Say your prayers, little one / Don't forget, my son /To include everyone

February 28, 2018 9:26 AM

The bizarre "cover songs for babies" business is booming

Covers of:
Metallica: Enter Sandman
RHCP: Under the Bridge
Rush: Tom Sawyer
Van Halen: Running With The Devil
Rihanna: Rude Boy
Green Day: Basket Case
Nirvana: All Apologies
Kanye: Gold Digger
Alexander Hamilton
Star Wars

21 Famous Songs You Never Dreamed Could Be Children's Lullabies

posted by the man of twists and turns (59 comments total)

I bet there is a giant overlap between the "I might be having a kid, but I will never buy a minivan!!!!!!!!" crowd and the people driving this business.

Some people cannot let go of their younger and free-er selves. One way of living in the past is pretending your baby is really into Black Metal.
posted by sideshow at 9:39 AM on February 28, 2018 [17 favorites]

This phenomenon has been going on for at least a decade and a half; that's how long the Park Slopes and Stoke Newingtons of this world have been full of shops selling Sex Pistols/Clash/Cure/Pulp/Black Flag/(insert cool/credible band here) baby onesies and such. Which is because we've had a few generations in which defining oneself by one's consumption of pop-cultural artefacts was the norm, and where there is a gap for, say, incentives to maintain one's subcultural identity into parenthood, the Invisible Hand Of The Free Market will provide.
posted by acb at 9:43 AM on February 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

I just pipe NWW's original Soliloquy For Lilith into little sandettie's Skinner box, why use a facsimile?
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 9:45 AM on February 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

One way of living in the past is pretending your baby is really into Black Metal.

I read little baby T The Odyssey and Small Gods, among others, because:
It doesn't matter what I read. It's the tone you use.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:52 AM on February 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

Kristen Bell and Dave Grohl - Do you wanna build a Sandman?
posted by Talez at 9:54 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

It's a shame that adults can't get, like, metal covers of "Hush Little Baby".

Because I'm an Old and grew up in an old-fashioned household, TBH I am a bit off-put when I see a little kid singing or dancing to something really gross and sexually explicit. My younger peers are always sending videos of their six-year-olds singing "Bitch Better Have My Money" and so on, and it doesn't seem like it's doing the kids any harm, but it still seems weird to me.
posted by Frowner at 9:55 AM on February 28, 2018 [25 favorites]

I just pipe NWW's original Soliloquy For Lilith into little sandettie's Skinner box, why use a facsimile?

You joke - I presume - but a friend of mine decided to stop playing Coil and most related World Serpent stuff around his toddler after kind of considering, well, a lot of things.

I might be getting older because I kind of agree. I love Coil, but the sources of a lot of the recordings are often really dark, experimental and ritualistic. When there are recognizable themes or words they tend to be either extremely sexual, spooky or downright unsettling or appalling.

And frankly, this kid has like 150 versions of Wheels on the Bus and he wants to hear all of them.

Related, one of the first pictures my friend sent me of said tiny human was of him in a crib under a mobile made out of a bunch of postcards of my extremely psychedelic optical art mandalas, and my first gut reaction was "Oh, you poor thing, that's not really what you should be training your new eyes on. Oh, man, I was so screwed up when I made some of those things, and they're basically scientifically designed to break your eyeballs."

And I joked that if he kept that kind of stuff up he was going to accidentally raise someone who ended up very conservative in response to so much high weirdness. Which... considering how much of a fussy eater this kid is and how freaked out he is by bugs, and how into cars he is... well... hrm.
posted by loquacious at 9:55 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

Paging MeFi's Own caspar babypants.
posted by infinitewindow at 9:58 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

One wonders what will happen when kids that have been raised as their hip parents' pop-cultural fashion accessories, from punk-rock BabyGros to lullaby covers of Pavement to their first vinyl record, will do when they hit adolescence and need to individuate themselves from their parents' identities. Will they start listening to deliberately commercial and un-hip stuff, jumping from item to item as hipster culture assimilates it (as it has done everything from Hall & Oates to Taylor Swift), ultimately converging on some sort of anti-Metal Machine Music, something so irredeemably inauthentic that it defies hipsterisation? Or, if no such item can exist, will they reject music altogether? Will a generation arise that defines itself by its hatred of organised sound in all its forms, possibly with elaborate ideological rationalisations for why music is bad (perhaps some sort of neo-Platonist argument, combined with wokeness about how the music-addicted Boomers/Xers/Millennials have fucked everything)?
posted by acb at 10:02 AM on February 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

