It is a Saturday morning in the mid ’90s. You are up uncharacteristically early, perhaps awakened by the sound of a lawnmower off in the distance of your charming, middle-class residential neighborhood. Birds chirp pleasantly outside your window, perched in the horse chestnut tree that towers above your modest bungalow — which, being the only home you have ever known, does not seem like an impossible fantasy of wealth. Mom and dad are still in bed, together, as they always will be. You pad across the carpet to the living room and turn on the TV, which hums to life with a satisfying thunk, and flip over to channel 25. YTV. Youth television. Your television.
The good cartoons don’t start for a little while, but sometimes there’s cool stuff on before the prime cereal hours. Could be an episode of that goofy old Batman show, or that Mega Man cartoon that only ever seems to pop up at random. Hey, maybe you’ll even see some of that neat show about ninjas fighting.
You are confronted with horrors beyond your imagination.
Kids Can Rock and Roll was a nightmarish parade of gaudily made-up men enacting little bits in the formless void interspersed with insipid songs about respecting authority and doing your homework. It was a cheap effort at instilling pro-social values in a generation that was coming up on Bubble Tape commercials, toy slime, and killer fairies. In short, it was a TV series for nobody, crafted by madmen shaking off the haze of a decade-long coke binge and stepping into a world they could no longer comprehend.
The show was hosted by a band named Kideo, a power trio composed of Ace Manners on guitar, Buddy Goodfellow on bass, and PJ Styles on drums. They all wear the same white greasepaint and superhero-style masks in colors matching their glam wigs and outfits. The schtick would have been derivative in KISS’s heyday twenty years earlier. In the mid ’90s, they looked like the kind of act that would feature at the Bar Mitzvah of a boy whose parents openly blamed him for the death of their other, better child. Even now, seeing Kideo fills me with the kind of revulsion otherwise reserved for blowfly infestations and Peachtree Carnivore.
Am I being too harsh on three guys who might have had a modicum of real musical skill and just happened to lose out in the Great Wiggles War of the ’90s? Maybe. But I have a lot of rage inside of me at the state of the world, lashing out at whatever happens to be nearby makes me feel more in control, and this column is my trashable public bathroom stall. Thus: prepare to face my impotent, decades-late wrath, surviving members of Kideo — if indeed any of you still remain on this cursed earth.
Every episode of Kids Can Rock and Roll opens with the “Kideoath,” in which the band members swear to prove that children are capable of rocking and rolling. It is a meaningless promise built on a foundation of lies. If the show had empowered children to learn some fundamentals of rock music, like playing power chords or crafting a stage persona or shamelessly appropriating African-American culture and erasing its originators, then maybe it would have been worth something. But the vast majority of Kids Can Rock and Roll’s runtime simply features three clowns standing next to musical instruments and doing criminally-indictable wordplay.
They knew how bad this was. Maybe they thought they could push it around to being ironically enjoyable through over-the-top delivery and frequent drum stings. But you can’t ironically succeed at entertainment any more than you can do so at lovemaking. In both cases, saying “sorry, that was a terrible joke” afterwards doesn’t endear you to anybody. Trust me.
The closest Kideo gets to actually teaching kids anything about music is when Ace Manners takes out his guitar and tries to explain how it works. Sorry, that isn’t a great way of describing it. If you want to learn anything about resonance or amplification then flip over to Bill Nye or The Magic Schoolbus. Here’s what Kideo has to teach us about guitars.
Who is this for? The audience shots in some of the musical segments suggest five to six year olds, but if I showed this to my six-year-old niece she’d say “Auntie Merritt, what crime did these men commit against God that they are being punished thusly?”
So yes, they do sometimes actually play their instruments. Kideo’s songs have titles like “Stranger Danger,” “It’s Apparent to a Parent,” and “Clap Snap Tap Rap.” Yeah, they rap. Sort of. It sucks, obviously, but nobody says “Well my name is _____ and I’m here to say,” so fuck it.
