When thinking about modern day music, I can't help but notice how many explicit words and phrases are included in different songs and other types of media. This led me to think about different resources and materials that can be used for children to ensure they aren't exposed to explicit ideas, and Kidz Bop is a perfect example of this. Kidz Bop is a group of children banded together to create clean covers of popular songs from big artists. They change the lyrics that aren't deemed "kid friendly" and make them more appropriate for children. However, looking deeper into this, I noticed that Kidz Bop doesn't change some of the lyrics if they don't blatantly include an explicit word or phrase. This leads to suggestive lyrics being left unedited or unchanged, therefore being unsafe for children to listen to. With this comes my research question: do explicit words or phrases in original songs become suggestive, changed, or bleeped for children in Kidz Bop songs? While researching this, I plan to use a lyric study to analyze the lyrics of the original and Kidz Bop song side by side to uncover lyrics that have been changed, bleeped, or have stayed suggestive along with a table to keep track of all my findings. Regarding my gap, I will analyze the correlation between the gender of the original artist and the genre of the original song to discover which types of songs are the most explicit, or if there is even any correlation between the two.
Kidz Bop is "the #1 music brand for children, featuring popular, contemporary pop songs re-recorded by kids for kids". In other words, Kidz Bop features big hit songs that have been covered by children to make them more kid-friendly and childish for the youthful ear to hear. However, sometimes Kidz Bop doesn't change alter everything they should. Some lyrics are left unchanged, unbleeped, or suggestive which isn't good for a children to be exposed to. As Kidz Bop has been around since 2001, they have released 52 different albums featuring all covered songs from the time period they were released in. Added up, these albums include over 1100 different songs and out of these, I have chosen 72 to work with. Currently, Kidz Bop features 10 different kids on their songs, but this has changed over the years. Kidz Bop also turns some of their covers into music videos, but not every single one has a music video to go along with it. Lastly, Kidz Bop claims to be kidSAFEcoppacertified which means they have a seal on their company that makes them certified to be able to call themselves kid-friendly.