What Do You Mean Its For Kids / Music

• Michael Jackson toes the line between this and the opposite. He started out as a squeaky-clean child performer with the Jackson 5, a group that got their own Saturday morning cartoon, and as an adult cultivated a family-friendly Friend to All Children image. He narrated an E.T. storybook album, made Captain EO for the Disney Theme Parks, contributed songs to the first two Free Willy movies, starred in The Wiz as Scarecrow, and frequently pushed messages of nonviolence, peace, and charity in his work. His 1993 Super Bowl halftime performance ended with him surrounded by hundreds of tykes as he sang "Heal the World". He was well aware that he was a hero to kids. Yet much of what he aimed at them was less than family-friendly by conventional standards.
  • One of his most famous solo songs, "Billie Jean", is about a stalker who claimed that Jackson was the father of one of her twins. Similar "evil woman" songs appear on other albums.
  • "Thriller" and its spiritual successors have horror themes that are extensively played out in the "Thriller" video and the short film Ghosts.
  • In Moonwalker, the longest segment of the film is "Smooth Criminal", in which he plays himself as a superhero saving kids from an extreme version of The Aggressive Drug Dealer. The song itself is about a woman's murder, and in the Gangsterland dance segment featuring the song, he beats up or outright kills several people before whipping out a tommy gun to shoot at the villain's mooks. In the climax, he transforms into a robot (later spaceship) and mows down mook after mook without a care in the world. Note that there was a tie-in book for kids for this film, and it had to Bowdlerise the story quite a bit by leaving out the darker lyrics of "Smooth Criminal" and the mass killings (with the exception of the Big Bad's demise).
  • His crotch-grabbing dance move. He was doing this as early as the video for "Bad", but the video for "Black or White" made it infamous. This was because the clip was hyped for its kid-friendly, high-tech special effects, a prominent role for Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin, and even cameos from Bart and Homer Simpson. (The Simpsons always had a huge Periphery Demographic of children despite being an adult-oriented show.) Families really didn't expect the video to end with a long, music-free sequence of him dancing, grabbing his crotch, and smashing up a car and storefronts. In fact, director John Landis tried to talk him out of the crotch-grabbing, pointing out that his fanbase was full of kids, but was overruled. In the subsequent public outcry, press speculated that he ended the video this way because there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, while Jackson himself claimed he meant no offense at all.
  • After he was accused of child molestation in 1993, his work became Darker and Edgier and was no longer pushed to families, but he still referred to himself as a Friend to All Children for much of his later career.
• S Club 7 fell into this category with their last album Seeing Double. Two songs in particular that stand out are:
  • "Hey Kitty Kitty" which contains the lyrics "Hey, kitty kitty, set me free. Why d'you wanna do what you do to me? So good at being bad, you blow my mind. Hey, kitty kitty, you're so fine"
  • "Do It Til We Drop." Bradley's raps were pretty unexpected for kids, but this song starts out with the line "Come on and play with me baby, like girls do" which is sung by Rachel and one line before the chorus that's repeated frequently is "I'm so high/I can't come down."
• Blue Monster and Bikki was, according to the website Bubblegum Dancer, a dance music project from Sweden aimed at children and young kids. It's even referred to as a mixture of Aqua and Sesame Street. However, the lone videoclip they released features, in order, an anchorman mentioning the eponymous furry monster "hasn't had sex in 3000 years", the monster drinking lots of alcoholic beverages and sporting a huge pixelated boner after seeing Bikki, a man falling face first into a girl's ample cleavage, and finally the monster whizzing blue pee with his big schlong all over the scientists who were trying to capture him, turning them into other blue monsters. The page mentions that the producer thought that "we had some problems deciding the targeted age-group for the album". No kidding!
• The French children's song "Alouette", when translated, is about plucking a bird's feathers off. It has been featured on everything from Dora the Explorer to Barney & Friends. One children's show, The Alvin Show, got past the true meaning of the lyrics by singing different English lyrics.
• Béla Bartok's set of piano pieces For Children includes several based on Bawdy Songs with unprintable lyrics.
• A recall happened involving a Wal-Mart CD called Kids Favorites, in which it featured songs with absolutely explicit lyrics.
• Kidz Bop is very infamous for frequently succumbing to this trope. A number of songs that have been featured on their albums will make you go "What the hell were they thinking, putting that in there?!":
  • This phenomena started early and never quite stopped, with them covering Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life" in their fourth album. Ever wanted to listen to a chorus of children sing, "Wake me up inside! Bid my blood to rise! Save me from the nothing I've become!"? Well, you can!
  • Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy actually called them on this, preventing "Dance, Dance" from being used for Kidz Bop 10 due its sexual undertones. Kidz Bop wouldn't cover any of Fall Out Boy's songs until 2014, when they covered "Centuries", a decently kid-friendly power-up anthem...and "Uma Thurman", which is just as sexually-charged, if not as much, as "Dance, Dance".
• Peter Aslop, a children's singer, made a CD about sexuality for kids which contained songs such as "It's My Penis", "Hopelessly Heterosexual" and "Let's Trade Butts".
• Notorious YouTube child singer Misha lists most of his songs as (FOR KIDS). And while most of his older songs are fine for kids, his recent stuff... isn't. He swears a lot, throws in harshly-worded Take Thats, is infatuated about older women, and simply attempts to be an uneducated adult. And yes, you did read that opening sentence correctly.
• Voltaire's children's album Spooky Songs for Creepy Kids. Most of it consists of bowdlerized versions of his past songs, but it lives up to its name by still dealing with some rather morbid subjects like cannibalism.

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