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October 05, 2009

Who Don't Like Kids? pt. 2

Previously: Part 1

Sometimes kids have been enlisted to sing words that are perfectly suited to their youthful status, such as on “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper, where they join in on the schoolyard chant, “No more pencils no more books/ no more teacher’s dirty looks.” The Smiths go for a similar but darker effect in “Panic,” as the kids echo Morrissey in his mournful “Hang the DJ!” chant. The sound of the schoolyard, with those disembodied, joyful voices rising and falling, was all Belle & Sebastian needed to lend an instantly evocative atmosphere to “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” while on Yo La Tengo’s cover of Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War,” version 2, the notion of cheery kids’ voices singing en masse is turned on its ear, as a gaggle of Ira Kaplan’s nieces and nephews join him in a call-and-response of, “Nuclear war/it’s a motherfucker.” Somehow, the effect is disarming, and it doesn’t feel as if any imp was traumatized by the experience. But one has to wonder how the young guest vocalist felt after the recording session for Current 93’s “Falling Back in Fields of Rape,” which entails a good deal of repetition of the title phrase.

Karen O and the Kids - "All Is Love"
(fan video by petedune)

On the soundtrack to Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, the seminal children’s book by Maurice Sendak, kids join forces with Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Ms. O, who wrote the soundtrack’s songs and co-produced the record, enlisted a backing band dubbed “the Kids,” (featuring a roster of prominent Merry Swankster-approved names, including Bradford Cox of Deerhunter) along with a chorus of untrained youngsters. Here’s Randall Monty’s take on the results: “While shouting/singing the lyrics of “All is Love,” the first single off the album, O’s voice rings with youth and enthusiasm. It’s a fitting transformation on her part, one that meets the supporting children’s choir halfway: while Karen O takes years off her voice, the children raise theirs to another level. The lyrics themselves, which consist mostly of the song’s title spelling out L-O-V-E and some howling, are suited for the younger vocalists, but that doesn’t mean this is a kid’s song. In spite of the youth of the singers, the anger and maturity of Sendak’s novel comes through.”

The first few generations of rappers were not particularly interested in using kids on their records. It took Jay-Z to demonstrate the full hook-worthy potential of the idea, and others ran with it. Mr. Monty picks up the story: “If we attempt to exit the world of hip-hop songs featuring kids and head all the way to the boundary, we would find a region where the accompanying children are not merely used for clichéd dramatic effect (the Pink Floyd model) but are instead imbedded as inseparable contributors to the whole song. At this edge, “statement” meets up quite succinctly with “inspiring” and “hilarious.” Here is a triptych of songs embodying the pinnacle of this hamlet of the genre.

Jay-Z - "Hard Knock Life"

Jay-Z’s first crossover hit (back when there was such a thing), 1998’s Annie-sampling “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” kicked the door down for hip-hop stars using children as supporting vocalists. In what would become a become a signature theme, Jigga raps about what it was like back in the day, interspersing lyrics about slinging dope and seeing neighborhood folks being gunned down with the taunting holler of that unavoidable (and unforgettable) chorus. But there’s no juxtaposition between the children and the man; instead, it’s a shared narrative of growing up in inner-city America. By no means a heartwarming message, but damned if it isn’t catchy. On the other hand, Nas amps the positivity vibe substantially with “I Can,” a track that became Nas’s biggest hit thanks almost entirely to the chorus’s inspiring words. “You don't wanna be my age and can't read and write” is cliché coming from your parents, but coming from the guy who once boasted, “I'm like Scarface sniffing cocaine/Holding a M-16, see with the pen I'm extreme,” it’s conveyed as wisdom worth minding. (And when he instructs little girls to ”act your age, don't pretend to be/Older than you are, give yourself time to grow,” well, it gets a little dusty for this writer.)

