Archive for December, 2008
DVD Review: Princess Katie and Racer Steve, “Revved Up and Ready to Rock!”
Princess Katie & Racer Steve – Revved Up and Ready to Rock! (2008, RocketNYC)I’d never heard of Princess Katie and/or Racer Steve before my copy of Revved Up and Ready to Rock! arrived in the mail, but they apparently have quite a loyal following, and have released a pair of CDs (Fast & Feisty and Songs for the Coolest Kids), selected songs from which are collected on this live DVD.
Katie and Steve seem to have come to kids’ music the hard way — namely, after years spent fruitlessly trying to build careers in grown-up entertainment — and as a result, the PKRS aesthetic is pleasantly adult; because their move into this arena was gradual and organic, they use a smarter and more eclectic musical approach than some acts who self-consciously aim at the youth demographic. The Princess (nee Katie O’Sullivan) has a big, elastic voice, and doesn’t rely on cutesy antics to get across — then again, in a ball gown, corset, and tiara, she doesn’t need to; she’s got plenty of appeal for the kids (and, ahem, their dads). The band, led by Racer Steve (A.K.A. Steve Borne)’s lead guitar, hops nimbly between genres from song to song, mixing rock with jazz, swing, funk, and good-old fashioned uptempo pop. They have a horn section, too, which is more than most grown-up bands can afford. Best of both worlds, right?
The songs themselves are fun and varied, but none of them knocked me out, and after watching the DVD twice (largely without my daughter, who lost interest pretty quickly during both viewings), I can’t remember a single line or melody — but Revved Up and Ready to Rock!, like the songs themselves, seem pretty squarely aimed at the 5-8-year-old demographic, and both of us are outside that bubble. There’s no arguing with the energy of the show, however, or the way Princess Katie and Racer Steve smartly break things up between songs with an ongoing puppet show that deals with Katie’s wandering pet dragon.
The production values aren’t what you’d get from, say, a They Might Be Giants DVD, but they’re still impressively high; a number of cameras were used, and the editing cuts (a little too quickly, in my opinion) between angles during the songs. They even mix in a few special effects. For PKRS fans, especially those who have either been to a show or who are bummed out because they haven’t, it’ll be a wonderfully fun way to spend an hour. For the uninitated, it may be a little underwhelming, but that’s probably par for the course with something like this.
CD Review: “Yo Gabba Gabba!”
Various Artists – Yo Gabba Gabba! (2008, Nickelodeon)
purchase this CD (Amazon)
For the record, I can’t watch this show — I want to punch DJ Lance Rock whenever he comes on the screen, with his big grin and all of his hand-talking — but I know when I’m beat, and for the last couple of months, my three-year-old has been obsessed with Yo Gabba Gabba! Also, much as DJ Lance gives me the creeps, I have to admit that any children’s show that makes me stop in my tracks on the way to the shower and ask “Why is Elijah Wood dancing with a yellow robot and a bumpy red cyclops?” can’t be all bad.
If you have young children, you probably already know about Yo Gabba Gabba!, which has supplanted Jack’s Big Music Show as the hip, with-it kids’ show du jour, and a magnet for such unlikely guest stars as Wood, Biz Markie, Rahzel, Laila Ali, Tony Hawk, Sugarland, the Shins, and Mark Mothersbaugh. It’s utterly ridiculous, and easily the most unsettling form of children’s entertainment that I’ve laid eyes on since cowering in fear during an accidental late-night viewing of Boohbah. It’s also oddly addictive, which is why anyone with a YGG! fan in the house will want to run far, far away from the Yo Gabba Gabba! soundtrack album.
YOUR KIDS WILL LOVE IT.
First of all, it’s just a tiny little thing — less than half an hour in length. Second, the tracklisting is a genius blend of skits from the show (“Biz’s Beat of the Day”) and standalone songs. My favorite is the Salteens’ “Be Nice to Animals,” but there are a handful of non-annoying musical numbers, including the Little Ones’ “Hey, Won’t Somebody Come Out and Play” and the Roots’ “Lovely, Love My Family.” The end result is something your kids will clamor for over and over again, because it’s full of stuff they want to hear and it doesn’t last long enough to bore them.
I’m just warning you — if you give this to your children, prepare to surrender your radio for a period of several weeks. And prepare to find the songs stuck in your head at odd moments, or to hear and/or say the phrase “there’s a party in my tummy” far more often than you’d ever thought possible. Prepare also to possibly pay a visit to Target in search of some of the righteous YGG!-themed swag for sale, including the Muno-shaped talking guitar. Proceed with caution.
