They're Taking Over #04 - Oh No, This One Has Sk8er Boi

As I keep teasing for some ungodly reason, Razor & Tie moved the recording operations of Kidz Bop to New York City sometime in either 2002 or 2003. There doesn't appear to be an explicit reason for picking up stakes from Nashville, but the Fandom wiki page for this album is pretty sure it's "because of Val's Artist Management", with no further description. I looked into the company, and they appear to be a very small (3 employees) operation in New York. My assumption is that VAM managed the various uncredited child and adult singers for the local recording sessions. It's very likely that Chris Chenfeld and Craig Balsam, who were friends at New York University together and worked as attorneys in the City afterwards, wanted their new money machine much closer to home. Razor & Tie was entering its golden age of success on the heels of Monster Ballads and the first few Kidz Bop albums, and in the coming years it would sign artists like All That Remains as it expanded its ambitions. While I do want to explore Razor & Tie's history in more detail (especially its namesake), I'll leave that for another time when there's less going on behind the scenes.

The big question, of course, is whether all these changes on the business side made a meaningful difference (read: improvement) to the music. The first three albums have a truly ramshackle production, to the point where you often wonder if anyone involved has even heard music before, let alone made it. In this latest effort, gone are the truly amateurish instrumentals of "Heaven" and "He Loves U Not", which have been replaced with... reasonably competent ones? Arthur Jefferson has been exiled to the Phantom Zone, but the vocals aren't that much improved. For whatever it's worth, the children seem better, which almost certainly means they were receiving actual direction on their singing this time around. The censorship is still borderline non-existent; this album contains the second and final time the word "sexy" slips through the heat stroke-addled editor's notice. And as far as song choice goes, Jimmy Eat World's "A Praise Chorus" is here to get absolutely butchered, despite never being a Billboard Hot 100 song. On balance, it doesn't feel like a whole lot has changed, but maybe it's first New York album jitters.

There are some other minor interesting things to note about this album that are unlikely to fit the categories below. First, every song on the album is sung in its normal pitch, which will become an increasingly rare event as time goes on. This probably ended up hurting the adult singers on the covers of "The Remedy" by Jason Mraz, "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera, and the aforementioned "A Praise Chorus", which all sound like I'm-not-drunk-enough-to-listen-to-this caliber karaoke. Second, the upgrade to VAM means we're going to start seeing some famous (or semi-famous) names pop up. The biggest one is in the conversation below, but Nick Jr. star Christiana Anbri, who was 13 at the time, was a child singer on this album. Kristin Klabunde, another Nickelodeon voice actor (who later acted in Les Miserables on Broadway, damn), can apparently be clearly heard in a few songs. Lastly, there seems to be an actual effort to pull some songs from outside the Hot 100 that would ostensibly appeal to children, in this case Hilary Duff's "Why Not". I'm still unclear why an adult is even singing the song, considering Duff was a mere 15 years old when the song was recorded. And with the revelation that I'm older than Hilary Duff threatening to eat what's left of my sanity, I think we should get on with the features.

[ Album Link ]

The Songs: Kidz Bop 4 starts with a cover of "Sk8er Boi" by Avril Lavigne. The base song has its defenders, but I am here to tell you that this song sucks complete shit. It's a weirdly vitriolic anthem about a girl not putting out for a skateboarder in high school (mostly thanks to her friends, it sounds), and then being upset five years later when she's a single mom and the skateboarder is a star guitarist. This is already pretty terrible, but then Lavigne adds the detail that she's dating the skateboarder, and they made the song specifically to mock a girl that turned her boyfriend down when they were children. It's a pretty clear case of a villain not realizing they're the bad guy, and when the singer is less talented than Lavigne herself, it's really all I could focus on. One of the strangest moments in the album is when a cover of "If You're Not The One" by Daniel Bedingfield (who?) is sung suspiciously well, like an order of magnitude better than every other adult singer. Well it turns out it was Justin Guarini, runner-up of the first season of American Idol. Fortunately for him, the existence of the movie From Justin to Kelly ensures that this is not the worst piece of media he's been on. We have our usual inappropriate song selections like covers of "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!" by Shania Twain and "The Game of Love" by Santana / Michelle Branch, neither of which is worth writing much about. A special shout-out to the cover of "Swing Swing" by The All-American Rejects, which morbidly fascinated my friends with how consistently flat the singing was throughout the song. Overall, the album ranked 42nd out of 53 (which, as a reminder, was the most recent KB album when I finished my rankings), which is very bad but not bottom 10-worthy.

