If you don’t know what Kidz Bop is, you don’t have young kids. Or you do, but your child is named Helen and everyone makes jokes about her answering the iron. 

Imagine turning on the radio and hearing the crappiest pop song possible sung by an adult. Now, picture the same crappy song sung by ten year old children! This is Kidz Bop: the brilliant marketing scheme of some music mogul somewhere. I don’t know what it is about the popular entertainment notion that if you make something younger, it makes it better. Case in point: Muppet Babies, Tiny Toons, A Pup Named Scooby Doo, and countless men’s second and third wives. The latter, however, I easily agree with. 

I was first made aware of Kidz Pop through a television commercial while my five year old was watching Cartoon Network, or Disney, or some other youth oriented channel where adults can’t really tell the difference between one crappy show and the next, which doesn’t really make any difference so long as said shows keep the child in a quiet hypnotic trance long enough for me to catch up on my shows on Hulu; that is until the Kidz Bop commercial comes on, and your child comes running to you screaming, “Can I get that!? Can I get that!?”

My suspicion is the television commercials for Kidz Bop had little success in marketing this particular musical genre. And I use the root word music, loosely. If most parents were like me, they couldn’t even tolerate hearing sixty seconds of this entertainment equivalent of water boarding, let alone get through an entire full length CD. At some point the marketing executives over at Kidz Bop realized they were having little success. It was however, a boon to remote control companies who were finding scores of households of parents with young children having to constantly replace the mute button on their clickers from over use.

At a Kidz Bop sales meeting someone lamented that they couldn’t even give this crap away. Then someone else promptly chimed up, “But I bet McDonald’s could!”

Fast forward several months. Driving in my car, I hear the usual childhood complaints about who’s looking at who, who’s hitting who, who’s taking who’s this or that away, and a McDonald’s off in the distance brings me a sense of relief and reprieve. A Chicken McNugget in a child’s mouth is worth countless minutes of peace to a parent’s ears. But au contraire, mon frère, once I hand off the Happy Meal to the back seat, like nails against a chalkboard, I hear the words, “Look Daddy! A Kidz Bop CD!”

Now it’s no longer, “Can I get the Kidz Bop CD!?” It’s “Play my Kidz Bop CD!” Somewhere in the afterlife Dave Thomas is having a big laugh at Ray Kroc’s expense. Never before has a fast food restaurant’s marketing campaign driven so many people to the competition! Because there wasn’t just one Kidz Bop CD, at last count, there were five! A new one to look forward to each week! I’m now regretting taking my four year old to preschool where he learned to count so soon. “Oh, sorry son! You already have this Kidz Bop CD!” I say. To which he responds with, “No I don’t! This CD is this many! (Holding up three fingers).    

Thank god for Night at the Museum 2! A new campaign has given way to new toys in the Happy Meal. And on a hot June day, when my son asks if we can listen to Kidz Bop on our way to the mall, I readily agree. Daddy sees the importance of an object lesson here. Call it a lesson in science, or simple responsibility, either way a lesson was taught: When you leave five CDs laying on the seat of the car (accidentally of course) in direct sunlight, they melt…