Bidding a Greasy Adieu to Greasy Kid Stuff

Greasy Kid Stuff logo by Rodney Alan Greenblat

I saw on Twitter yesterday that the radio show Greasy Kid Stuff was coming to an end this weekend, and I thought it was important to publicly celebrate the show before it permanently went off the air.

Longtime readers are probably familiar with GKS, but if you’re not, the show was started 22 (!) years ago by Belinda Miller and Hova Najarian, airing on legendary New York station WFMU long before the couple became parents. From the beginning, Belinda and Hova -- it was always Belinda and Hova, their last names have mostly been an afterthought -- were less interested in “kids music” as much as they wanted to play weird music they thought kids would enjoy as adults. They weren’t the only kids music show (and they probably would issue with the idea that it was mostly for kids, but they were definitely the oddest, a mix of Dr. Demento, Sesame Street, and 120 Minutes. And as kids music moved into a more kindie direction, they certainly shined a spotlight on artists that fit their somewhat off-center sensibility, but never fully embraced the full-on conventional kids music world.

That was, in my view, to their credit and benefit. As I noted in my review of their third and final compilation of music (yep, they released three albums in total, all worth tracking down), I think kids music embraced Belinda and Hova’s approach as much as Belinda and Hova embraced kids music. They weren’t the only radio outlet that took that view, but on the whole I think they did it longer than anyone else.

After moving across the country to Portland, Oregon in 2004 (and also becoming parents), Belinda and Hova eventually moved their show to 94.7 FM in Portland and more recently XRAY.FM. (Why am I noting those links? Because you can still find playlists, at least for WFMU and XRAY.FM, online if you want to see how unique those playlists are.) But after 22 years, they’ve decided to hang up their headphones and microphones. As they put it in a Facebook announcement earlier this month, they have “decided we’d like to see what it’s like to have regular weekends.”

I can’t say I blame them. Twenty-two years is a long time to work on anything, and they have earned the right to break out the bedazzler and make some art (Belinda’s goal). But the kids music community owes Belinda and Hova a big round of thanks for the many years of playing their music and for supporting the idea that kids can embrace music outside of the mainstream.

Greasy Kid Stuff logo by Musho Rodney Alan Greenblat

Radio Playlist: New Music June 2017

Summer is here -- today! -- and there's no stopping the kids music playlists. A dozen songs, three dozen minutes, and if you want more, feel free to check out the May list here.

As always, these Spotify playlists are limited in that if an artist hasn't chosen to post a song on Spotify, I can't put it on the list, nor can I feature songs from as-yet-unreleased albums. But I'm always keeping stuff in reserve for the next Spotify playlist.

Check out the list here (or right here in you're in Spotify).

**** New Music June 2017 (June 2017 Kindie Playlist) ****

"Tilt-A-Whirl" - Trapper Schoepp

"Dance party avec un hérisson" - Dana & the Petit Punks

"Sunshine Sunny Sun Sunshine Day" - Danny Weinkauf

"Gozar" - Mister G

"Elephants" - Uncle Dox

"Superhero 2017 Remix (feat. Carly Ciarrocchi)" - Tim Kubart

"Go Out and Play" - Zigzag and the Astronauts

"I'm a Bear Now" - Will Parker

"Toss the Toys Blues" - Brenda Kahn

"Mozartistic (feat. Orion Weiss & Marley Carroll)" - Secret Agent 23 Skidoo

"Subway" - Joanie Leeds and the Nighlights

"Captain Brown Beard" - Mr. Dave

Summer Road Trip Playlist!

Beth Blenz-Clucas, proprietor of Sugar Mountain PR, has, for a number of years, compiled a summer road trip playlist featuring tracks from her clients. This summer is no different, and there's a bunch of new and excellent tracks for your listening pleasure, including music from as-yet-unreleased albums from Lucky Diaz and the Family Jam Band, Danny Weinkauf, and Jazzy Ash, whose album Swing Set comes out July 21. That's the very playful cover art over there. (There's also music from artists like Lisa Loeb, Justin Roberts, and more. Peep the list below.)

And while there's nothing definitively "road-trip-y" about the set (only Jazzy Ash's "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" and Weinkauf's "Transportation") specifically suggest travel, it's an entertaining set nonetheless. For the next week you can download it for free, but you can listen to it all summer.

Monday Morning Smile: "I Was Born" - Hanson

Just a great pop song from the band Hanson, a song that in its celebration of individuality and the need to be, well, you, could easily be a kindie song. A video that features a bunch of kids (11 of the trio's 12 kids) -- this could easily be a kindie video. The song isn't quite as good as the twenty-years-old "MMMBop," but what song is? The fact that this new song is in the same ballpark speaks volumes about the earworm-y nature of the track.

