Backbone > Lucid Dreaming
A Kid’s Ear View
(Or, Do We Really Need Another Song about Brushing Our Teeth?*)

My friend Shazz, known affectionately within our social circle for still being able to act like a kid in her late thirties without being childish, recently posted a new bumper sticker on her car. It reads: What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about? All existential considerations connected with this question aside—and there are so many it’s almost scary—it can be taken to define the two sides of the contemporary children’s music industry (yes, it has become that). On one side of the dividing line, there are those kids’ musicians—and parents and, as a result, some kids themselves—for whom the Hokey Pokey is quite enough, thank you, and on the other side there are those for whom it isn’t, never was, and never will be. Along the top of the line, shall we say, is a wide spectrum of mainstream kids’ music-makers—from the increasingly internationally popular The Wiggles, the new up-and-coming Hooley Dooley from Australia, and Barney, to the ubiquitous (and in my opinion, righteous) Raffi, to the highly successful, once left-of-center Tom Chapin, to name but a few. But then there is the kids’ music counterculture, consisting of a range of quirky and sometimes downright weird musicians who are clearly the bright sparks in what can sound like a monotonously preachy, moralistic and cheerful gray world of adults’ made-for-kids sound. “Yeah, you do find a glut of crap out there,” concurs kid-music band leader Dean Jones (Dog on Fleas). And that’s probably enough said on that note.

In the sixties, kids’ music for me consisted for a long time of exactly two albums of music made specifically for children: a compilation of Shirley Temple’s greatest hits from her movies, and another including everything from “Can She Make a Cherry Pie, Billie Boy?” to “Peter and the Wolf.” I only wanted to hear “Peter and the Wolf.” But then I discovered the Beatles and bubblegum music. While I detested the Archies, I must admit, at the risk of (out)dating myself, that I was not averse to watching “Wonderama”—both the earlier Sandy Becker version and Bob McAllister’s days of singing repeatedly, “Has Anybody Here Got an Aardvark?” The latter of which featured real elementary school-age kids dancing to bubblegum songs like “Build Me Up, Buttercup” and “Gooey Gooey Gumdrops.” (Although I can still remember all of the lyrics, don’t even ask me who sang them.) Anything the Beatles sang gave me chills. That was kids’ music for me. From there it was an easy jump to everything else in rock ’n’ roll.

But in the early 1990s, when I had both my kids, it was a different story. There just wasn’t much around for kids that was worth listening to. Following their births, I was given recordings of famous musicians singing kids’ songs I’d never heard before as fundraising efforts for children with AIDS. Being boys, they liked Sting’s version of “Cushy Butterfield,” and Springsteen’s “Mama’s Soup Surprise” because they were about things that are disgusting, like bad breath and toenail pie. The one Raffi tape we received went into the trash along with another one in which my kids’ names had been inserted into each song. One of my proudest moments as a parent came when my oldest son turned his back on the Barney float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and yelled, “I hate Barney! I’m not gonna look at him!” (The crowd also loved it.) Inevitably, when my kids grew out of the AIDS benefit tape, I had no choice but to return to the infinitely reliable and guaranteed-to-be-complex Beatles.

Not surprisingly, given this area’s reputation for creativity and its tendency toward left-of-center, three of the bright sparks of today’s kids’ music world—those who make “music that actually tries to say something,” as Jones puts it—live in the Hudson Valley or within close proximity. Count along the underside of the dividing line between “what Disney likes,” as Steve Zucchini puts it, and what the current crop of kids really like, Rosendale’s Dog on Fleas, Saratoga’s the Zucchini Brothers, and Jay Mankita of High Falls. Add to that lively mix of musicians any band or musician who is privileged enough to receive airplay each Saturday morning on the Hoboken, NJ-based WFMU-FM’s show “Greasy Kid Stuff,” hosted by intrepid kids’ DJs Belinda Miller and Hova Najarian, two long-term volunteers at the station who describe themselves as “a couple of dorks” who grew up liking punk music.
Today, the children’s music industry—especially the alternative side of it—is so big that it includes bands and individuals I’d never heard of before starting research for this article. Besides the Wiggles/ Raffi/Chapin/Barney contingent, there are several other lesser-known kids’ musicians worth investigating. The following bands and musicians were recommended by the five people I’ve interviewed: Magpie, Sarah Pirtle, Bob Blue, Louise Kessel, Billie Jonas (who plays trash cans), Laurie Berkner (who plays for Madonna’s kids’ birthdays), The Bottle Let Me Down, 1,000 Clowns, James Kochalka Superstar, Gloria Balsam, Michael Shelley, Cat Power, Gooey D, Judy Pancoast, Dana, Marcia Lane, Jessica Harper, nursery rhyme rapper Miss Vee, Cathy Fink, and Marxie Marxer. And then there are the established artists who have come of parental age and realized that, as some critics believe, they can’t stomach the children’s music that’s out there, and have produced their own. This group includes former Del Fuegos rocker Dan Zanes, Springsteen accompanist and house band Cats on a Smooth Surface member Ray Andersen (now known as Mr. Ray), The Bad Examples’ Ralph Covert, NRBQ, They Might Be Giants, former Pimentos for Gus principal Justin Roberts, Donovan, the Roches, and even Sugar Hill Gang, who have issued a clean version of Rapper’s Delight, especially for kids.