I stolidly reject the use of covering metal songs as lullabies, but you can have my 10-month-old's "Anarchy in the Pre-K" onesie when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
posted by Mayor West at 10:07 AM on February 28, 2018 [11 favorites]

When our daughter was born I had a lullaby all picked out and customized for her to be The Kraken Song based on Tender Shepherd from Peter Pan, and for a month or so I sang it to her every night at bedtime because I think it's a lovely song for a baby. It IS lovely but somehow when I was actually singing it to her it didn't feel quite as perfect as I'd expected and when I was up nursing her late at night I found myself singing impromptu versions of other songs I know one of which just kept popping up in the rotation until I was singing it every day which is how her night-night song ended up being a special personalized version of Closing Time by Semisonic.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:14 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

It's a shame that adults can't get, like, metal covers of "Hush Little Baby".

I'm a Little Teapot with heavy metal drums
posted by The Tensor at 10:16 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

The Bjork ones we used to have in regular rotation at nap times. The Radiohead ones are good too but all spooky as fuck.
posted by Artw at 10:30 AM on February 28, 2018

I don't have kids, but a friend of mine who does explained his purchase of a couple of these CDs by saying they were marginally better (for the adults, and really young kids don't care what they're listening to as long as it's soothing) than the usual baby and toddler music fare. He was under no illusions that anyone was being rendered cooler by owning or listening to them.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:40 AM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I was going to say that there’s no need for the author to be all judgey about these. I don’t have kids, but my brother in law was asking me to make stuff like this for them because they were so tired of the same basic melodies and the same songs all the time. Having a kid doesn’t mean you suddenly want to hear Wheels on the Bus millions of times. A kid-appropriate version of something the parents like makes perfect sense.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:45 AM on February 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

shapes that haunt the dusk: "A kid-appropriate version of something the parents like makes perfect sense."

Two words for you here: Radio edit.

My now-8-year-old likes a lot of music. I wake him up some mornings by playing whatever the hell I want to hear. He likes it, I give him a musical history lesson, everyone wins. "What do you want to hear today, buddy?" "How about bands from the 1970s?" or 80s, or 90s, or sometimes "Well what's the oldest stuff you have?" and I pull out some blues recordings from the 1930s or whatever.

I refuse to play for him watered-down versions of the original stuff. Covers, if they are legit covers, we compare and contrast. It's fun to play multiple versions of the same song by different people over and over to see how they each took the song in a different direction.

But I solidly draw the line at "Hey let's dumb this down to play for kids"

For lullaby time, I just played stuff I could sing along to, and he went out like a light. James Taylor's Sweet Baby James album is still my go-to when he won't go to bed - as soon as I start singing he starts to drift off.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:57 AM on February 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

One wonders what will happen when kids that have been raised as their hip parents' pop-cultural fashion accessories

There's an ep of Portlandia where the first grade parents bicker over which Neu! album to use in class.

I wonder along with acb's sentiment, and concur with the concerns loquacious aired above. I'm very relieved that I do not have to sweat any such considerations.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 10:59 AM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's a shame that adults can't get, like, metal covers of "Hush Little Baby".

Cookie Monster is the one to follow.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:11 AM on February 28, 2018

It's not like this is the first generation of kids to be raised by "cool" parents. Ned Flanders was raised by beatniks, and look how he turned out!

If anything, it'll be more like this Onion article, which describes my childhood perfectly: Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:12 AM on February 28, 2018 [20 favorites]

I didn't listen to too many of these when my kid was a baby but she did have a Mommy's Little Monster onesie complete with the Social Distortion skeleton logo.
posted by vespabelle at 11:19 AM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just assumed that these albums were a way for parents to play kid-friendly music without completely losing their minds.
posted by sarcasticah at 11:21 AM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

"What do you want to hear today, buddy?" "How about bands from the 1970s?" or 80s, or 90s, or sometimes "Well what's the oldest stuff you have?" and I pull out some blues recordings from the 1930s or whatever.

