Covers
This is a genuine question. Is there something about the way kids hear music that makes it so that they will only listen to “kid” versions of things and not the adult version? Or is this just an affectation of the adult world?
Someone recommended the Baby Einstein Baby Mozart CD to us. I played it for the kid yesterday. It was basically a bunch of Mozart piano concertos played on a cheesy synth. It wasn’t terrible, and the kid seemed to like it insofar as he realized it existed (which is to say, not that much). But wouldn’t he have liked a version with piano and traditional instrumentation just as much? Was this just to keep from paying royalties or hiring real musicians? Or was there some developmental psychological research that showed that xylophone and bonky drum sounds stimulate babies brains more than pianos and violins?
Later yesterday we took a walk and ended up at Stellabella Toys in Cambridge. They were playing some kind of kid’s CD that featured “What Goes On” by the Velvet Underground as performed by a woman with a sunny voice and an acoustic guitar. Now, I don’t personally see why you’d need to re-record this song to make it palatable to kids, it’s pretty basic, catchy, stripped-down. But maybe some parents with more delicate sensibilities would flip if the same band that recorded “Sister Ray” or “Heroin” was on their kids CD. I don’t know. What makes me think that something else is going on is the version of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” we heard there– it sounded exactly like the original, just a different singer.
A kid doesn’t have the cultural context to know the difference between John Lennon and a random studio signer, why even bother? It’s obviously for the parents’ sake. Why would parents choose the studio singer over John Lennon? Maybe hearing his voice conjures up his assasination, his embarassing and ultimately-not-world-changing protests involving hair and bed and Yoko, and “Double Fantasy”.
So, my hypothesis is that kid covers are a slightly self-delusional way to make parents feel like they’re protecting their kids. I will revise this opinion when, if I play both versions side by side, my kid prefers the dumbed-down kid version of a song. Until then, he gets the real deal.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:28 am
I’ve never been able to decide if kids are smarter than people give them credit for or if they really are as stupid and tasteless as the products geared toward them would seem to suggest. Not having any kids of my own I’m the least qualified person to answer this but every parent I’ve ever known has told me that kids value repetition almost above all other things. It could be the worst song/tv show/bedtime story ever made but once kids latch onto it they will insist on hearing/viewing/having it read to them over and over and over and over and over again. Since children have a limited capacity to understand, let alone care, how sick and tired their parents are of listening to the same annoying Raffi song eight times a day it probably is best that you expose your kid to stuff you actually like listening to. At least you can enjoy “Heroin” and “Sister Ray” for a few more years – that is until the kid becomes old enough to start asking what heroin is or picks Thanksgiving dinner to start singing “sucking on my ding dong” at the top of his lungs.