Kidz Bop: Horrifyingly True Tales!

Tonight we went to karaoke at the Oakwood. The Oakwood is pretty notorious for being the number one haven for child actors and their disturbingly over-dedicated parents. This means that this is not the kind of karaoke night that you or I may be used to. It's not really karaoke night at all. It's an excuse for the parents to get their kids up on stage and exploit them one last time before the day is through. It's a mixture of hilarious ("OH MY GOD DID SHE JUST THROUGH HER COWBOY HAT INTO THE CROWD???), heartbreaking ("these kids are getting set up for failure, their parents should take them home and let them be kids.), and just plain fucking adorable ("awww she knows all the words to that High School Musical song and she's only four!).

You're not really sure what to make of the whole thing. There's a large woman who walks around and passes out candy to everyone, but she gives dirty looks to anyone over the age of fifteen, claiming that she "may not be a mother, but she's a great-aunt forty-five times over, and she knows how rude teenagers can be." There's also Karaoke man. You never see him, but you hear his ominous voice throughout the entire show. Much like the Wizard of Oz, you feel both threatened and in awe of his power, even though he is really nothing more than a man with a microphone and a few instrumental CDs. Also, when he says things like "Hannah and Marie are singing 'So Yesterday.' Is it me, or is that song so yesterday???" the level of awe, as well as the level of being threatened, plummet drastically.

The kids are surprisingly supportive of each other. They all sit in the front and cheer for each other and talk excitedly in between songs. I guess I figured there would be more backstabbing and complaining but it seems that the parents do most of that.

Seriously though, I couldn't get enough of it. The choreography. The pretensiousness. The clothes. Oh God, the clothes. Should eleven year olds be wearing tanktops with mini-skirts? Should they have highlights? Should they be wearing make-up? No. They should be pissing their pants and watching Nickelodeon. It's crazy.

One boy sang "Livin' La Vida Loca" and he took his shirt off in the beginning. He was wearing a wifebeater underneath. And wanna know what's really twisted? People CHEERED when he took his shirt off. A little boy is stripping and parents are cheering. How disturbing is that? It was almost as bad as the oversexed trio of eleven-year-old-girls channeling their inner Britney and singing "I Love Rock & Roll." "Channeling their inner Britney," of course, is a euphamism for "gyrating provacatively on each other, groaning and moaning as if participating in coital activities on stage, and doing everything that a good parent would raise their kids to do better than."