In theory, the success of Kidz Bop makes sense. Kids like pop music and they like singing along to it, so why wouldn’t they like to hear G-rated versions sung by kids like them? In practice, however, Kidz Bop is both torturous to any parents born with eardrums and generally creepy as hell. That fact is never more clear than when you sync the audio of a Kidz Bop song with the original artist’s music video. The effect is really… something.
This all started when Twitter user and Mariah Carey enthusiast @Antferny made the grave mistake of Kidz-Bopping the music video for “We Belong Together.” The new vocal track made the normally pitch-perfect Carey sound like a drunk coworker at the office karaoke party that was being backed by a choir of weird, tone-deaf children. But with each successive music video, things became more and more unsettling.