Swinging the pendulum back to the center, the first song from the first album by the recently maligned Kanye West combines the better components of Jay-Z’s and Nas’s tracks. By the time The College Dropout was released, we had already heard Kanye rapping with Jay-Z and Twista, but “We Don’t Care” serves as a formal reintroduction. Lyrics like, “Ain’t no to tuition for havin’ no ambition/And ain’t no loans for sittin’ your ass at home” come across as pointed, scathing, and above all, funny. By the time the kids start singing along, it’s downright anthemic.”

While many of his fellow hipsters would be hesitant to devote too much time to the topic of young kids singing pop songs, Jeff Klingman approached the task like, well, a kid in a candy store, and the result is the following novelistic account: "Like a science project that’s a little too academically illuminating, the best songs featuring children singers leave the listener suspicious. Rather than assuming prodigy status, the more natural inference is that there’s someone back there pulling the strings. Is this a disqualifying factor for legitimate art? In his critical takedown of Brooklyn tots Tiny Masters of Today’s album earlier this year, Matthew Perpetua rolled his eyes at “hipster stage parents” who would nudge their kids towards a rock n’ roll lifestyle in the first place, when their spawn would presumably rather be playing soccer or something. A little league stint surely wouldn’t cost the world any great songs if they’d pre-empted practice sessions by similar 00s alterna-kid-flavored bands like Smoosh, or the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players. (And we can only hope that a social worker, or even an out-of-state college, will eventually deliver those poor little Nazi twins away from the clan that nurtured their performances as Prussian Blue.) But does the unnaturalness of kids authoring pop music preclude that music’s worth? It would seem to depend on the vision and craft of the puppet master (moppet-master?).

M.I.A.'s 2007 record Kala, a rare hit in both the Web critic-sphere and actual real life, double-dips on kid vocals. The most prominently huge example, in the gunshot-flavored chorus of signature jam "Paper Planes" notably subverts the typical aw-shucks cutesy nature of children singing. All they wanna do is blam-blam-blam and uh, take your money, you know. You can think that's adorable on record, but it's still a little fucked up. Taken to its extreme when soundtracking the abject poverty fantasia of 2008's Slumdog Millionaire, it gains another couple layers of problematic queasiness. But hey, if this is a party and not a sociology class, it's still one of the best tracks of the decade. Kala's second try, featuring a gang of rapping aborigine lost boys (the Wilcannie Mob, they're called) in "Mango Pickle Down River" is far less heady, and objectively worse. Instead of attaching cuteness to violence and dread, it just stays at adorable. A spoonful of medicine helps the sugar go down, I guess.

Langley Schools Music Project: VH1 Special (portion)

Langley Schools Music Project - "Space Oddity"
Langley Schools Music Project - "Rhiannon"

One of the most famous instances of a maestro conducting young tykes toward pop immortality is the work of Canadian music teacher Hans Fenger. As music teacher for the Langley School in British Columbia in the late ‘70s, the anonymous work he did directing and arranging the performances of his young charges is perhaps the most critically lauded instance of kids doing pop songs ever. The amateurish, guileless thrills of these school gym-recorded cover versions, rereleased under the title Innocence and Despair in 2001, again lie in the juxtaposition of adult themes and non-adult voices. Even Bowie had to tip his hit to their completely bonkers take on his first big hit, “Space Oddity.” Their spacey loneliness is swell, and so is the shouting enthusiasm on bits innocuous as the countdown to liftoff. More often, though, the record falls back on the basic “a kid shouldn’t be singing this” trope. Sub in a few twenty-somethings at an open mic night, and even Fenger’s charmingly spare arrangement for Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” wouldn’t have made it very notable. But there’s something about all those blank waifs, singing “wouldn’t you love to love her…” in Stevie Nicks’ knowing manner, that endures.