My kids and I used to play the Globe Music Game, where we would take out a globe and spin it and stop it randomly at a point. Then we would search Youtube for music from wherever our finger landed. My son was really into this. My daughter, on the other hand, just kinda doesn't like most music much (?!?) and actually prefers "kids music", and, um, Christian rock.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:23 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

Do people really play music like this for their babies? Whether "traditional" or toy-piano'ed pop covers? I don't know any parents who do. We just put on the radio or Pandora or whatever.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:24 AM on February 28, 2018

Do people really play music like this for their babies? Whether "traditional" or toy-piano'ed pop covers?

People must. It sells and I often hear people talking about finding kids music for their kids. We did the Rockaby Baby thing as a guessing game through Spotify shuffle after the kid went to bed. "What song is this? Oh, Coldplay again." For the most part though, yeah... we just put on whatever. (The kid's bedtime playlist is just Phil Ochs.)

And I know our kid gets exposed to commercial stuff at daycare and I know the day will come when they can verbally demand listening to Bruno Mars at home, but until then they get all the Sylvester.
posted by kendrak at 11:35 AM on February 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Do they make these for birds? Because finding the overlap of music that calms our birds down and is also music we like is pretty difficult, and I'd appreciate if someone else put the work in for us.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:44 AM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

It doesn't matter, you'll still hate the music your kids love and you'll feel really old in the end.

Trust me.
posted by GuyZero at 11:55 AM on February 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

There's an ep of Portlandia where the first grade parents bicker over which Neu! album to use in class.

Actually, I think I'd go more for Musik von Harmonia.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:23 PM on February 28, 2018

I checked a few of these out of the library when my son was a tot, but they're just not as good as the originals so we just listen to whatever we want unless it is super-violent or misogynistic. Which is how we ended up with what is probably my proudest parenting moment: looking into the backseat to see my son, age 3, wearing sunglasses and headbanging, playing drums on his sippy cup while we listened to The Cramps.

He's 7 now and suuuper into pretty much any music that comes his way. We got him an Echo Dot for Christmas and set him up with his own Spotify account so he can play pretty much whatever he asks for. I wasn't too fond of the Paul McCartney phase he went through a couple months ago but it's fun to suddenly hear Radiohead or Nina Simone or The Gorillaz or Stevie Wonder or Boards of Canada coming from his room.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 12:28 PM on February 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

I fell down this rabbit hole a few months ago when I found, left in a pile of discards on a stoop in Park Slope (of course), a vinyl copy of “Lullaby Renditions of the Flaming Lips”. It was so bizarre and on-the-nose that I had to google it immediately, where I discovered this whole weird world of parents hell-bent on being The Cool Ones.
posted by Itaxpica at 12:42 PM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've encountered a lot of these covers through a Pandora station that we used to put on during nap time. I would occasionally think about how silly it was to hear the dulcet sounds of G'n'R's "Paradise City" coming through the baby monitor, but apart from that I never gave it much thought.

Kidz Bop is 10,000,000 x worse.

When my kid was still a baby (he's five now) I would sometimes try to make sure I was playing like The Beatles and some cool punk stuff that I liked for him. But then I thought back to what I was brought up on: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and whatever classic rock my dad would put on in the car. I realized that it doesn't really matter at all and trying to shape his tastes a) is an exercise in vanity and b) probably won't work anyway. So we listen to top 40 pop in the car and I just play whatever records I feel like around the house. I figure if he grows up hearing me play guitar and his uncle playing piano and us listening to a whole bunch of different stuff (I absentmindedly threw on the Black Panther Kendrick album on the way to school last week. Oops), he'll be fine.

Yes, he still has a Ramones t-shirt. Those are always cool.
posted by Maaik at 12:43 PM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Camila Cabello's "Havana" came on the radio the other day, and lilozzy started singing, "Savannah, ooh-na-na." Evidently there is a kid in her preschool class named Savannah and they all sing this.

I am 100% okay with top 40 in her brain.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:48 PM on February 28, 2018

/me mulls making tot-oriented "I Am Sitting In A Room"
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 12:48 PM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

voiced by elmo, or such
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 12:49 PM on February 28, 2018

Brian Eno: Music For Mobiles
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:51 PM on February 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

I am gestating in a womb different from the one you are in now.
posted by uncleozzy at 1:07 PM on February 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Ten minutes later:

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmwoooooooooooooooooooooooothplt
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:09 PM on February 28, 2018

If anyone wants baby lullaby suggestions with a rock music pedigree, I will offer up Tom Petty's wonderful Alright For Now, which is already a perfect lullaby and needs no alterations.

