They're Taking Over #01 - Muzak, But For Kids

For a series as long-running and widely known as Kidz Bop, extensive details of its origins are not readily available. In my research, I came across the same story told by creators Cliff Chenfeld and Craig Balsam. To paraphrase, they would attend children's birthday parties (to which their own kids were invited), and they noticed the kids getting tired of listening to Raffi and Barney songs on loop. The other parents confided that they were extremely wary of listening to pop music as the alternative; the 90's was the decade of the parental advisory sticker, after all. As it happened, Chenfeld and Balsam were cofounders of Razor & Tie, a record label that issued all of those greatest hits multi-CD collections that you could only order by phone. If you watched any TV in the 90's and early Aughts in the United States, you undoubtedly remember at least one of these (the disco one is embedded in my head). One of their compilations, Monster Ballads, is certified platinum. It made Razor & Tie a ton of money at the exact time Chenfeld and Balsam were brainstorming how to enter the pre-tween market, and thus the work on Kidz Bop began in earnest. All of this might be giving too much credit to Chenfeld and Balsam, though. United Kingdom residents of a certain age are likely screaming about the most obvious point of comparison to Kidz Bop: the Minipops.

Minipops debuted on Channel 4 in the UK in 1983, and the idea behind it was to have preteen children sing pop music of the day in order to appeal to that post-Raffi / pre-puberty crowd noted above. You may wonder how Minipops handled the intensely inappropriate source material to make it something parents would allow their children to watch. The answer, naturally, was that they didn't try. British media immediately seized on how jarring it was to see children dressed up like sultry pop mistresses, with the extreme example being a 5-year-old singing Sheena Easton's "9 to 5" uncensored. For those unfamiliar, this includes the line "we make love". British reviews were characteristically scathing, with Julian Barnes calling it "tasteless and appalling". The seminal moment that started covering Minipops with grave dirt came when Tracey Ullman parodied it. She dressed up in revealing clothing and had older men slavering over her, preying on every parental fear. Despite the cancellation of the show in 1984, the series released five albums (adding to the two they created before cancellation), the last of which released in 1989. Canada loved the Minipops, and the group's high point came in a three-week tour there in 1983. While I haven't seen Minipops mentioned anywhere by Chenfeld or Balsam, it would be insane for it to have had zero influence on them. Surely, at some point, someone at least brought up the failed attempt to do precisely the thing Razor & Tie was betting on. At the very least, they learned that having children sing the least palatable portions of the song would be an enormous mistake.

Kidz Bop was recorded in "late" 2000, in Nashville from what I can tell. Razor & Tie had quite a wealth of popular 90's songs to choose from, and to fill out a 2-CD set, they would need to plumb the depths. The song selection is fairly bizarre, with "Real World" by Matchbox 20 being at least four years old by the time the album idea was being developed. Having listened to all fifty-three albums, the most jarring aspect of my second listen was that the adult singers are immensely prominent on this album. Only one song ("Steal My Sunshine", by Lem) is fully sung by children, and not particularly well at that. The six adult singers are Chris Kelsey ("All Star", "Summer Girls"); Amanda Daniels ("Oops... I Did It Again"); Berny Martinez ("Bye Bye Bye", "One Week"); Vanessa Buxton ("What A Girl Wants", "Believe"); Jennifer Foutley ("MMMBop", "That Don't Impress Me Much"); and my personal archnemesis Arthur Jefferson (see below). The entire album was eventually rerecorded by the Kidz of 2021 to celebrate the series' 20th anniversary. As for censorship, it's not clear to me how many lyrics even got changed. The word "sexy" appears for the first of only two times ever, and "Slide" by the Goo Goo Dolls might have no lyrical changes whatsoever. The "bullet to your brain" lyric of "Livin' La Vida Loca" is also intact, which is wild considering that even the suggestion of violence would get turned into esoteric nonsense later on. Overall, I'm pretty shocked that this series lasted more than one entry, but people were a lot more forgiving of shoddy first tries back then.

This is a whole lot of introduction, and I know you filthy little kids are here for the music. Without further ado, let's get into the bits.

[Album Link]

The Songs: I went over some of the highlights / lowlights during my spiel above, but there's still quite a lot going on with this album. First, I rated this my second lowest quality album of the entire series, owed mostly to its crappy production and overreliance on adult singers. The album begins with Smash Mouth's "All Star", as it was developed during the period where everything was contractually mandated to carry the song. The dinky keyboards in the back make it sound like Neil Cicierega is about to drop a mashup with Wesley Willis or something. The kids don't even come in until 38 seconds deep, enough to convince you that you're just listening to karaoke at a radio station contest. Speaking of bizarre production, the uncredited children of "Steal My Sunshine" deliver two excruciating (and seemingly slow-motion) spoken word sequences. I forgot that "MMMBop" uncensored is over 5 minutes long. And if you play the portion of "One Week" where the children, agonizingly high in the mix, repeat the phrase "chickity China" eight times out of context to another human being, then being tried at The Hague is too nice a fate for you. You know the setlist is rough when the risible "Amazed" by Lonestar is the eighth best track (by my reckoning). There was no reason for this to be 30 songs long, other than a 2-CD set is the only card that Razor & Tie knew to play.