Hanson - "I Was Born" [YouTube]

Dad Jokes (Billy Kelly's "My First Comedy Album")

Kids music is filled with funny people, probably because the ability to make kids laugh is vital to survival in dealing with kids all day long. (Also probably because the ability to make yourself laugh is also vital to survival in dealing with kids all day long.) But in a world of funny people, only one person has earned the title Funniest Person in Kids Music, and that would be Billy Kelly.

Thank You for Joining the Happy Club cover

From the very first track of his very first album for kids ("This Is the First Song" off of 2009's Thank You for Joining the Happy Club), Kelly has amused listeners with his deadpan humor and occasionally meta-fictional takedowns of songwriting tropes. Over time his humor has swerved a bit from earnest to dark (something which he readily admits), and his albums have contained varying amounts of humorous and non-humorous material.

Is it possible to chart his albums on a matrix with those two axes? Yes. Will I do that for you here? No. Instead, I will use words in lieu of graphs, even though I love myself some graphs. (I honestly do.)

Is This Some Sort of Joke?, his second and most comedy-heavy musical album, required serious attention to process all the levels of humor being laid on the listener's plate. It was also in parts his darkest album (comparatively speaking -- it's still kids music) as it featured not one but two songs about the potential end of the planet and the human race.

Kelly's third album The Family Garden was his most earnest, a correction, or possibly overcorrection, to the joke-filled and dark approach on Joke?. It's not devoid of humor, but with songs celebrating gardens, American flags, and pen pals ("We Could Be Pen Pals," which featured Molly Ledford), it was definitely a detour from what Kelly's fans -- at least this one -- had grown accustomed to based on his previous two albums. The album does, however, underscore Kelly's basically optimistic nature, a nature that, while present on the first two albums (he sang a song with the Monkees' Davy Jones about the joy of getting a new haircut, after all, on Joke?), could be buried under the jokes and cleverness.

For my tastes, I think the two albums that followed -- 2013's Again! and his Grammy-nominated effort with Molly Ledford from the band Lunch Money, the 2015 album Trees -- were probably the high points thus far of his output. With Again!, Kelly melds the silly ("Ode to Butter") with the sweet ("There's Nothing Like My Town"), with nothing too mend-bending, except for "Don't Tell Me That I Don't Know What I Know (When You Know That You Don't Know What I Know That I Know)," which I'm still trying to work through the logic of.

And the universally-loved Trees finds Kelly's silly songs like "The National Tree of England" and "(It's Just a) Dumb Ol' Stick" nestled in amongst Ledford's earnest and tender rockers. Ledford, in fact, basically inserted herself into the album after Kelly had been talking about recording such an album for years. And it's amusing to hear Ledford's drier wit make Kelly laugh, like on the gentle putdown Ledford uses on "Coniferous Trees," a joke that it takes Kelly 4 or 5 seconds to hear ("I just got that," he chuckles while trying to continue to sing his verse.)

From there, Kelly's 2016 Welp (oh, that title -- that's a dad word, for sure) covers the same tonal ground that Again! covered, perhaps a little more comedic, and with slightly less of a poppy sound. The narrators on tracks like "If I Could Have Your Attention," "My First Protest Song," and "You Remember Steve," which lead off the album, sound like clueless buffoons, which isn't necessarily an approach your hear on a lot of kids music -- you hear buffoons, sure, but they're rarely the ones singing the music. But of course he does have earnest tracks, like "Might It Be Love?" (though I'll admit to probably preferring an earlier, robot-attacking, self-sabotaged attempt at the track).

But on his most recent album, Kelly decides to go all in with the comedy and go where no kids' musician has gone before -- the standup comedy club. The album titled My First Comedy Album is a misnomer, because most of his albums have been comedic at their core, but it is his first attempt at recording a show in a comedy club. (With a two juice-box minimum? Unclear.)

Billy Kelly is hardly the only artist to provide a healthy dose of humor on their albums for the single-digit set. Recess Monkey, for example, have been on the jokier end of the musical spectrum, and wrote an entire song ("Knocktopus") revolving around the first jokes most preschoolers learn -- knock-knock jokes. Josh and the Jamtones did an entire album called Bear Hunt that was essentially a long set of riffs loosely connected by songs that eventually became a movie, as if one of those two-guys-talking-in-front-of-a-microphone podcasts became an animated production. The latest Michael and the Rockness Monsters album Funny Faces features a handful of silly songs that harken back to the era of novelty songs. Cory Cullinan and Richard Perlmutter use comedy to carve an entrance for kids into classical music. And Eric Herman did an entire sketch and music comedy album titled The Incredibly Spaced-Out Adventures of Jupiter Jackson.

