Biography

Kidz Bop is the name of a series of popular music albums recorded for children, sold by Razor and Tie Direct, Ltd. and frequently marketed through television commercials.

Eleven Kidz Bop albums have been released to date. Each album features different pop music songs, played with music similar to the original, and with the “Kidz Bop Kids” singing instead of the original artist. Albums are typically released within a few months of each other and thus the songs included tend to be the hit songs of the current time, including such songs such as “Float On” (Modest Mouse), “This Love” (Maroon 5), and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (Green Day).

Although the albums are marketed as being “sanitized” versions of popular songs for children, many of the songs featured on the Kidz Bop albums still contain explicit sexual material, such as Rob Thomas’s “Lonely No More,” which some people consider inappropriate for younger audiences. Other featured songs, such as “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, contain profanity. Although the albums censor the actual word from the song, the context of the profanity remains. They also covered Green Day’s hit “Wake Me Up When September Ends”, which is about death.

The Kidz Bop video for their cover of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi”, for instance, features the song being sung by a pre-teen girl in heavy make-up, fishnet stockings, and a Sex Pistols t-shirt.