Of course now that my son has Opinions, he treats me like a jukebox and demands we sing "Farmer in the Dell" at bedtime (sigh) but Tom Petty worked great when he was a little pink loaf. Easy to learn, easy to sing, didn't get sick of it.
posted by castlebravo at 1:14 PM on February 28, 2018

My daughter, on the other hand, just kinda doesn't like most music much (?!?) and actually prefers (...) Christian rock.

I am 8 months pregnant and this is legit the worst nightmare parenting story I have heard so far.
posted by Tarumba at 1:19 PM on February 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

These are awful. Good songs (even bad songs!) should not be treated this way. I remember someone gave me one of those Baby Einstein DVDs when my son was born - I was willing to have an open mind so I put it on one day, but it was so terrible. Bach does not deserve to be played badly on slightly out-of-tune kiddie instruments. That was my last experiment with music "for kids" - thenceforth we just played regular music.
posted by Daily Alice at 1:32 PM on February 28, 2018

Mom used to sing us "Pore Jud is Daid" from Oklahoma! at bedtime, and wake us up with "Hello, Dolly!" (complete with Louis Armstrong voice).

"He's all laid out to rest,
With his hands acrost his chest;
His fingernails have never been so clean!"
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:49 PM on February 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

You've got to start them early, or suddenly they're in kindergarten and don't know the difference between Emerson Lake & Palmer and post-Gabriel Genesis
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:07 PM on February 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Itaxpica: "parents hell-bent on being The Cool Ones."

Those people get it wrong. It's not a contest. I'm not trying to be cool, I'm just trying not to listen to shit during the kid's formative years. It's the musical equivalent of a healthy diet. Feed the kids "junk music" and that's what they'll demand. So you provide a balanced diet of stuff your parents introduced you to, and stuff you discovered on your own later in life. Sure, as they grow up they'll develop different strange and exotic tastes, but because of the solid foundation you built, as grownups they'll secretly come home and steal all your best albums when you aren't looking.

(That's how I got my parents Dylan and Beatles records anyway.)
posted by caution live frogs at 2:26 PM on February 28, 2018

Oh, yeah, there’s definitely value to that - there’s a reason that my dad raised both me and my little brother on a steady diet of They Might Be Giants; their kids stuff is great and their adult stuff is still pretty kid-friendly. But once you buy your Flaming Lips album for kids on vinyl, you’re sending a very specific signal.
posted by Itaxpica at 6:29 PM on February 28, 2018

Too many people are over-thinking this. Your kids and your music should come together naturally. When I was pregnant with my first, my background music was heavily Motown—under the influence of hormones many of the love songs become sentimental declarations of maternal love.

After she arrived, She's a Sensation (my acappella version) became one of her lullabies.
posted by she's not there at 6:41 PM on February 28, 2018

LOL I had to wait until I got home to listen to these tracks. My husband is marking frowny faces at me but I'm finding it kind of relaxing!
posted by Calzephyr at 7:32 PM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

We listen to a lot of folk and traditional music in our house, so it was super duper easy to play music that was mellow and quiet once we had a baby around (so many Childe Ballads I have sung to this kid). But I can imagine that if your musical tastes are limited to indie or rock or metal, these lullaby versions could fill that need. And it is a need, right up there with finding cartoons and the shows that you don't despise and getting your kid hooked on those ones early.

Soren Jr. legit loves Bjork, and we didn't even try that hard.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:38 PM on February 28, 2018

Sadly my son moved past it, but when he was 3, he was *really* into a local Americana (guitar/bass/washboard/kazoo) band, and would play & sing along with their YouTube videos. I have recordings of him singing "Dying Crapshooter's Blues", "Sadie Green the Vamp of New Orleans", and "I Get the Blues When It Rains", among other things.
posted by fings at 8:06 PM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I checked out one of those cover albums from the library (maybe the Madonna one?) but could not handle it. My weirdest discovery has been that in the 30 years between my listening to Raffi on tape cassette and my son listening to Raffi on Pandora, the lyrics to "Bananaphone" have changed to include "my cellular, bananular phoooone."
posted by Maarika at 8:29 PM on February 28, 2018

Sure, as they grow up they'll develop different strange and exotic tastes, but because of the solid foundation you built, as grownups they'll secretly come home and steal all your best albums when you aren't looking.

(That's how I got my parents Dylan and Beatles records anyway.)

If we're talking about cool music tastes, that's not a good thing to humble brag about.