Book Review: Wendell Berry, “Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World”
Wendell Berry – Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World (2009, Counterpoint)This is a beautiful little book, and the calmest, gentlest illustrated short story about a mouse fighting for its life against a terrible flood that you are ever likely to read.
That should come as no surprise to longtime fans and followers of Berry’s prolific output, which reflects the pride and commitment to tradition of his agrarian lifestyle. In his nonfiction work, Berry has argued for the merits of a philosophy he calls “solving for pattern,” which is a fancy way of saying that you should try to solve as many problems as possible at once – and do so in such a way as to minimize the likelihood of additional problems.
It’s sort of a mouthful, but it’s a beautifully simple school of thought, and it resonates throughout Whitefoot‘s 60 pages. Berry’s placid text, which meshes wonderfully with Davis Te Selle’s beautiful pencil illustrations, follows the journey of a mouse named Whitefoot as she gathers food, builds a nest, and manages to survive a flood that carries her far beyond her home. She does this by doing as little as possible — in other words, by following her instincts. In a passage about something as simple as Whitefoot building her nest, Berry extols the virtues of simplicity and thrift:
She molded the cup of the next exactly to fit by pressing against it with her body. She made it snug. She did her work according to an ancient, honorable principle: Enough is enough. She worked and lived without extravagance and without waste. Her nest was a neat small cup the size of herself asleep.
He concludes the paragraph with the most beautiful phrase of all: “Her sleep was an act of faith and a giving of thanks.”
As you may be able to tell, Berry’s writing makes few concessions for younger audiences; to some parents, Whitefoot may seem impenetrably…adult. But I read it to my three-year-old, and she loved it — I’m sure she wasn’t able to absorb the subtext of Berry’s message, or perhaps even its broader themes, but she understood what was happening, and she absolutely loved the illustrations, squealing with delight every time we turned to another page with a picture of the adorable little mouse.
It isn’t as eye-catching as the work of Eric Carle or Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman, but it’s no less instructive, and it may very well stay with your young readers much longer — sort of along the lines of The Giving Tree, albeit lacking quite the emotional impact. Like I said: A beautiful little book.
Website Review: Jitterbug.tv
Tired of listening to your kids’ same old CDs over and over again? Jitterbug is here to help! The site seems to be in something like beta right now, with just a handful of artists available, but the premise is awfully cool. In the site’s words: “Discover great independent music for kids. we hand pick the good stuff…you won’t find Barney here.”
It’s a sentiment I can’t argue with, certainly, and I can personally vouch for Jitterbug’s appeal to one particular three-year-old who told me, after watching one video, “I love this site.”
What would be nice is the ability to stream a Jitterbug radio station, or download a Jitterbug podcast — hand-picked content aside, the site is essentially just acting as a portal for embedded content that seems to be mainly hosted elsewhere. Once Jitterbug gets its legs, hopefully they’ll add some of the extra functionality that will help turn them from a video gateway into a must-visit site for the “hip kids” they’re targeting in their manifesto.
CD Review: “Come Dance with Us”
Various Artists – Come Dance with Us (2007, First Wave)
purchase this album (Amazon)
First Wave, the company behind Come Dance with Us, is also responsible for the Fundamentals series of DVDs, which is geared toward teaching very young children to speak clearly — so it should come as no surprise that this CD is a perfectly old-school slice of kids’ music, about as far removed from the hipper, more rockin’ stuff that’s popular with the parental units these days. On the junior set continuum, it’s far, far closer to Barney than Yo Gabba Gabba!
For what it is, though, Come Dance with Us is very well made, and it comes with a sweet back story: First Wave is run by a daughter-mother duo, Melissa and Dolores Ormandy Neumann, and the songs on this disc were sung by Dolores to Melissa when Melissa was a young girl. Those songs — with titles like “I Know a Little Girl” and “Sitting in a Train” — are arranged around a story about a brother and sister who take a trip to visit some family the day before vacation. (I suppose this makes it the kiddie music equivalent of a concept album.) The storyline, such as it is, is incidental to the songs, which are just as short, cute, and catchy as you’d expect for something geared toward the under-5 set.
The music is stereotypically “kiddie,” by which I mean it’s performed with a lot of not particularly expensive-sounding synths, and the vocals are coated in syrup — and although that lessens its appeal to older kids and parents, it won’t have any significant impact on how your young ones respond to it. To hear samples of Come Dance with Us (and/or purchase it), click on the above link or visit the First Wave website.