So, what’s driving what Zucchini calls “this new subculture” of kids’ music? Are kids more hip and sophisticated these days than they used to be? Or are their parents? Is it another case of the last members of the Me Generation demanding to continue to get their ya-yas out, albeit with toddlers and school kids in tow? Is making cool music for kids just a trend or a full-fledged movement?

According to Billboard, it’s a movement. “Over the past few years, there has been a rise in the number of indie rock musicians moonlighting as recording artists in the children’s music industry,” reporter Moira McCormick wrote in the magazine’s November 17, 2001 issue. She cites Zanes, Roberts, and Covert as examples. But according to everybody I talked to maybe it is, maybe it’s not. “Well,” as Hova of “Greasy Kid Stuff” said simply, “This is a generation of parents who used to listen to punk rock.” So there you have it—so what if it is or it isn’t a movement?

“We didn’t realize how bad the kids’ music industry was until we started getting mail for doing the show…One thing I’ve noticed, if this is a kind of zeitgeist, over the seven years we’ve been doing the show, is that it definitely seems like things are hipper, at least for kids living in the metropolitan area,” said Belinda of “Greasy Kid Stuff.” “We used to notice that kids are cooler and think, ‘Hey, they’re listening to us!’ but maybe that’s because of where we live.” In any case, she can’t help admitting, “I cannot listen to Raffi! I mean, we don’t mind Raffi, but we don’t play him on our show. But he does suck.” This year, the DJ duo released a CD of their own, Songs from Inside the Radio, which contains 15 very alternative tracks, from punk band The Mr. T Experience’s version of the “Sesame Street” favorite, “Up and Down,” to Yo La Tengo’s “My Little Corner of the World.”

But Zucchini, a member of his band along with “brothers” Jack and Sam for 12 years, disagreed. “There is definitely a whole subculture of this kids’ music thing, and people doing stuff that really needs to be heard,” he said. “Where the kids’ music business suffers is that most adults think it doesn’t matter how they sound, as long as they’ve got a beat, kids’ll like it. That’s definitely something we fight to counteract.”
As I always tell my own kids, the only people who get old or start to dislike children are the ones who’ve forgotten that they were once kids themselves, and can’t think like them anymore. Likewise, Jones, Zucchini, and Mankita agree that their success in writing children’s songs (as Belinda and Hova’s is in choosing them) is due to the fact that they see little difference between adults and children. As a result, their music is playful, period—regardless of the age of their listeners. “Kids are adults, just with less experience,” Belinda said. “The real kernel of truth is, kids know whether you put your whole heart and soul into a song, or whether they’re being thought of as second fiddle, just like adults know,” Zucchini agreed. And he should know, having trained as a teacher along with his fellow band members before all three decided to enter classrooms, not as teachers, but as the Zucchini Brothers.

“The best kids’ music treats kids as if they have the power to comprehend topics that are more complex than what a lot of kids’ music offers,” Mankita, a jazz musician by night, said. “Some of my favorite musicians are Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary. When I think of them, I don’t think, ‘Is this kids’ music or adults’ music?’ They just play. And they never play down.”

It’s that lack of condescension, that ability to see children as smaller versions of adults, that Mankita says he has worked to “craft a career about” over the past 15 years that he has been writing and performing for children, as well as networking with other performers through the musical community formed by members of the Children’s Music Network. He explained: “What drew me to kids’ music was being hired by a bunch of children’s performers to play guitar. That was my first foot in the water, and I liked it, so I started writing for kids—and for myself—and it’s become very popular.” Like the others interviewed, he draws upon his own musical roots—especially Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, and James Taylor—in both his lyric-driven songs and lovely storytelling, and it shows. Similarly, you can hear the Grateful Dead in the Zucchini Brothers and Jones’ other bands—the ongoing Fighting MacKenzies and past projects For Sale By Owner Orchestra and the Harmonica Virgins—all influence his kids music, and vice versa. And I wasn’t surprised to find that the musical choices being made on the air by Belinda and Hova are based on their early love of the Beatles and bubblegum, followed by Jonathan Richman (the show’s “patron saint”) and punk music. “Context is everything,” said Hova.

