PROCESS/NARROWING
Towards the end of the AP Seminar course and into summer, I thought a lot about things that interest me and that engage me on an everyday basis. Naturally, I caught myself constantly listening to music while doing everyday tasks. No matter what I would be doing, there would always be music playing in the background. This led me to think about music related projects I could do. At first, I wanted to do something related to the artists themselves and I landed on doing something regarding conflicts between artists and how those can affect their listening pools, but I felt like this was too much of a recent topic to have any legitimate and academic research behind it. This led me to think of the musical lyrics themselves and how they have changed over different decades which helped me reach my final topic and research question being: Do explicit words or phrases in Kidz Bop songs become suggestive, changed, or bleeped for children?
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
When looking through academic databases for different resources and papers that backed my topic, I found multiple different studies done on my exact topic, most of them even regarding Kidz Bop themselves since Kidz Bop was established 24 years ago. However, most of this research was outdated and only covered a small selection of Kidz Bop songs. This meant that my research is broader and will yield more accurate results, as I have a bigger data pool and selection in general. On the other hand, since these previous studies only had a small data pool, it helped me formed my gap which is the studying the relation between the gender of the original artist and genre of the original song. All other studies done before have been so small scale that none of them have studied this exact relation, making it easier for me to assess. Along with this, every other study done has had their own methodology, helping me craft my own methodology easily and with almost no problems.
COLLECTING DATA
As previously mentioned, most of the other studies done regarding this topic have included different methodologies in their papers and journals. Using these, I took two different methodologies from two different papers. One of these is a table that keeps record of every aspect of my data. I personalized this table for the specifics of my project, meaning my table includes the song title, the original artist, the year of release (original and Kidz Bop), the genre of the original song, the gender of the original artist, and of course how many lyrics are changed, bleeped, or suggestive. The second part of my methodology was taken from a different paper and this introduces a lyric study to my research. To conduct a lyric study, I will print all the lyrics of every song (both original and Kidz Bop) and I will lay them side by side. I will listen to the Kidz Bop song and the original song while following along with the lyrics in front of me, pausing the music to highlight my findings in the respective colors (blue for changed, purple for suggestive, and red for bleeped) as I go. Using these two different methodologies, I will be able to complete not only my data collection but also my data analysis with ease.
RELEVANCE
As music becomes more and more modern, more and more mature concepts and ideas are introduced and referenced in hit songs that get listened to by young ears. Young children shouldn't be exposed to these kinds of things, as their innocence should be protected and they should feel safe and cared for. When listening to music, the brain subconciously takes in different phrases and words that someone may not notice, meaning if a child is listening to a more mature song, although they may not fully understand the lyrics, their brain will still take them in and that can't be reversed. Kidz Bop is a company that advertises clean and kid-friendly music catered specifically to today's youth, but if they aren't living up to this standard, then children today may be at risk of exposure to explicit and unsafe concepts and ideas. By studying different Kidz Bop songs to prove their innocence (or maybe their matureness), then I can bring awareness to this topic and help children stay children for longer.
INTRODUCTION
As I have been researching songs that have been covered by Kidz Bop, a company of kids banded together to create clean versions of hit songs, I have been looking for Kidz Bop lyrics that have been changed to be more kid-friendly, bleeped out entirely, or that have stayed suggestive to other concepts and ideas that a kid should not be exposed to. People, mostly children, listen to Kidz Bop as a way to escape explicit words, phrases, or even mentions of inappropriate subjects. However, while exploring these lyrics of different Kidz Bop songs, I have found that some lyrics aren't as innocent as they should be.
PROGRESS
With my data set of 72 songs (top 3 most playes songs from the past 24 years), I would listen to both the original and the Kidz Bop version of the song while conducting a lyric study, studying the lyrics of both songs side by side to catach changes and suggestive lyrics throughout. At this point, I have finished listening and analyzing all of the songs I needed, meaning I am done with my data collection a month early! I have so much time left that if I wanted, I could go back and add 24 more songs to my data set if I see it necessary.
CHALLENGES/PROBLEM SOLVING
For every single one of my songs, I used the same website to gather the different lyrics I needed to conduct my lyric study. However, when I was deep in my data collection, I noticed that for one of the songs, Don't Stop the Music by Kidz Bop (a Rihanna original) the lyrics that I printed were wrong, and they were wrong on every website I could find. This threw my data off since this was one of the top 3 most played songs from the year of 2008. To solve this issue, I replaced the song with the next most played song of that year. This meant that for 2008, my data isn't the top 3 most played songs, but the top 4 most played songs. Another issue I ran into was that two of the songs I chose, APT. by Bruno Mars and Rosé and RITMO by the Black Eyed Peas and J Balvin, both included lyrics in different languages that I didn't know. Analyzing these lyrics would make my data inaccurate, so like I did before, I replaced both of these songs with the next most played songs from those years.
DATA HIGHLIGHTS
Looking back on my analyzed lyrics, I have observed that most of them have either stayed suggestive or have been changed into a different lyric. When a lyric stays suggestive, it is usually referring to something like drugs, alcohol, sexual activities, etc. Although these may go past a child's mind, it definitely doesn't slip by someone more mature and older. The song with the most changed/bleeped/suggestive lyrics is Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars. This song had 24 changed lyrics, 9 suggestive lyrics, and 23 bleeped lyrics totaling to 56 altered lyrics. Furthermore, another trend I found was that when most lyrics are bleeped out of a song, it is almost never just one or two lyrics of the song, it is usually an entire verse of the song. This verse usually belongs to an artist that was featured on this song, meaning Kidz Bop tends to cut out verse's/lyrics from artists that are just featured on a song as opposed to the actual artist's vereses themselves.
REFLECTION
I think I am at a good spot with my research so far. The nice thing is that since I finished my data collection so fast, I have lots of leniency with what I want to do next (add more songs to my data set, start data analysis, etc.). I think I have learned a lot about Kidz Bop themselves. Some things include the fact that sometimes just hearing a kid's voice automatically tricks the brain into thinking anything being said is innocent and pure, when that isn't always the case. Along with this, Kidz Bop uses lot's of adults voices in the background to try and elevate the song, but this defeats the purpose the company's mission.