In the video for “It’s Apparent to a Parent,” the band goes to court to attempt to convince a jury of children to listen to their parents. It’s an anthem to putting yourself in your mother and father’s shoes and submitting to their authority, trusting that when you one day raise a child of your own, you will understand why they didn’t let you play with the bandsaw. You know, rock and roll stuff.
Ace sings: “It’s apparent to a parent so when I become a parent then it might become apparent to me / That the safety of my children is the thing that’s by a million is the most important thing to me.”
First off, rhyming “me” with “me” is the kind of lazy horseshit that shouldn’t have flown in children’s media even back in the ’90s. Second, despite the subject matter, the whole production feels… unwholesome somehow. A grown man in clownface testifying to a jury of kids about how he’ll care passionately about the well-being of his children — from the perspective of a child — is the kind of scene that should be appearing in the DMT-induced visions of a child stampeded to death at a circus, not whatever this is.
And it’s not like I’m unjustly judging this from the perspective of a jaded adult, either. Kideo played at the YTV Festival of Friends in 1992 at Canada’s Wonderland — basically our Six Flags, which used to be Paramount movie-themed but is now just whatever — and the reception was frostier than a snowman’s bussy in Baffin Bay, beb.
They’re belting out “Kids can rock and roll / When they’re two years old!” and nobody gives a fuck. The audience was more receptive to Shari Lewis’s Lamb Chop ventriloquist act than these three bozos. Sorry, that’s offensive to the hard-working bozo community.
Seriously. Lamb Chop fucking killed.
I don’t think Kideo ever got over this. Oh, sure, they shook hands with Shari Lewis backstage, said “hey, great wordplay with your sheep dummy out there,” but on that day, within them was planted the seed of a noxious envy. They knew, then, that they would never be Raffi. They would never be Sharon, Lois, and Bram. Hell, they would never even be Bob Schneider and the Rainbow Kids.
They channeled their rage and frustration into an anthem for unity and fellowship. It would be their magnum opus, the moment at which they transcended little ditties about respecting your teacher and not climbing into unmarked vans. It would tackle an important social issue. They called it “In a World of Black and White.”
From the title you probably assume it’s going to be about how you shouldn’t judge people based on the color of their skin or something. It’s kind of that, but it’s also kind of the apotheosis of a puppet-induced madness by a trio of color-coded maniacs.
It opens with a monologue about “how easy life should be in a world of black and white.” And then— you know what? I’m just going to show you the lyrics. I don’t think you’d believe me if I tried to summarize them.
Huh? Wha? This doesn’t sound like a track about how our apparent differences are meaningless in the face of our shared humanity. It sounds like the opening to a children’s song produced by the Aryan Brotherhood.
What are we doing here? It’s like aliens heard about the hu-man concept of race and decided to make first contact by creating a video explaining their inscrutable take on it.
Next, we pan over shots of the Statue of Liberty, Notre Dame, and a pagoda as we enter the bridge. Ace and Buddy sit before the glorious sight of Niagara Falls as the former croons “Would it matter to you…” Given the fullness of time, you would never guess how that sentence ends.
Fuck, man. I get what you’re going for, but fuck. You can’t surprise me with shit like that. It took me a full ten minutes to come down from the shock of Ace’s poignant question, delivered with the manic grin of a man who looks like he’s getting a secret thrill from saying this stuff from behind a mask. And just when I thought I’d recovered, I unpaused the video and they got me again.
“In a World of Black and White” failed to solve racism or exterminate the races or whatever their goal with it was. Kideo leapt off Niagara Falls and snuck across the border into the United States, where they went on to have lucrative if unglamorous careers as members of Joker’s gang until he blew them up with a big bomb shaped like his face. When asked why he did it, the Joker said “none can understand my jokes…”
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Alpha Scientist Javo, who doesn’t care what color you are, as long as you aren’t a dumb asshole that sucks. Unfortunately Javo thinks that everyone is a dumb asshole that sucks. Them’s the breaks, kid.