The Great Christmas Record Odyssey, Ep. CXXXVIII

Welcome back, music-lovers. Hope you guys are ready to be creeped out by a bunch of little kids. . . 

Album Title:  Kidz Bop Christmas

Album Artist:  Various Artists

If you haven't raised kids in the last 20 years, you may have never heard of Kidz Bop. 

I had caught wind of it while working at Meijer in my 20s (it started when I was in college) but it wasn't until I had kids of my own and they started listening to it that I really became acquainted with the concept. As little kids grow out of the 'princess phase' and transition into their elementary school years, where they're not yet tweens and haven't started wearing makeup yet (at least how normal chicks wear makeup), they start to become aware of pop culture. Seeing how most pop music isn't necessarily appropriate for the 6-10 year-old demographic, the geniuses behind Kidz Bop realized that they could take the same popular music that dominates the radio, clean up the lyrics, and have kids sing the songs instead.

Whoever thought of this was a genius, because the shit sells like hot cakes.

My girls were obsessed with Kidz Bop for a couple years, when we first moved back to Michigan, before they were old enough to listen to real artists on the radio. The Kidz Bop producers recorded plenty of YouTube videos of the kid performers singing and dancing along to the major chart hits, and my girls wasted hours in front of their computers being hypnotized by this craze.

Kidz Bop was, and I assume still is, straight-up crack for little girls. And my kids devoured it.

There's a creepy air to all this Kidz Bop stuff, though, and I feel the need to touch on this before we continue. Now, while albums such as this one are geared towards little kids, the performers still adhere to sleazy music industry standards. All the kids performing on this album are good-looking kids - there's no fat kids, no kids with weird faces, or disabilities, etc. These guys look like they just walked off the set of an after-school, Disney sitcom, and that is intentional. The music execs churning out these Kidz Bop albums know that sex sells, and even if the target audience isn't aware of that sort of thing yet, they know that if they can have eight-year-old girls watch some 12-year-old boy sing a child-appropriate version of a boy band number, they've got her hooked. 

Lots of inserts - like this Advent Calendar - with this one. 

It's super gross, but it doesn't shock me in the slightest.

Another thing that's a little disturbing, but understandable, about the last twenty years or so of this craze, is that the child performers tend to age out of this child-only music business. Since the early 2000s, there have been multiple Kidz Bop 'groups' (usually five or six of singers at any given time, a mix of boys and girls), and once they get too old - probably like 15 or so - they're replaced by younger kids and those older kids go on and. . . who knows. 

Never found a cookie recipe in an album before. That's odd.

I'm sure there's a stable full of ex-Kidz Bop performers who have developed severe mental health issues after serving on a few albums. They're pushed into this business at a young age by their parents and, once puberty hits and they're no longer suited for the role, they're shown the door. I doubt most of these kids found success in the music industry later in life, and I'm sure substance abuse runs rampant in this community.

My Holiday Checklist look WAY different. 

Anyway, on to the album. I came across this on Amazon a few years ago while browsing for Christmas records. I didn't have any desire to purchase this double-LP, of course, but for a super-low $6 for brand new, colored vinyl, I figured this might be something worth picking up. Maybe to hold on to for a decade or two until I start getting grandkids of my own and they want to listen to G-rated Christmas music performed by fellow children, I don't know. I mean, this isn't the sort of album that any adult in their right mind would throw on the turntable during the Holiday season, and God knows my kids have zero interest in this past obsession of theirs, but for this blog's sake, I figured 'what the hell.'

Listening to this album as an adult, without little kids on hand to justify it, is super weird. The production value is insane - there's a lot of money behind this franchise and it shows. The backing music and mix is  professional and on par with any contemporary Holiday album you'd pick up from a well-known, popular-selling artist. The only thing different with this one, of course, is that there's no adults to be found anywhere across the two records - this is a strictly kids-only affair, so all the vocals are done by upper-elementary and middle-school aged performers. 

And yes, the child performers can all sing very well - they're probably hand-selected by recruiters at one of those open-auditions that pop up around the country and attract thousands of kids (and their parents) who are chomping at the bit to break into stardom.

So, having kids singing on a children's album is fine - nothing wrong with that whatsoever, it's expected - provided they're singing kiddie Christmas jams. There's tons to choose from, too -  'Up on the Housetop' or 'Jingle Bells' or 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.' Stuff along those lines. What we get into on this release, however, is young children performing songs like 'All I Want for Christmas is You,' by Mariah Carey, or risque songs like 'Mistletoe.' 

Nobody wants to hear a group of 4th graders singing about kissing people under the mistletoe. That's super gross, and I feel like I may end up on some kinda registry just for listening to this in my own house without little kids present to justify it.

Questionable song choices aside, there's nothing horrible, per se, to be found on this Holiday album. And while hearing little kids singing about kissing people and missing lovers during the Holidays is gross, it's got enough 'standard' Holiday music across the two records that make it a solid album for upper-elementary school aged kids who feel too old for Disney cartoons but aren't yet to that pre-pubescent, tween phase. 

