At just 24 years old, Zendaya became the youngest ever recipient of the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her acclaimed performance. But perhaps her most impressive, and audacious, career move came in 2019 when she signed up to play the drug-addicted teen Rue Bennett in HBO's teen drama-that's-not-actually-for-teens, Euphoria. Zendaya has also finished runner-up on Dancing with the Stars, reached the Billboard 200 with her self-titled debut album and lent her voice to animations Duck Duck Goose and Smallfoot. And just like Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez before her, she managed to parlay her child success into adulthood, appearing opposite Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron in musical phenomenon The Greatest Showman and playing Tom Holland's love interest MJ in the third big screen incarnation of Spider-Man. I play one, two, three songs tops before I start to feel as if I’m on a singalong school bus to hell.Zendaya went on to become one of the Disney Channel's biggest names thanks to her starring role in sitcom Shake It Up. If I had to choose one word that captures Kidz Bop’s effect on my curdled adult soul, I’d pick what Jacques Lacan called jouissance, basically an intense, transgressive sensation of pleasure often mixed with pain that stems from an “excess of life.” Kidz Bop can be too much - synthetic goop, crisp satire, buoyant, hilarious, nauseating, winking, innocent and catchy enough to scramble your cortex in the shower, in midday meetings and as I try to fall asleep, I’m now regularly haunted by hyper, harmonized tweens shouting Rihanna lyrics (“He see me do me/Dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt”). At the same time, Kidz Bop serves as unintentionally scorching parody: The Kidz’ shrill chanting amplifies pop’s tropes of lovelorn treacle, monotonous synth and bass and the childishness that dominates the charts. They suffer emotional, existential and erotic crises that they won’t be able to experience in reality for a decade. Instead, it invents a Wes-Anderson-on-Viagra fantasy world in which children live lives that are overly complex. Somehow, though, in its quest to make raunchy radio hits palatable for children, Kidz Bop doesn’t mute human complexity it isn’t mere camp. Countless Kidz Bop lines are at once preposterous and more poignant than the original’s. “Masturbate” becomes “concentrate” “skirts” turn into “shirts” even “midnight,” that way-past-bedtime witching hour, is castrated into “tonight.” In “FourFiveSeconds,” which otherwise preserves lyrics about a couple on the verge of splitting up, Kanye West’s line “If I go to jail tonight/Promise you’ll pay my bail,” becomes “If we’re going out tonight/Promise I’ll pay the bill.” Yet this new non sequitur is indeed something a partner trying desperately to forestall a breakup might say. With Kidz Bop, the tykes unwittingly present themselves as fireballs of rage and libido, bemoaning their deadbeat boyfriends, exalting their plump rumps and “goodies” that “make the boys jump on it” and “starving” for intercourse.Įven so, the exquisitely awful and bizarre bowdlerized lyrics often opt for safety at the expense of meter, rhyme and sense. Racy as the originals may be, at least they have adults singing about adult lust and adult plight. The oddest thing about Kidz Bop is that these defanged versions have a much more perverse bite than their source material.
No sounds simultaneously bewilder and rejuvenate more. Now seldom a week goes by that I, 28 and childless, don’t play selections from the Kidz Bop oeuvre, which covers more than 500 contemporary hits over 34 albums. We blasted children’s versions of Rihanna’s “Work” (about a man who wants only sex), Flo Rida’s “Club Can’t Handle Me” (booze-fueled bacchanal) and Pitbull’s “Timber” (sex-fueled bacchanal). Delightful questions abound about how the song’s events could possibly unfold with minors. Clean as the lyrics are, the children still sing - ecstatically squeal, really - from the perspective of a man berating his ex-lover for her newfound independence. The next line, “late night when you need my love,” had been sanitized: “anytime you need to talk.” I wanted to laugh, vomit and cartwheel all at once. It was “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” meets “Eyes Wide Shut.” It was grotesque, transfixing and supercharged with youth. It had the same opening line, “You used to call me on my cellphone.” But the rapper had been replaced by a chorus of exuberant, Auto-Tuned, prepubescent children.
The track started with the same muffled and drippy R.&B. On Spotify, I typed in “Hotline Bling,” but I accidentally clicked not on Drake’s passive-aggressive ode to his ex but on a cover, by a group called Kidz Bop. To stay alert, we needed something loud and mindless. We drove four hours to my cousin’s wedding, sweated in the August sun and sobered up, and at 10:00 my wife and I began the snaking slog back to Boston from Vermont.
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