CD Review: Mama Doni, “I Love Herring (& Other Fish Shticks for Kids)”
Mama Doni – I Love Herring & Other Fish Shticks for Kids (2008, Mama Doni)Let me begin this review by saying that I think children’s music with a Jewish focus is a terrific idea. Speaking as someone who gets up to his pupik in holiday songs every year, the overall lack of explicitly Jewish modern American music is a sad, troublesome thing, and any album that nudges the scales in the other direction is a good thing in my book. Earphones. Whatever.
On the other hand, I am honestly and utterly uncertain what to make of Mama Doni and her debut CD, I Love Herring (& Other Fish Shticks for Kids). It’s a most…unusual album, and when you consider that I’ve listened to multiple full-length efforts from Wing this year, that’s saying a lot. Not to muddle the religious waters, but as I listened to this album, I was frequently reminded of an expression used by the Mormon girls I knew in high school to signify surprise, befuddlement, and fear:
Oh…my…heck.
Here’s the deal: Mama Doni, also known as Doni Zasloff Thomas, has arranged 16 eclectic songs here, all of them relating in some way to Jewish…well, culture, I guess, but when you’re talking about songs with titles like “Bubbie’s Tupperware,” in which a gefilte fish named Shlomo is taken as a pet to show & tell, you have to understand that the emphasis is on its irreverent aspects.
Which is fine, really, but Mama Doni either really likes her morning (and afternoon, and evening) coffee, or she’s just naturally bursting with the kind of energy that drives a person to pose on the back cover of an album as a cowgirl with a shofar horn (“Jewish Cowgirl,” “Sportin’ My Kippah”), a wannabe Rastafarian (“Bagel Time,” “Shvitzin’”) and a floppy hat-wearing middle-aged woman (“Oy Yoy Yodel”). It’s a comedy album, sort of, but the humor is very over the top, and about as subtle as spoiled borscht.
Still, if you can handle Mama Doni’s relentless mugging, I Love Herring isn’t a bad record at all. It definitely fills a void in the marketplace, all the songs are written and performed well, and the production values are high. We’re still talking about an album that includes songs such as “Jewperheroes,” “Mensch Appeal,” and “Fahklempt,” but hey — maybe that’s just the sort of music you’ve been looking for. To sample some of Mama Doni’s wares (including her new holiday EP, I Love Chanukah!), visit her at her official site.
DVD Review: “Readeez Volume One”
Billing itself as “brain fruit” that will help your kids “giggle and grin as the knowledge sneaks in,” the Readeez series of animated educational DVDs has just kicked off with its first volume. If you have young children, and are the type of parent who tries to avoid exposing your kids to the fast-paced, commercial-laden shows on channels like Nickelodeon, Readeez may be right up your alley.
The setup is simple: Each Readee consists of roughly a one-minute short, most of them featuring the animated duo of Julian Waters (voiced by Readeez creator Michael Rachap) and his daughter Isabel, whose sparsely drawn, gently paced interactions form the backbone of the series. As Julian and Isabel interact, their dialogue is displayed on the screen in large, clear type, helping — in theory, anyway — kids form connections between what they hear and what they read.
That’s the educational hook behind Readeez (and the genesis of its title), but since the series is aimed at kids 18 months and up — and any 18-month-old who can read quickly moving text on a screen is working in a government lab somewhere, not fooling around with DVDs for kids — it functions on other levels, too. My daughter is three, and is just beginning to put together words on the fridge with her letter magnets; she can’t read anything Julian and Isabel are saying, but she’s still requested Readeez on multiple occasions, because she loves the songs they sing, has a toddler’s inordinate fondness for anything animated, and the segments are the perfect length for a young attention span.
Children’s programming has come a long way since the days when Sesame Street was struggling to compete with the sugar-frosted Saturday morning cartoons we all remember so fondly, but even among the new wave of gentler, smarter kids’ entertainment, Readeez is something special. Here at our house, we’re lucky enough to have both the commercial-free Noggin channel and a spare TiVo that we can load up with our daughter’s favorite shows, which include Wonder Pets!, Backyardigans, and Zoboomafoo — but even those shows sometimes dabble in real-world concepts that might give you a bit of a headache. Readeez, on the other hand, is the perfect blend of educational content and entertaining, heartwarming escapism — the kind of thing you can legitimately feel good about your children watching. Here’s a song that I’ve heard Sophie singing repeatedly over the last couple of weeks:
See? Isn’t that nice? Learn more, watch more, and buy your own copy at the Readeez website.