Although much of the music being produced by alternative kids’ musicians sounds fresh, unique, and catchy, if I had any complaint to make, it’s the fact that, like the mainstream kids’ performers, there is still just a teensy bit too much preoccupation with sending messages, however innocuous they are. Sure, the messages being sent aren’t as vapid as Barney’s “I love you / you love me / we’re a happy family,” and they aren’t as preachy or as obvious as those conveyed in the songs of the quasi-spiritual Raffi, but they still seem inordinately preoccupied with things like…dental care, of all things. Each CD my nine-year-old son Harrison and I reviewed together for this article—Dog on Fleas’ Fairly Good Songs for Fairly Good Kids, the “Greasy Kid Stuff” compilation, Jay Mankita’s The Day the Library Went Wild, and The Zucchini Brothers’ Live at the Clubhouse! and In the Garden—featured some ditty about oral hygiene. “Do we really need another song about brushing our teeth?” Harrison despaired. Admittedly, the toothbrush is not his favorite object, and he is often referred to as a 40-year-old man living in a child’s body. But still. “Rule Number One,” he declared. “Kids don’t like songs about teeth. The CD can’t have a song about that. We have too many of those songs already. Rule Number Two: You can’t say the same thing over and over through the whole song.” (Unless, of course, it’s the Ramones singing “Blitzkrieg Bop,” his latest favorite.) Belinda agrees, despite what Harrison considers her lapse in judgment concerning cleaning the old incisors: “We believe in recycling, but we really hate playing songs saying ‘You must recycle!’” she said. “It’s so PC. Kids can get a message without you repeatedly beating it into their heads.”

Some musicians, like Jones, want to send messages, but definitely not politically correct ones. “When the shit hit the fan here, with September 11, I wondered how to write music that expresses the opposite point of view from ‘We’re gonna kick some butt!’” Jones recalled. At the time, he was working at an elementary school as a musician-in-residence, teaching songwriting. “I asked them, ‘What do you think about what’s happening? What do you feel?’” he said. “I expected them to say, ‘I don’t want to be at war,’ but they said, ‘We’re gonna kick butt!’ So I asked them what they thought about the poor peasants in Afghanistan, who had tanks running over their land; I said, ‘How do you think they feel?’ They said, ‘We should kill them!’ When I see a trend like this, hearing kids saying ‘These people are our enemies,’ I want to write music about it.”

But Jones knows exactly what he’s up against in attempting to present kids with an alternative viewpoint. “It’s a process, to get in with the kids after hearing this kind of stuff over and over,” he said. “I don’t know if we can address this stuff yet. I don’t know if it will hit them.” Even so, his song “Every Kind of People Is Good People,” came out of the experience. “I tried to tell them that bad kids aren’t necessarily bad kids, they’re just going through stuff and we can help them through it,” he said. “But I also feel like, let’s do music from the Mid East, so kids don’t get this picture of ‘America—good, world—bad.’” Then his voice turned rueful. “I could call it ‘Music from the Axis of Evil,’” he laughed. “You know, put a positive spin on it.”

Where will children’s music go from here? Zucchini sees the industry as a ladder, with the mainstream—specifically Barney—at the top and his own band and other alternative musicians on the bottom rung. “I know I’m pushing buttons, but The Wiggles are very hot right now and so many other bands at the bottom deserve to be in the spotlight, because they’re better than The Wiggles,” he said. Mankita expressed similar distaste for The Wiggles, but philosophically disagreed: “I don’t see there being a ladder. I don’t want to climb any higher than I am…I love performing, but I already feel like I’m performing too much, with 150 gigs a year. My struggle is to remain centered in my life, and give as much importance to being home with my family and friends as being with my audiences.”

For Jones, now working on his second Dog on Fleas CD, there is “definite frustration” with the children’s music industry. “I hear things like, ‘Oh, all our label deals with is songs about counting and the alphabet.’ I thought, wow, this world is wide open, but it’s actually hard,” he said. “But all my songs are really playful, and kids would like them. It’s just that before, I played them mostly in smoky bars. Now we can do a gig in the morning and they’ll eat it up.”

But in the end, it was Belinda and Hova who expressed the future of kids’ music the best. “If you play it,” Belinda said, “people will come. You have to believe.”

For more information on the upcoming performances, CD releases, programs, and current works of Dog on Fleas, The Zucchini Brothers, Jay Mankita, “Greasy Kid Stuff” or Dan Zanes, try the following:

For Dog on Fleas, log onto CDBaby.com or e-mail dogonfleas@msn.com.

For The Zucchini Brothers, visit www.zucchinibrothers.com.

For Jay Mankita, log onto www.jaymankita.com.

For “Greasy Kid Stuff,” tune your radio to 90.1 FM on Saturday mornings, 10am-12pm, or log onto www.wfmu.org/gks, or e-mail greasy@wfmu.org.

For information on the children’s music industry or to research a particular artist, log onto http://www.childrensmusicnetwork.com.

*Subtitle by Harrison Roberts, age 9.