Kidz Bop--Insanity on Crack

So there's this dude in my class named Jake (all names changed to protect the guilty) who brings his wiped to school a lot. Since this guy is geeky dork numero uno, I got curious. Just what do geeky dork numero unos listen to on their baby-blue-leather encased ipod minis? I ask to see it. What do I find? Eragon book-on-MP3 (no surprise there), and a strange band called "Kidz Bop." Since the Jake wouldn't let me listen to his pod, I felt the need to go to my own ituned store and look up the oddity "Kidz Bop." Up come the search result. I look in the "songs" column and I see familiar titles like "I'm a Believer," "Toxic," "Because of U," and "My Immortal." I listen. For all of about two seconds. My ears are assaulted by a barrage of about fifteen eight-year-olds singing the chorus of Toxic, a song about making out with boys--well, men really. Am I the only one who notices something wrong with this picture (or this sound, for that matter)? All of the other songs were exactly the same--Pop/Rock hits, sped up, then sung by tone-deaf preteens. By now I'm intrigued.

My next step was the world wide web. I googled Kidz Bop and headed off to the official website. The premise behind this website seemed to be "How can we take the drug-induced hallucinations of the 60's and present them to preppy preteens via a band homepage?" There was no color that was not at some time used in a Lisa Frank drawing of some rainbow kittens. The background consisted mainly of purple silhouettes of kids(z) jumping up and down like freaks. I spied a survey--I love surveys--that is I DID love surveys until I came across this one. The question: Which Kidz Bop music video is your favorite? A) Because of U B) Sk8r Boi C) D) . These people make music videos?! For you, my dear readers, I subject myself to the horror that is the Kidz Bop Sk8r Boi music video.

A twelve-year-old dressed as a poser-punk "croons" the opening of Sk8r Boi. Spliced in are shots of just her lips, just her eyes (so heavily made up that she looks permanently blue) and shots of more twelve-year-olds skateboarding in the background. The chorus arrives. Ten invisible kids join in, and the pitch shoots up an octave. The poser-punk begins bouncing up and down like she's got knives in her shoes. Her face looks like it, too. More shots of kids skateboarding. I nearly died.

What am I doing now? I'm in the school computer lab, watching two slightly insane boys throw themselves at a conglomeration of office chairs, trying to knock over as many as they can at one time. There's another guy taking pictures of them doing this from his camera phone. They're listening to "Damn it's good to be a gangsta"