RSSDon’t Let Your Kids Listen to Kidz Bop
Jul 29
Kidz Bop 14 makes it debut today with hits the likes of 4 Minutes, Clumsy and Bleeding Love. Don’t them? Parents, boy are you in for a surprise.
Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love is in fact a love song, with lyrics that run along the lines of “My heart’s crippled by the vein that I keep on closing” and a chorus that repeats the chant “keep, keep bleeding love.”
Now imagine that sung by a choir of 9-year old girls. Such is Kidz Bop, cover versions of some of the hottest songs on radio, most indescribably filthy. Madonna’s 4 Minutes is relatively tame lyrically (assuming you don’t read between the lines) but it’s still the creepiest song on an album of disturbing sexual imagery sung by little girls. This is pop music by the Children of the Corn choir and I cannot imagine what parent would allow their children to listen to it.
To be fair, the songs are sanitized versions that swap out some of the worst lyrics. Take You There goes from “We can go to the tropics Sip piña coladas Or we can go to the slums” to “We can go to the tropics We can get it hoppin’ Or we can party in the sun.” But these songs head beyond just the lewd pop malarkey of the original versions you hear on the radio. Did I mention the songs are sung by kids?
Some of the stuff was vaguely child friendly to begin with (The Jonas Brothers’ When You Look Me In the Eyes was pretty much written for the 11-year old girl.) Maybe your daughter is already practicing the song in front of the mirror with a hairbrush. But taken on the whole, this concept is seriously warped. It’s the 14th volume in a series of unsettling pop covers that you might hear in the background of a To Catch a Predator confrontation. Chris Hansen’s voiceover saying, “We found the man in his house, listening to Kidz Bop 14. It sounds like Natasha Bedingfield’s Pocketful of Sunshine.”
Parent or otherwise, you might be inclined to remark that the Kidz Bop songs are no worse than the actual songs they are based on, that kids hear on the radio everyday. I would probably agree with you. I would probably also say that as a parent, you have an obligation to so some screening of the media that your child is exposed to and make some wise decisions about what is appropriate and what is borderline. Maybe Miley Cyrus isn’t really any better or worse than Kidz Bop’s version of Stop and Stare but if you intend to pick your battles, you could a lot worse than starting here.