Most Apathetic: In all the hubbub of introducing you fine folks to this sonic trainwreck, I neglected to explain how I define Apathy in the context of a Kidz Bop song. This is an aspect of the music that will shift as the adults are phased out of Kidz Bop, which won't happen for another dozen or so albums. During the adult singers era, this mostly means how much the kids have been pushed aside despite the tagline of the series being "by kids, for kids". It can also mean lazy censorship, which ranges from inconsistent to nonexistent. The first Kidz Bop album strongly abuses the latter point, and this was by far the least-censored album in my anecdotal experience. I provided the worst examples above, but I can assure you that there are many occasions where I thought "surely they wouldn't..." just before they sang the standard lyrics. Their solution to this dissonance was to just make the adult sing the most risqué parts, which mostly happened. The covers of "Slide" and Third Eye Blind's "Never Let You Go" both received 9 (out of 10) ratings for Apathy; "Slide" for the complete lack of censorship ("don't you love the life you killed") and "Never Let You Go" for relegating the kids so far to the back that I forget they were involved. In terms of pure poor production, "All Star" is the worst offender, and it earned a 9 as well. This might not seem so bad, but across over 1,300 songs, I only rated three the coveted 10/10. And after this album, there will only be six more 9/10 Apathy ratings. Somehow, the aggregate made this only the sixth-most apathetic Kidz Bop album, though in hindsight I should probably have juiced some of those numbers a bit. On the flipside, the cover of Cher's "Believe" got a stellar 1/10 Apathy rating from me because they kept all of the godawful autotuning in the song, which is frankly far more effort than they put into the rest of the album.

Most Deranged: This category probably requires less explanation. Essentially, this is how close I felt pushed to the brink of sanity while listening to the track. Logical covers, such as Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way", played out exactly as you might expect. Keeping songs that vividly describe physical intimacy (as with Jennifer Paige's "Crush" and "Kiss Me" by Sixpence None the Richer) merited Derangement scores of 7 and 9, respectively. But Kidz Bop's first entry contains two 10/10 Deranged songs, out of twenty-four total 10s across every album. The worst offender is "Slide" for the reasons noted above (whose combined Apathetic - Deranged score of 19 is truly admirable), but the "One Week" cover earned its perfect score. The direction is so bizarre, as well as the production decisions, that I can only recommend listening to it to truly understand its strangeness. This will become a hallmark of the most Deranged songs of the series, and eventually it became a prerequisite to becoming a bottom-dweller in the overall rankings.

Censorship Report: LOL what censorship? The only two instances I could find are a cut lyric on "Steal My Sunshine" and cutting the word "sex" from "What A Girl Wants" (which, again, did not cut "sexy"). I can't even tell which line got modified in "Steal My Sunshine", so the funniest lyrical change is Christina Aguilera's by default, I guess. I promise that later entries will have funnier things to report, but on this one: they just didn't care.

Wiki Fact You Should Know: The Fandom wiki (yes, I know) for Kidz Bop has been invaluable for my research, so I want to shout out something funny or strange that doesn't quite fit the above categories in this section. It's generally full of useful facts, the most useful of which is identifying which songs are sung in a different key or pitch. But the wiki REALLY needed people to know that this album "was released on the same day that Scooby-Doo & The Cyber Chase was released on VHS and DVD". This might be the surest indicator that actual children edit the wiki, because I can't believe an adult would care to know this fact. However, now I do, and so do you.

Best Song / Worst Song: I want to shout out their cover of "That's The Way It Is" by Celine Dion, even though it's not the best song on the album. For some reason, Kidz Bop goes really hard on any Celine Dion cover, making me think the owners really love Celine Dion. The best song is the aforementioned "I Want It That Way" by Backstreet Boys, which is competently sung and uses the children well, relatively speaking. The worst song, not only for this album but for the entire series, is "Slide" by Goo Goo Dolls. An honorable mention goes to every song sung by Arthur Jefferson. "All The Small Things" by Blink-182, "Fly" by Sugar Ray, and "Real World" by Matchbox 20 are drunkenly crooned in a way that will strip your soul out of your body. The children do the best they can to salvage all of these songs, but it's simply too great a hurdle. Arthur, if you're reading this nearly three decades later: I just want to know why.

Next Time: Kidz Bop (2001) turns out to be a pretty big commercial hit. We'll check in on the contemporary reception, then we'll dive into Kidz Bop 2 and try to figure out what they changed, if anything. But more importantly, I will introduce you to the most painful Ja Rule imitation to ever exist.

No, not that one.

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