What have you realized makes a Kidz Bop song more tolerable for you after listening to over 1,300 of them? Did anything surprise you about what makes them more or less tolerable?

A: I touched on this earlier, but my attitude towards the original song was a big factor. Terrible production could make a song grating in a way the original didn't, though if the song was poorly performed enough, it could swing back around towards the top of the rankings simply for being hilarious to listen to. Later on in the series, they started covering more non-English-language songs, and those scored higher on average for the sheer novelty. I still know enough Spanish and German to know there was inappropriate subject matter in those songs, but it bothered me a lot less.

Q: Which songs haven't been Kidz Bopped yet that "should" have?

A: I have a lot of joke answers for this, but I definitely think they should have done "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers. Kidz Bop feels like a quintessentially Millennial franchise, and they've already covered "All Star" by Smash Mouth (twice, even).

Q: What was the hardest song to rank?

A: Definitely "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan. Purely by performance, the cover deserved to be in the top 100 of all KB songs, but the amount of censorship they applied to aggressively remove any LGBTQIA+ implications put the song firmly in the bottom half. This song in particular caused a severe enough public backlash that they allowed the next album to contain a dash of queerness. But overall, it made me second-guess a lot of my previous rankings, if I should have focused purely on the song quality or if the external circumstances deserved a heavier weight. Ultimately, I came down somewhere in the middle, which should do nicely in satisfying no one.

Q: What do your family members make of this project?

A: My partner was oddly impressed by it, and the kids have no idea. The older of the two did recognize the KB cover of "Believer" by Imagine Dragons, and she apparently loves that song. Everyone else in my family smiles politely if I talk about it.

Q: Has listening to the Kidz Bop covers changed your perception of pop music in any way?

A: Yes, in both directions. On the negative side, I can't just ignore pop songs I hear at the grocery store anymore. Each one prompts internal "ohhh who is this song by" questions, to the point that I've brought up my rankings for the peace of mind of knowing. But on the positive side, there are a number of songs and artists I would never have sought out myself that I regard more highly than I did previously. I think I like Post Malone now?

Q: What is the strangest rabbit hole you encountered during this project?

A: There's a parallel, alternative wiki to the main one (both are on Fandom), and each page of it starts with the same grievance against Kidz Bop and specific editors of the wiki. I'd say more but I'm still researching just what the hell is going on with it.

Q: When does the first entry for this series come out?

A: Very soon! As soon as I see this has been reviewed and published, I'll submit the blog for KIDZ BOP (2001).

I can answer any other questions in the comments. I hope you enjoy my suffering as much as I did.