Recommended Age Level

Certain things I can forgive in the name of cuteness and certain things attempt to be cute but are inappropriate and end up facing my folded arms and cold stare.

In the latter category we have these sisters Lennon and Maisy Stella, ages 8 and 12, performing Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” last week on Good Morning America. I caught a second of it on TV and scoffed but later looked it up on YouTube to see if it was as non-charming as I thought. It was. The girls sang a cappella with empty Parkay containers as their percussion. The vocals were OK for kids but would not get them past round one on America’s Got Talent.

Yeah, I’m an asshole, judging children. The thing is, if it were my family, I would applaud and think it was cute. But once these kids go on national television, there should be some kind of talent level justifying their appearance and there just wasn’t.

What really bothers me is that these girls sang a song way above their maturity level. I love Robyn as she records dance music with a tragic edge, songs that get smarter and more sophisticated the more I listen to them. “Call Your Girlfriend” is one of her best. On the surface, it seems like a sweet song, with a woman asking her new boyfriend to let his old girlfriend down easily. But I read the lyrics as callous and nasty. “Tell her that the only way her heart will mend/ Is when she learns to love again/ And it won’t make sense right now/ But you’re still her friend,” Robyn suggests to the boyfriend. This sounds like a gentle kiss-off but all the sentiments are total bullshit and Robyn sounds like she’s tossing off platitudes to get the girl out of the way, while acknowledging the more damning reasons why her man left his ex. Before the bridge of the song, she sings “You just met somebody new/ And now it’s gonna be me and you.” I just read those lines as possessive and cold rather than sweet.

And those girls on morning TV cannot possibly know enough about the world yet to grasp that song. They could be smart kids but what 8- or 12-year-old can identify with a verse like “Don’t you tell her how I give you something/ That you never even knew you missed/ Don’t you even try to explain/ How it’s so different when we kiss”? What kind of middle school break-up would contain that depth of feeling? This is a song from a perspective of someone who has been around the block and I don’t want to hear that from kids.

So I think child singers are better off sticking to songs in their age level. I have said before that I don’t care much about authenticity in pop; that if a song is a fiction, all that matters is that I’m entertained and that the singer sells it. But even if a singer did not write the song or experience the level of feeling therein, it should at least be plausible that the singer could have had that experience. Therefore, I just don’t buy love or break-up songs from tweens. They might have great voices but they can’t sell Annie Lennox’s “Why.”

That’s why I can’t even feign interest in YouTube videos of kids singing songs that are too mature for them. It would take a major act of will for me to pretend to be interested in such things and probably score me a Best Actor Oscar nomination. I don’t care about the 6-year-old Japanese boy who can sing “Paparazzi” exactly like Lady Gaga or the 10-year-old girl who does a mean impression of Adam Levine in “Moves Like Jagger.”

It’s creepy when kids try to sell adult songs. It’s like a parade of Jon Benet Ramseys who have been pushed on stage but are dead behind the eyes. It’s like a talking baby commercial where an adult voice is coming out of a child who is far too young to talk. It’s like robots with flawless voices but no real heart. It’s like somebody who speaks another language phonetically but has no idea what he’s saying.

Please stick to the recommended age level.