Most Apathetic: The same cannot be said for this album's apathy rating. With an average of 5.2 out of 10 score per song, this is the second-most apathetic album in the first 53 mainline LPs. A big part of this is an expectation that adding a professional management layer would improve the music, but it truly feels like they just didn't care how it sounded. There are no 10s, and the only 9 is a forgettable J-Lo cover ("All I Have"). There are sleepy-sounding 8s for "The Remedy", No Doubt's "Underneath It All", and Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why", which itself is kind of a snoozer. The major factor is likely that only 6 of the 30 songs managed to get a score of 1, 2, or 3 in the apathy category, which is less than the number of 5/10s (seven) and barely more than the number of 6/10s (five) and 7/10s (four). After relistening to the entire track list, I may have been unfair to this album compared to the previous three, if only because the instruments do sound noticeably better. Still, I stand by the idea that they should have figured out how to make one of these sound at least partly good nearly three years into the series.

Most Deranged: We have another 10 in the cover of "The Ketchup Song" by Las Ketchup, which I had blocked out of my memory. This is the aforementioned final use of the word "sexy", and its general insanity and inanity was enough to put it at the top of the list. But let's not allow this to prevent some of the 9s from getting their flowers. It really hurt to listen to the uncensored "The Game of Love", as sung by children and adults; the lyric "it started with a kiss now we're up to that" should absolutely not be uttered by the Kidz. It's one of the closest examples to the fictional "Kidz Bop Inappropriate Edition" I mentioned last time. The poor singing of "Swing Swing" and the direction to have the children shout "SWING SWING SWING! YEAH!" at times felt like an overly long car ride with nap-deprived kids in the back. And finally, there's the cover of "Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence, which gets its own writeup below. Overall, Kidz Bop 4 hits the same ranking as its overall song quality in the average derangement score with a 42. Not good by any stretch of the imagination, but not so bad it achieves bottom 10 notoriety.

Censorship Report: What censorship? The Fandom wiki page notes that Lady Saw's verse was removed entirely from "Underneath It All", but I have no memory of that verse so it might just be a copy of the radio edit. According to that censorship tracker I shared in the introduction, 2003 had the second-lowest censored lines per album. They must have thought they did everything they needed when they included Hilary Duff and Baha Men songs on the track list.

Wiki Fact You Should Know: I've pretty much covered all the most notable items already, but it's worth mentioning that this is the first album where the store (18 track) version contained zero songs that hit #1 on the Hot 100. Checking the 2003 year-end list, this group includes hits like "In da Club" by 50 Cent, "Ignition (Remix)" by R. Kelly, and "Get Busy" by Sean Paul. I think in this case, it's hard to blame this album for not dipping into those, though you know they were tempted to do it.

Best Song / Worst Song: The best song is "If You're Not The One" because a real singer sang it. The worst song, and one of the worst KB songs ever recorded, is the cover of "Bring Me to Life". The Amy Lee impersonator is at least semi-competent, which only serves to lull you into a false sense of security. The backup vocalist, and in particular the rap verse, is quite possibly the most painful adult performance in the Kidz Bop series overall, if not the worst. The man's delivery sounds like when you hit only "OK" timing on a Parappa the Rapper song. Perhaps Arthur Jefferson disguised himself and showed up in the New York recording studio to give us one final treat. In my casual googling of "worst Kidz Bop song" years ago, this was one of the songs that popped up, and for good reason. Even if I weren't severely irony-poisoned, I would enjoy the Goofy version of the song much more.

Next Time: The unstoppable force meets the immovable object: can Kidz Bop butcher a song so badly that it blocks even the inherent greatness of "Hey Ya!" by Outkast?

Previous Entries: [Introduction] [KB01] [KB02] [KB03]