One thing you might notice scanning down that list is that it's made up entirely of males. And my perception is that guys tend to be given more leeway to do silly things in kids music, which means that female artists like Joanie Leeds, Sirius-XM's/Wow in the World's Mindy Thomas, or the much-missed-in-kindie Ashley Albert of The Jimmies who traffic in broader humor like their male counterparts above are more the exception. (And women such as Molly Ledford who use humor sometimes more subtly are often overlooked.) It's a little disappointing, to be sure.

Both lists above also highlight the fact that comedy crafted specifically for kids is pretty hard to find. Find someone to animate your jokes and craft a 6-, 11-, or 22-minute story around them, and you too can get your own development deal. But sketch comedy for kids, especially audio-only sketch comedy for kids, is reaaally hard to find. As best I can tell, the only folks doing that full-time are The Listies, who are based in Australia, so even though they tour a lot, it's probably too much to expect that they just criss-cross the United States week after week. (Note: I very much recommend listening to The Listies. Maybe they'll change their minds about the States.)

Into this void, then, jumps Billy Kelly, father of two, purveyor of dad jokes, whose puns earn groans from the audience (when was the last time you heard that on a comedy album?). And Kelly certainly does take a few opportunities to speak directly to the kids who are sitting in his mixed age audience, noting that he got them into the [comedy] club and noting that kids do, in fact, catch a break. Like, a lot.

But for the most part, Kelly trains his eye on more absurdist topics, like deciding to forego bird-watching for bird watcher-watching.

He eschews the often dense wordplay and allusion-filled approach of his music for a more laid-back take, like Steven Wright with a higher-pitched voice. (No complaints about airplane food or relationship woes, thankfully.) Kelly plays with the conventions of standup, humor which might work a little better with the adults who know when he's slightly subverting the form. And some bits like "Auditordium" start out sounding like they're just mistakes until you realize that they're well-plotted jokes.

Only once does he break down and turn to music as a frame for his comedy, and that's on the cut called "Dictionary." It's actually a recycled bit from Welp. The music isn't necessary at all for the basic structure of the jokes, though the structure of the song -- whereby the spoken jokes essentially fill the role of verses, and the wordless do-do-do-dooooos the chorus -- probably helps the listener process the jokes themselves, which require a little thinking.

The whole album requires a little thinking, actually. While there are definitely some simpler jokes on the album, this is not something that will amuse your kindergartener. Rather, it requires a level of attention and smarts that may even be out of the range of your second-grader. Unlike the Listies, Kelly offers no fart jokes. This is neither good nor bad, just noting that fart jokes are the fastest method known to science for getting a second-grader, especially a boy, to laugh. In some ways, My First... is most reminiscent of Is This Some Sort of Joke?, his most comedic album up 'til now and the one that needed the highest level of listener attention, though the humor is lighter in tone on this new album.

There are a ton of jokes on the 45-minute-long My First Comedy Album and with it Billy Kelly safely retains his title of Funniest Person in Kids Music, unlikely to give it up until he chooses to retire as GOAT. I hope that there's a second album of standup or pure comedy from him (current odds of him naming it My Second Comedy Album: 50/50?). But I like what happens when he works with artists like Ledford who pushed back on "Coniferous Trees" or with other musicians generally. So I also hope he continues working with others to produce funny stuff as well, because I think that feedback makes the humor sharper. Dad jokes work even better if there's an occasional mom or group of dads to offer up some eye rolls... or make an even worse dad joke. And if other dads and moms want record their own albums of comedy just for the kids and their adults, I think it's time it becomes an actual field.

Video: "Mr. Pickle" - Michael and the Rockness Monsters

Let's face it, the era of silly novelty songs is pretty much over -- really, the presence of the occasional "What Does the Fox Say?" is a case of the exception proving the rule. The only outlet at this point is Dr. Demento who continues to produce a weekly online radio show featuring, no doubt, plenty of songs that are silly but not necessarily solely comedic in intent.

So I sort of think that Michael and the Rockness Monsters' "Mr. Pickle" (off Funny Faces) would be an excellent addition to an upcoming Dr. Demento playlist. The song features the nasally ramblings of the titular character and his musings on his way to leading the pickle parade. And that's about it. No homilies about changing the world, or feeling good about yourself, or standing up to bullies. Just a song about a talking pickle. And now, a video that gives visual life to those silly lyrics. Bless 'em, we need a few more songs like that. And maybe Dr. Demento back on the radio.

Michael and the Rockness Monsters - "Mr. Pickle" [YouTube]