CHILD POP By Bruce Crumley PARIS, 2 November 1998 - When it came to dealing with obnoxious kids, Shakespeare had it right. The penalty for juvenile presumptuousness was eternal silence and darkness - any audience asked to put up with a conspicuously precocious child would be rewarded by seeing him offed by the final act. Tragically, the modern music industry seems to have turned this order on its head, and allowed the youngsters to take over the audio day care center. In case no one else has noticed, the Muzak Biz has been championing a particularly horrid trend of late : Child Pop. Over the past year, the pop music industry has spit out a growing number of acts made up of pre-and barely-pubescent kids. But far from being the novelty acts and freaks child performers used to be, the current crop are actually demanding to be taken seriously as artists, whose work offers something profound to say about life. Call it Ado-Rock, Pedo-Pop, or simply Toddler Trash, it's making millions, and is thus regarded as a credible musical genre in the eyes of avaricious record execs. People with no profit motive in evaluating Child Pop, however, have been left wondering just how much a 14-year old has to say about life that merits the attention of anyone other the kid's obligatorily adoring parents? How much, after all, can a mere child know about love, death, and root canal that deserves imparting to millions of listeners? Why, then, is the pop world suddenly producing crooning tots to wax shallow about the ravages of a world they can know precious little about? Listen to one of these bands, and the obvious answer--that "It sells"--just doesn't seem like reason enough. The sorry trend began in earnest last year with the apparition of Hanson: a trio of screechy-voiced and straggly haired brothers - all under 17 - whom one person has accurately described as looking like "three unnecessarily ugly girls". Next, the American music community inexplicably hailed 14-year old country singer LeAnne Rimes, whose twangy ballads about Real World issues are about as credible and convincing as Bill Gates listing his Ten Toughest Things About Remaining Meek. Europe then got in on the kiddie act with the launch of the of adolescent blow-up dolls, Ultimate Kaos. The worst, however, came in the truly awful Cleopatra: three weird sisters with a collective age of 47, whose overly aggressive, nasal vocal delivery most closely resembles an angry female US postal worker treating chronic PMS with large doses of helium. The result is an audio recipe for instant migraine, replete with that ever-so-endearing affectation that has become de rigeur with all bubble-rap groups: the ersatz Brooklyn accent. As consistently lame as its musical content may be, it is in its lyrics that Child Pop most gravely insults the listeners' intelligence. As with Hanson, Cleopatra in their first single stuck to what the band considered a manageably moronic theme: a navel-gazing recitation of how they intend to work real, real, real, real hard to become big time pop stars. But again like Hanson, the Cleopatra sisters soon made the mistake of attacking topics they can't but have the most remote and naive understanding of - the cruelty and ruthlessness of "real life" in the follow up single, "Life Ain't Easy". In case you missed it, these girls - who still get tucked in each night - are going to tell us how in this bad old world, "Life Ain't Easy". Right. Sure. In fact, life's a real whore when you're 14, and have to go to school and stuff like that. Wait till you're older, Cleos, and learn how being spoken down to by wards leaves you longing to see the return of Victorian treatment of children. The hallucinogenic heart of Child Pop is blinding in moments of its own unrecognized incongruence. Such is the case when the 16-year-old New York musical midget, Billy Crawford, utters the line "I can have any girl I want" in his laughably serious single, "Urgently in Love". The idea of such a hormonally-retarded love is inadvertently stripped of all credibility in the video, where oh-so-cute Crawford and his chums saunter around Coney Island seducing the kind of video-perfect babes who'd be the envy of any normal rock star-if only it weren't for their training bras. But probably the single most intense moment of mind-bending retardatia embodied by the entire Child Pop phenom comes in the single by England's kid group Ultimate Kaos, "Casanova". In it, the group's lead vocalist - who is apparently heading the band precisely because his voice has yet to change - promises his sweetheart "I want you to be my wife". That's right: Junior wants her to be his betrothed - presumably so they can spend quiet nights together before a fire, talking about what they'll do when they grow up and have reproductive plumbing that finally works. The idiocy of this single line encapsulates everything that's backwards about the band, and the entire Child Pop trend: at best it's either nonsensical or disgustingly naive, and at worst it sounds like some over-fed, dim-witted child standing up at the dinner table and making pronouncements about how to cure the world's ills. These are the kinds of situations the backhand was invented for. There are those who will protest such criticism, contending such sub-mental, "light" fare is fine, and that the world would be far too heavy and intense if everything - even often vacuous pop music - always had to "mean something". But while there is some truth to that view, it is equally true that everything should "mean something" at least sometimes-and Pedo-Pop bands just can't. Like anything else, music and songs need some minimal amount of raw material to be of any value, and children virtually never have the combination of developed talent, creativity, and simple knowledge that comes with experience. There are, of course, exceptions. Michael Jackson, for example, had such talent that he actually was better belting out "I Want You Back" as a child than he is as an experienced adult protesting (how ironic) charges of pedophilia in "They Don't Really Care About Us". But that was because Jackson's path was inverse to today's Child Pop stars: far from having been launched before he had anything to say, the dynamic and deep talent Jackson commanded made whatever he sang something worth listening to - a situation that has changed as his persona and "act" took precedence over and eventually silenced that talent. Moreover, for every Jackson there is an Osmond Brother or former member of Musical Youth, who enjoyed a moment of youthful fame before taking up a life-long career of cringing whenever they hear the flatulent sounds they were encouraged to produce as kids. Similarly, virtually all the current pedo-popstars will be in college or waiting tables by the turn of the century - long forgotten by a music industry that made a mint by taking the public for idiots and exploiting a pack of overly-ambitious children like precocious musical chimps. There is enough crappy music in the world being made by adults with no excuse for not having a clue; the world really doesn't need juvenile Musical Messengers who can't reasonably be expected to have a clue.

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