They sure do grow up quickly, don’t they?
Last week marked a milestone for the children’s brand Kidz Bop: The release of “Kidz Bop 50,” the company’s 50th album of sanitized, child-friendly covers of pop songs.
The songs are sung by a small group of telegenic teenagers, who also appear in carefully choreographed music videos. The latest record has 38 tracks, including the Sabrina Carpenter hit “Espresso,” Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” and Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby.”
Time flies. In the case of Kidz Bop, which launched in 2001 and included millennial anthems like NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” and Blink-182’s “All the Small Things,” the first generation that grew up with G-rated earworms is now in full-fledged adulthood. Kidz Bop is almost old enough to no longer be eligible for its parents’ health insurance. It’s been an improbable ride for the world’s most unexpectedly successful cover band.
But don’t expect any references to sex, violence or drugs, regardless of the songs they are covering. (Kidz Bop might amend that sentence to say: expect specs, assurance and hugs instead.) And the music videos, as usual, will be bursting full of bright colors and energy similar to a children’s pizza party right before nap time.
Or as Cooper Hounshell, a former Kidz Bop performer who is now a graphic design student at the University of Cincinnati, put it: “All sunshine and rainbows.”
Some of the lyric changes are subtle. Take Psy’s megahit “Gangnam Style,” covered on “Kidz Bop 23.” The line “Hey, sexy lady!” became “Hey! Hey Lady!” for Kidz Bop. On the newest album, Chappell Roan’s “Hot To Go!” lyric “I could be the one, or your new addiction” is changed to “I could be the one, or a new condition.”
Others are borderline comical. In “Telephone,” Lady Gaga sings: “Out in the club, and I’m sippin’ that bub.” On “Kidz Bop 10,” that was changed to “Out in the club, and I’m eating that grub.” (Apparently, children love to hit clubs for dinner.) For Meghan Trainor’s song “All About That Bass,” on the 27th album: “I got that boom boom that all the boys chase” is changed to “I got those dance moves.” Not to worry: The boys still chase, but in a later verse, “bringing booty back” is tweaked to “bringing it all back.”
Jayna Elise, who is now starring in the national tour of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” was part of the group that covered the Trainor track. Trainor called them over FaceTime to thank them, she recalled. Elise would have the chance to remind Trainor of the interaction years later, when she was a contestant on “American Idol” and Trainor was a mentor.
“Sometimes I’ll be singing a song and I’ll be like, ‘That’s the Kidz Bop version. Why am I singing that?’” Elise, 23, said. (All of the former Kidz Bop performers interviewed for this piece said they caught themselves singing Kidz Bop lyrics to pop songs even as adults.)
But 50 albums, many of which have charted and have sold millions of copies, show a remarkable staying power. To put Kidz Bop in perspective, the company has dozens of Top 10 Billboard hit albums, which puts them in similar company to acts including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. The franchise also has a touring act which debuted about a decade ago.
The streaming era changed listening habits, and resulted in a decline in chart success for “Kidz Bop.” Brand partnerships with companies including Lego and Chuck E. Cheese have helped, and the music has racked up billions of streams.
“It’s pretty simple why Kidz Bop continues to resonate and have appeal after almost 25 years,” Sasha Junk, the president of Kidz Bop, said. “I can kind of boil it down to one word: It’s fun. And kids love to hear other kids sing.”
Kidz Bop was the brainchild of two lawyers, Cliff Chenfeld and Craig Balsam, who had previously formed the independent record company Razor & Tie in 1990, then known for compilations.
“We saw that there was a gap between music for tiny kids — Barney and all that — and pop music that wasn’t safe for 4-to-12-year-old kids,” Chenfeld told The New York Times in 2006. “We thought it made sense to bring pop music to those people.” (Both Chenfield and Balsam left Kidz Bop in 2018 and could not be reached for comment.)
It appealed to parents of children like Elise, who said Kidz Bop was “all I listened to” before she auditioned for the group, “because I couldn’t listen to anything else.”
Dana Vaughns, a 27-year-old alumnus who is now an actor, Kidz Bopped for about three years from age 11, and said he was blissfully unaware that the lyrics he was singing were sometimes not the original.
“I probably needed the adjustment of those lyrics anyway. I was the demographic!” he said with a laugh.
Children’s versions of adult themes have long existed. Many bookstores sell toned-down, childproof versions of Shakespeare. But Kidz Bop was the first large-scale attempt to package pop music for children.
It came at a time of increasing societal concern about explicit imagery and lyrics in pop songs, particularly in rap music. In 1994, seven years before the first Kidz Bop album was released, Congress held hearings as to whether rap music could lead to violence. Incidentally, Kidz Bop was lampooned on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” with the help of the rapper Ice Cube, Lil Jon and other rap and hip-hop musicians imagining Kidz Bop versions of some of their songs.
“For me, one of the things that Kidz Bop responds to is any kind of cultural anxiety around, basically, to put it bluntly, Black culture or Black music as a potential dangerous influence,” said, Loren Kajikawa, a music historian at George Washington University.
In some corners, stripping the songs of profanities and toning down references doesn’t make adult songs kid appropriate. A 2017 undergraduate paper published by the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs argued that Kidz Bop “does not help children culturally, socially, or morally.” One of the professors cited in the study told Vox in 2018, shortly after the study was released, that Kidz Bop was an “abomination because it censors language but it doesn’t censor content.”
Regardless, Kidz Bop has endured. And some of its singers are now becoming — excuse us — Adultz Bop, forever shaped by their experience as early teens with the group. Some Kidz Bop alumni have become adult successes as a result. The brand’s most famous alum is Zendaya.
Grant Knoche, 22, is a Los Angeles-based musician. By his count, he recorded songs on 12 albums and performed 162 live shows with Kidz Bop over about four years starting from when he was 10.
“Being in studios and getting all that experience, it really kind of set me up for the rest of my life as an artist and a musician and being in the music industry in that way,” Knoche said. “And I would go back and do it again.”
Kidz Bop is gearing up to celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, as well as expanding its tour and clothing lines, releasing its songs in other languages, and getting more involved in film and television. Put another way: It’s not your mother’s Kidz Bop anymore.
But the eternal question still remains: Does making pop music childproof diminish the original intent of the musicians? Not necessarily, said Andy Gershon, a professor at Syracuse University and a former music industry executive who has worked with bands like the Smashing Pumpkins.
“In this day and age, it doesn’t dilute the art at all. If anything, it provides the songwriter another revenue stream for the cover version,” Gershon said. “And hopefully, an eight-year-old kid that hears the song ‘1979,’ when they become a teenager, they’ll rediscover the Smashing Pumpkins version.”
