Any insomniac knows the most unforgettable images of television
viewing come from late-night commercials. What 4 a.m. channel
surfer can forget the Crazy Gideon’s commercials, where the
eponymous electronics shop owner shows how crazy his pricing is by
taking a bat to his products, or the Tom Emanski Baseball Drills
videos that have been running on ESPN for more than 15 years?
Generally, these commercials are comforting because
they’re consistently there, like the rising sun or a new
installment of R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the
Closet.” But as of late, a new series of commercials that is
anything but comforting has begun to dominate late-night
programming. Unless, that is, you consider small children singing
Evanescence to be anything other than disturbing.
I’m talking, of course, about Kidz Bop ““ or as I
like to call it, “Horribly Woeful Asinine Adolescent
Abuse.” This can be abbreviated as HWAAA, which
coincidentally is the exact sound that I made upon first seeing
this digital child abuse.
At its core, Kidz Bop seems innocuous, with kids in the
infomercials for the CDs singing popular songs. Now, there would be
nothing wrong with that if these songs weren’t completely
inappropriate for the age group these videos are targeting. This
isn’t meant to be a tired diatribe about how inappropriate
the media is for small children. After all, pretty much everything
in the media is inappropriate for children, most notably the news,
which does a nice job of saying the real world is no place for a
child to have to grow up in, but that’s beside the point.
When I say inappropriate content, I don’t just mean
typical things like sex and/or violence. That’s not to say it
isn’t present, as evidenced by the shocking statement in an
Amazon.com editor review of “Kidz Bop Volume 7″ that
the new disc contains “booty shakers for the rolling backpack
set.” Whoa there, time-out. “Booty shakers for the
rolling backpack set?” Who honestly wants to see children
under 10 dancing to “Oops I Did It Again” and
proclaiming “I’m not that innocent”? Do the
creators of these videos not realize that certain deviant types
might get more than a little excited seeing or hearing something
like that?
Sex aside, these songs have other themes totally inappropriate
for the 10-and-under set. I wouldn’t want my 8-year-old
listening to angst-ridden songs such as “Hold On” or,
God forbid, “The First Cut Is The Deepest.”
That’s no different from locking your children in a room and
forcing them to listen to Joy Division’s
“Closer,” the most emotionally harrowing album
I’ve ever heard. What self-respecting parent would do that?
This is something I’d probably do, though it’d be more
to get them to appreciate Ian Curtis’ genius at an early age,
but my lack of parenting skill is not on trial here.
Worse is the fact that this crap gets zero attention from
conservative watchdog groups. They complain about youths being
corrupted by evil music and the fact that it’s being marketed
to children, yet they either fail to realize or choose not to care
that Kidz Bop is repackaging this same material and making it more
appealing to children. Then again, perhaps hearing lyrics about
sex, self-destruction and isolation coming from the mouths of
saccharine little pixies missing their front teeth makes the fact
that they’re singing “Toxic” seem cute and
renders the content of the songs moot.
Of course, this is all without mentioning what is, in my mind,
the worst thing about Kidz Bop. Forget the inappropriate themes;
I’m more offended by the fact that it’s a thinly veiled
attempt to turn kids into consumers of trite, cookie-cutter pop
music at an early age. At least if they were covering The Smiths,
they’d be turning kids into depressed little mope mavens
through good music.
If you think the world will end when Kidz Bop inevitably
covers “My Humps,” e-mail Humphrey at
mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu to commiserate.