The problem with any of these discussions is that people tend to think their level of taste and effort is just right and anything more obscure or cool is pretentious. Only this flavor involves kids as an extension of the self. Yeah, there are totally people trying to be "cool parents", forcing their kids to listen to the Flaming Lips on vinyl. It's performative. Like people who crap on certain kinds of kids music but like acceptable kids records like TMBG. What's cool to one is lame to another.

My kid is too young to really express music preference beyond pointing and shouting at the stereo or dancing. I look forward to when they tell me my favorite band sucks. I don't expect them to appreciate my fairly extensive Billy Childish collection (I mean, most people don't), but I hope they pick up a sense of curiosity from being exposed to lots of different styles and genres of music thanks to a steady diet of college radio. I think that's my issue with kids music - so much of it hews to a narrow aesthetic that's patronising (to my ears). But when my kid gets a taste for it, oh well!
posted by kendrak at 8:39 PM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Finish the kid-cool-making process with a DADDY'S LITTLE HORSELEECH onesie.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:13 PM on February 28, 2018

Having a kid doesn’t mean you suddenly want to hear Wheels on the Bus millions of times. A kid-appropriate version of something the parents like makes perfect sense.

This is totally it, because kids music is horrible (notable exceptions: most of Raffi, Caspar Babypants, and Pete Seeger's Children's Concert at Town Hall). I have, over the last four years, curated a Spotify playlist of MY music that is also appropriate/fun for my son. I'm really proud of it, but my son is totally oblivious to it. It's actually for me to listen to when we're together.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 3:47 AM on March 1, 2018

My kid is at the age where she requests Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is alright, but Justin Bieber's album is musically boring and lyrically awful. I can't wait until she moves on. She doesn't like 'daddy music' much. She also knows all the lyrics to Whitney Houston 'I Wanna Dance with Somebody', which I'll take over either Swift or Beiber.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:26 AM on March 1, 2018

Her older cousins showed her the difference between Kidz Bop version and real version of Uptown Funk, and she correctly rejected the Kidz Bop version. So good enough for me.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:28 AM on March 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just listened (against my better judgment), and the most baffling bowdlerization in the Kidz Bop version of Uptown Funk is repeating "good girls" instead of saying "hood girls."

Also I'll be honest, I'm totally okay with my kid hearing and saying "hot damn."
posted by uncleozzy at 7:41 AM on March 1, 2018

I've heard (from acquaintances who have kids) that there's a genre of punk children's music which is not nursery covers of punk-rock anthems but chaotic punk-rock style songs with juvenile themes: a lot of scatological humour and an anti-authoritarian subtext running through it; sort of like The Wiggles if they lived in an anarchist squat.
posted by acb at 9:11 AM on March 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also I'll be honest, I'm totally okay with my kid hearing and saying "hot damn."

Exclaiming "Hot yeah!" (often with jazzy finger pointing) has become a running joke between my partner and I.
posted by Maaik at 11:37 AM on March 1, 2018

When my (twin) girls were 4-5 months old, sleep deficit was killing me, and I could close my eyes while feeding them and immediately start hallucinating. So I started singing whatever I could think of just to try and stay awake. One day, I was wearing my Berserker tee (see: Clerks, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back), and I started singing in an appropriate metal voice:

MY LOVE FOR YOU IS LIKE A STICK, BERSERKER!
WOULD YOU LIKE SOME YUMMY MILK, BERSERKER!
IT SMELLS LIKE YOU HAVE SHIT YOUR PANTS, BERSERKER!
NOW I HAVE TO CHANGE YOUR PANTS, BERSERKER!

And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for that pesky monitor. I finished feeding and changing both of them, made it back to bed, and just as my head hit the pillow and the dreams started, my wife woke up enough to mutter, "What the FUCK were you singing?" and I laughed so hard. Then we promptly passed out again.
posted by disconnect at 11:39 AM on March 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

This feels like as good a place as any to post the classic "Help the Police"
posted by GuyZero at 11:40 AM on March 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

Also I'll be honest, I'm totally okay with my kid hearing and saying "hot damn."

Mickey Mouse has a They Might be Giants written theme song called "Hot Dog", which we've turned into "Hot Cat". Their cousin has a bit of a kid-talk slur that sounds like "hot duck" - all are great. I don't mind them saying "hot damn" either, but "hot dog, hot cat, or hot duck" makes it a bit sillier.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:42 PM on March 1, 2018