For Joyful and You Know It, the newest documentary in HBO’s Music Field anthology, director Penny Lane considers the ocean of kids’s music that surrounds an enormous fish like “Child Shark” and its billions of streams. How do the artists who make this music cope with the age-old, nonetheless elusive, and nonetheless kinda dumb query of what’s cool? How does one write an efficient track for youths utilizing language that validates and consists of them? And can synthetic intelligence taint the innate pleasure of human voice and motion – of listening to a beat, and kicking out the jams – simply because the know-how is slopifying every thing else in our tradition?
The Gist: Joyful and You Know It focuses on 4 kids’s music creators because it considers the trade and cultural local weather the place they work. When preschool trainer Laurie Berkner realized she couldn’t attain her younger pupils, she started to jot down and carry out authentic songs – typically about dinosaurs – from their perspective. Chris Ballew loved success along with his alt-’90s band The Presidents of america of America, however after music trade burnout, launched quite a few data as Caspar Babypants. Musician Divinity Roxx, former touring bassist for Beyoncé, fused hip-hop with positivity in her personal flip towards child’s music. And for kids’s entertainer Johnny Solely, releasing his model of the previous summer season camp singalong “Child Shark” in 2011 turned a legally sticky signpost on the street South Korean firm Pinkfong took to unleashing its personal “Shark” take into the worldwide bloodstream. Copyright drama, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, company fats cats vs. the little man, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, and so on.
For Anthony Area of The Wiggles, the story’s just a little completely different, largely as a result of his band has develop into a kids’s music behemoth. The combo’s been making data and taking part in reveals for many years, and are such an establishment they’ve impressed generational followers, who now move Wiggles songs like “Fruit Salad” and “Scorching Potato” onto their very own children. Joyful And You Know It consists of plenty of footage of Wiggles concert events which can be arena-level sellouts, and bemused TV information reporters saying issues like “Toddlers going berserk over a rock band? I’ve my ticket.”
Inside all of this dialogue are questions in regards to the validity of what they do. Berkner making an attempt to copy the facial expressions individuals make after they study she solely writes and performs music for kids, as if that’s cute however not legit. Ballew calling child audiences punk as fuck as a result of they demand authenticity. (Roxx agrees: “It’s not till you begin doin’ it that you simply notice this isn’t straightforward in any respect.”) However Joyful additionally questions the character of music for youths on the entire. What can we train them by way of singing, repetition, and the central pull of rhythm? And maybe it’s not about schooling in any respect, as a result of the music – the sensation – was already in them, uncorrupted by ingrained habits. “It’s not typically adults enable themselves to be playful,” Laurie Berkner says within the Joyful. “Until they get drunk sufficient.”
What Motion pictures Will It Remind You Of? The 2023 documentary Scorching Potato: The Story of the Wiggles went deep on the historical past and legacy of the Australian group, who’ve develop into one of the crucial profitable kids’s music teams of all time. Parchís: The Documentary reveals a captivating – and a minimum of in America, forgotten – slice of kids’s leisure from a special period. And Joyful filmmaker Penny Lane additionally directed Listening to Kenny G, one other doc within the Music Field collection, which tried to string a love-hate needle by way of the profession of the graceful jazz heavyweight.
Efficiency Price Watching: The makers of kids’s music featured in Joyful constantly confront a query, which principally boils right down to the identical previous cool-or-lame binary. So it’s fascinating to catch them in house studios, or jamming with others, or strolling by way of the forest with a ukelele, on the lookout for inspiration. These individuals are professionals, and so they’ve gotta put within the work. Writing an amazing track requires writing an amazing track, regardless of if the tip end result options stomping dinos, huge crimson automobiles, or the genius of buttered noodles.
Memorable Dialogue: For Chris Ballew, writing songs for youths was “a gorgeous alternative to have kids’s expertise with media, and music and films be wealthy and imaginative.” Or, you recognize, the alternative of “shoddy and trashy and simplistic.” (Ballew: “COUGH ‘Babyshark’ COUGH.”)
Intercourse and Pores and skin: As we all know from the 2016 Caspar Babypants single “Jellyfish Jones,” the track’s important character’s acquired no bones. But when he did, one of many first issues he may do, when free of a life floating within the sea, and naturally after studying how one can stomach dance, could be to get fitted for some jellyfish pants.
Our Take: Possibly all of it comes down to a few chords and a hooky line about poop? Nobody actually comes out and says this in Joyful and You Know It, however the doc’s allusion is that kids’s music embeds a pathway to common human enjoyment. Youngsters love a repeated sample, possibly barely variegated in a approach they’ll anticipate. (So, a well-known musical hook.) Youngsters love noise, motion, and a way of countless enjoyable. (So, the abandon contained in a timeless pop track, or the consuming potential of a beat on the dancefloor – simply as Mon Mothra.) And youngsters haven’t any drawback partaking with how this makes them really feel, regardless of who’s watching. (So, no grown-up hang-ups about notion.) Chris Ballew will get closest to this sonic constructing block connection in Joyful when he describes the “cartoon gentle bulb” that switched on over his head. Free of the “tradition of cool” that dominated different music, he may apply the whimsy already hardwired into PUSA materials (“Lump lingered final in line for brains, and the one she acquired was sorta rotten and insane”) to his work for youths as Caspar Babypants. Writing one thing catchy and memorable isn’t unique to severe compositions and even foolish love songs. It’s key to how we perceive music on a nervous system degree.
We imagine within the musicians featured in Joyful And You Know It, and are assured they’ll preserve engaged on their craft. However this doc additionally made us just a little unhappy. Evaluating their work as songwriters to the AI that’s contaminated kids’s music areas on YouTube, as Joyful does, is de facto no comparability in any respect. The previous class is stuffed with creativity and the sunshine contact of a customized lyric; the latter is like telling a kind of burrito supply robots to truly make a burrito. Joyful doesn’t actually have a solution for this bigger phenomenon, however it doesn’t really want one. (It’s making an attempt to remain constructive, in any case.) As a substitute it’s half of a bigger, sadder commentary that even in an trade nook like kids’s music, a know-how nobody requested for is overtaking the perfect elements of being human – like the easy, discovered act of having fun with a track – and changing it with clickable nonsense created by robots. As author and cultural critic Willa Paskin says in Joyful, “It’s antithetical to what we wish to be doing to our two-year-olds.”
Our Name: Stream It, particularly should you’re a dad or mum. Joyful and You Know It unpacks what could make kids’s music lovely, what could make it earworm-y – in good and unhealthy methods – and what could make it bland and grossly marketable. When all of those varieties of children’ music are taking place on the similar time, it creates a problem for an trade that retains thriving with each technology born.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based author. A veteran of the choice weekly trenches, his work has additionally appeared in Leisure Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Information, and The Village Voice.
