Naturally, in places, this concert underscored the tension between the adult meaning of the original songs and their sanitized versions, as in Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” where the lyric “I’m missing more than just your body” became “I’m missing you, and now I’m sorry.”īut the most illuminating moments at this show came when the Kidz Bop Kids’ versions of songs told a new musical story. The Kidz Bop Kids are, by comparison, place holders, mirrors for the children in the audience, above all. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been a reliable farm team of future young adult talent, like Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel, which grooms stars like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez from improbably young ages. That underscores a conundrum particular to Kidz Bop: The brand is far bigger than the performers. Hack), though because of the combination of live and prerecorded vocals, there were few opportunities to truly show off. (Generally, the girls took it more seriously than the boys.) Each of the singers is talented (here again, the girls stood out, especially Ms. The choreography was loose, and everyone committed to it with different levels of fervor. Given how young much of the audience was, somewhere between 3 and 7, zeal was a suitable stand-in for precision. The Kidz Bop Kids - Ashlynn Chong, Sela Hack, Grant Knoche and Matt Martinez, all between 12 and 15 - were relentlessly cheerful and vocally enthused even when their bodies suggested lack of interest, or their eyes communicated boredom. “ Kidz Bop 32,” the latest installment, was released last week with versions of Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself,” Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” and Rihanna and Drake’s “Work,” which sounds like a Conceptual art piece about loneliness and confusion. The results lie somewhere between funhouse-mirror pop, winking parody and the gleam of freshly brushed teeth.
Since 2001, the Kidz Bop series of albums has sweetened and softened pop hits - and some hip-hop, though not the raunchiest stuff - by having child singers cover them, stripping out any offensive language along the way. The skit was funny not for its implausibility, but for how closely it approached the truth. Ice Cube’s elegiac “It Was a Good Day” became “Snow Day,” and Ty Dolla Sign’s “Paranoid,” about dodging a vindictive lover, became “Dirty Boy,” about hating baths: “I see all these bubbles in the tub/got to hide from my mother.” Last month, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” ran a sketch about an imagined compilation called “ Kidz Bop Hip-Hop,” a set of sanitized and cheerily naïve remakes of hip-hop songs.