“The real itself appears as a large useless body,” Jean Baudrillard
The Kidz Bop kids move in such a way so as to suggest not mortal flesh but life-sized screens, projecting learned references from YouTube videos, pop singers and codes of celebritydom. That is to say that their every gesture is mediated through a reference that is known – popularly known – but whose origin isn’t. A fan of the hand, a cock of the arm, a raise of the eyebrow. Innocuous movements, apparently, but anachronistic: decontextualised from the choreographed routines of adult popstars, relearned as the hyper-mediated gesticulation of the popstar in miniature. They bring to mind Baby Annabell, a popula r children’s toy from the Zapf company. The doll is designed to cry, burp, yawn and so on, as a real child would. The doll is plastic, not convincingly human, but performs necessary human functions as adequately as you might hope for £49.99. A Google search for “Baby Annabell” produces a popularly asked question: “Does Baby Annabell cry real tears?” The answer, of course, is “no;” but are the tears any less real than those programmed gestures performed by the choreographed child?
I was relieved to read a similar assessment of the Kidz Bop kids. Christopher Bell, an Associate Professor of Media Studies at UCCS, argues that “[The Kidz Bop] kids are doing dances that are sanitized but sexual at the same time because no one understands content; they just understand form.” Certainly, while the Kidz Bop operation doesn’t amount to sexual exploitation per se, it does strip its children of their humanity, reducing their performed selves to distinctly adult symbolic codes (forms) that ultimately belong to the pop-industrial language of “sex sells” (the content of said forms). It is of course important to also remember that the Kidz Bop kids sing existing popular songs, not originals. Chart-topping hits with sexual lyrics are rewritten so as to be child-friendly, all in the service of harnessing another market: “censorship of the most banal kind” as Bell puts it. Simply: teaching a child to mimic the gestural language of an adult pop star is not innocent, but functions within the context of capitalism’s exploitation of desire.
The recent controversy surrounding the film Cuties provides an interesting point of reference here. Depending on who saw it, Cuties either "challenges you to think about how individuals and the media sexualizes young girls" or places upon these young girls an "invasive, sexualized gaze." The dancing is the problem - by either admission it is not "sanitized." Kidz Bop, however, is “sanitized but sexual,” and is as such so ordinary that we accept it carte blanche – so much so, in fact, that it becomes more real than ourselves, it is how we (or our children) interact. Eileen Jones writes in a defence of Cuties that “children both long to grow up faster and feel pressured to mature sexually before many of them can emotionally handle it.” That is certainly true. In Kidz Bop, though, that “longing” and “feeling” is replaced by a tacit interpellation: might we not say that with Kidz Bop, "children both grow up faster and are pressured to mature sexually before many of them can emotionally handle it"? Who, here, is the agent?
The child becomes a proactive consumer of media at an increasingly young age. The iPad or computer keyboard becomes an extension of the body. I have observed non-verbal children – children for whom speech and the concept of communication via pen and paper are unimaginable – navigate an internet search bar, tapping, swiping and scrolling with authority to access and engage with visual media. But it is easy to fall into technophobia or conservative moralism (x is corrupting our children, y is ruining our values, etc.), so let’s pivot: what if your child is in fact a humanoid? Likely not, but it is striking how unhuman, how lacking in warmth, the media consumed by children currently is. Take Disney’s Frozen franchise, for example, whose films are the second and third highest-grossing animated films of all-time. The films’ characters are “glacially stiff,” possessing a dollish sheen, moving with little emotion or autonomy. It is remarkable, in fact, how the steeply the quality of animation in Disney films has diminished as the technology has improved.
Musician James Ferraro complains that we are increasingly “building emotional relationships with CGI characters and accepting them as powerful vehicles of meaningfulness.” The case of the Kidz Bop kids would suggest this; the audience responses to Frozen and, in particular, its lead character Elsa certainly would. Although absent of all warmth, the verisimilitude of Elsa’s simulacra is complete enough that it doesn’t require interpretation: the imaginative element of the reciprocal relationship – the character gives the child an archetype; the child gives the character an additional, interpretative personality in return – is absent. For while Elsa is ‘human’ (demonstrated not only in the painstaking attention put into animating her hair, for example, but in her supporting cast of contrastingly non-human acquaintances, not least a talking snowman) she is also, of course, digitally-rendered, a combination of “neoteny and artificiality to invoke pathos” in the viewer.
Is the message of Toy Story 4 not that a child can find as much or more meaning in a plastic fork (to which they can attach as much imaginative designation as possible) than in a mass-produced toy (whose creative possibilities are limited)? This is missing from Frozen, as it is apparently also from the gesticulations of the Kidz Bop kids. As Zizek writes, the uncanny causes anxiety “not because it confronts us with the fact that something is lacking, but because lack itself is lacking, because we get too much.” What is left for us to desire, to imagine? While Frozen does not enter the territory of Disney’s recent remake of The Lion King – wherein photorealistic CGI animals are given the function of human speech – it does occupy a strange position between physical reality and the low-fidelity warmth of early Disney films, shared perhaps with Baby Annabell and Kidz Bop (do the Kidz Bop kids cry real tears?). It feels only right to finally evoke Baudrillard: “The real itself appears as a large useless body.”