Ricky Wilde - "I Am an Astronaut"

The still prevalent archetype of parents living out their lost glory through their offspring has certainly reached the music world as well. By 1972, sturdy ‘50s rocker Marty Wilde had no reasonable prospects for further success in the cod-pieced, glitter-eyed glam scene of the British charts. But he did have progeny to work through, and an ear for the sparkly zeitgeist of the times. The result is the minor hit “I am an Astronaut,” in which young Ricky Wilde’s Our Gang-worthy gravel voice plays wonderfully off of twinkling Hunky Dory pianos and a playful glam stomp. As delightful as the track is, it’s hard to see it as anything but a cynical ghost-write. I shudder to think at what sort of trouble modern 11-year-olds get up to, but I think it’s safe to say that even in ’72, they were probably a bit past crawling around the house, pretending to be polar bears. It remains a fun little novelty, though. Once past Tiger Beat suitability himself, Ricky recaptured a bit of his pre-teen glory vicariously through his little sister Kim, as producer and co-writer of her 1981 new wave classic, “Kids in America.”


Chandra - "Kate"

On paper, Chandra Oppenheim’s mostly forgotten 1980 song “Kate” would seem to be just as inherently phony as Ricky’s dad’s imagineering. The daughter of successful New York City artist, Dennis Oppenheim, the 11-year-old Chandra had easy access to the thriving musical cross-pollination that defined the wasteland Lower East Side of her childhood. When set up with two established post-punk musicians (who had been gigging around town as “The Dance”) to record, she might have been merely a prop in another high-concept performance art experiment. What makes “Kate” feel more authentic is that, while the angsty throb of the music is a bit beyond her, the actual angst that’s articulated couldn’t feel more age-appropriate. Anyone who has been, or known, a pre-teen girl can recognize that the song’s first bitter lines (and repeated mantra), “There’s a girl named Kate, and she thinks she’s really great. But she’s not…” is much more documentary than make-believe. It’s rare, and perhaps even unique, that a kid in a manufactured pop project has been allowed to realistically express such un-cute sentiments as jealousy and resentment. And it’s not that our gal is trying on these grown-up emotions for show, so much as she’s running with the feelings she’s confusingly developing. If someone older had tried to put these words in her mouth, they most certainly would have fallen flat for distance and nostalgia. As it stands, this is probably the closest anyone can get to honest-to-God “Pop Art,” as produced by an actual child.”

Angie (w/ Pete Townshend) - "Peppermint Lump"

Any cursory analysis of the foregoing songs makes it clear that the majority of them feature the voices of English kids. It’s tempting to say that English accents just sound extra lovely, or maybe it’s that English artists find the kids voices more alluring than do their American counterparts. In any case, the Brits seem to have made this a pet genre, and my two favorites, both extremely British, feature not a kid’s chorus but simply the sound of one child’s voice. They attain greatness because these untrained singers imbue their respective songs with a secret ingredient, their voices serving a far greater function than mere ornamentation. “Peppermint Lump” is an oddball single released on Stiff Records 1979 and credited to Angie with Pete Townshend. Over a tape-delayed piano loop, in a simple almost-spoken manner, the young singer relates the rather humdrum existence of her dad, a minicab driver who drives her to school. Angie sings a plaintive melody that sounds like something a kid could have made up, but Townshend takes over on the chorus, where we feel the crunch of power chords. Along with Angie’s vocals, Townshend’s brief but stinging lead lines, the schoolyard sound effects and the divine Who-ish fadeout imbue “Peppermint Lump” with a genuine, and unexpected, poignancy and grace. And then there is “Dear God,” the song that briefly pushed XTC into the consciousness of America and its native England. The band clearly didn’t see the potential in it; initially “Dear God” was just a B-side and wasn’t even included on Skylarking until it began gaining interest and some airplay on college radio. Though in some ways typical of mid-period XTC—a sumptuous melody, Beatle-esque production touches and literate, lacerating lyrics—“Dear God” broke the mold, with its first verse and coda sung by eight-year-old Jasmine Veillette. The daughter of a friend of Todd Rundgren’s, who produced Skylarking, Ms. Veilette’s straightforward but stirring vocal turn adds the right touch of urgency and innocence to a pointed song that takes just about three minutes to lay out a more succinct case for atheism than Bill Maher or Christopher Hitchens could ever dream of making.

XTC - "Dear God"

Posted by David Klein at October 5, 2009 03:30 PM

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