If I were a seven-year-old girl, I imagine this album would f***ing slap. Alas, I'm a 45-year-old dad raised on punk rock and consequently this album does nothing for me.

. . . . and that's a good thing, folks, because if I did enjoy this you'd probably have to report me to the authorities.

VERDICT:  5/10 - Meh (Probably a flawless children's Holiday album, but I wouldn't know because I'm not an eight-year-old girl crushing on twelve-year-old boys. I'm giving this a '5' because it's well-produced and the track list, for the most part, is solid. I imagine in twenty years my grandkids will eat this shit up, but until then it's going into storage and won't see turntable time until then.)

- SHELVED -

- Brian

Sodbusters

Hey, Internet.

This entire weekend was devoted to grueling yard work. And grueling yard work f***ing sucks.

With the Cannonball turning 16 in a few weeks, we'd been needing to create some serious parking space for the additional car that's gonna be clogging up our driveway. At one point in time, months ago, Kris and I had entertained the idea of going in with our neighbors when they announced they were repaving their driveway, because God knows it'd be way cheaper to do it all in one, fell swoop. Then we had to go and buy a third car (which is loads of fun, by the way), and I started thinking about losing all that side yard grass permanently.

Ultimately, we decided to just take our neighbors river rock when they repave their driveway (they offered to have the cement company guys just shovel it over to our side of the property line when they moved it out of the way.) Ideally, we'll keep this parking space with rock until both girls are out of the house for good, then move that rock into the various beds around the house and yard, plant new grass seed, and go back to having a legit side yard again.

That's the plan at this point, anyway.

So early this morning Kris and I ran down to this local, heavy equipment place that rents out various machines on a two or six-hour basis and rented a sod-remover for the morning. In order to get the driveway prepped for all that rock, we had to first remove the grass by cutting up the sod; I wanted to keep the pieces of sod intact so that I could transport them around the yard and plug up holes and fill in not-as-awesome spots here and there with good, legit grass. To do all this by hand would take forever, and it would be mindless, excruciating work, so we looked into renting a machine to do it.

As you can see in the video above, this machine made short work of the actual cutting process (once we got the hang of it - there was a definite learning curve to operating this 500 lb monstrosity.) The worst part of this whole project, by far, was the moving of the sod pieces - it's far heavier than you'd think, and difficult to carry (it flops around and crumble, so you have to be extra careful transporting it.) Kris and I were able to, miraculously, get the machine back up the ramp into her van and return it to the rental place in little over an hour after checking it out, then spent the remainder of the day (seriously) moving sod.

The girls helped a little, too. . . but there was a difference in Abby's contributions to the project versus Alayna's.

Anyway, here you go folks - a not-at-all fun, but productive, weekend project.  Enjoy. . .

With the sod all cut up in neat, little columns, we set to work chopping it up into rows with shovels in order to get them to sizes we could actually carry out.

We had no idea that this part of the process - the cutting up and removing of the sod in smaller pieces, carrying it all into the backyard, would be the most grueling part of the process. . .

Definitely didn't help that I had set the sod-cutter to its lowest setting in order to make sure I had cut up all the grass. Mission accomplished as far as that goes, but it added inches of dirt underneath the layer of grass, and that was not fun at all to move.

Abby created a pile of sod in the backyard, kinda by our back patio, as a staging area that I could grab pieces from as I re-planted them in various spots around the backyard (that whole endeavor took up eight hours of the following day.)

We'd rotate jobs so that no one got burnt out with doing the same thing for too long. I'd cut sod for a bit, with Kris and Abby moving the pieces into the backyard, then we'd switch it out.

Alayna kinda putzed around the edge of the yard and cut out the grass from the sides of the driveway and sidewalk (I didn't want to get too closet to the concrete when running the sod-cutter, so gave it about 6-8" on all sides.

The sod weighed so much in transport that Abby at one point broke our gardening wheelbarrow. So now we get to buy a new one, which is totally awesome.

Still chugging away at the side yard, in the early afternoon. As people broke for a lunch break, I cracked a beer and sat in the sun for twenty minutes or so, giving my worn-out, old man body a bit of a breather.  Best. Tasting. Miller Lite. Ever.

I tried getting Alayna to help us move the random pieces of sod lying about to various parts in the front yard (like what I was doing on a much bigger scale in the backyard) to plug in holes and help out crappy spots, but she wasn't really feeling it I guess. She went inside and showered shortly after this.

Around dinner time, we had successfully removed all of the sod from the side yard (though the pile you see here still has to be relocated.) I sprayed an entire jug of Round-Up weed killer on the dirt, just to play it safe, before rolling out a mid-grade weed cover to prevent plants from growing up amidst the soon-to-be distributed river rock. 

To say I was sore after this project would be an understatement. Holy Christ. . .

So there you go, folks - in a few days all that rock you see to the left there will be moved over to the weed covering, and - once the sprinkler heads (flagged) are capped off by our sprinkler company - Alayna will have her very own space in the driveway.

- Brian