Some Alabama parents are upset about a track on the Kidz Bop 6 CD that is being given away with McDonald's Happy Meals. They say the supposedly kid-friendly version of Gavin De Graw's "I Don't Want To Be" includes the F-word.
The Boaz, Alabama McDonald's has pulled the potentially offending CD from the Happy Meals after parents complained.
One parent told station WAFF-TV: "In the song the word is supposed to be 'looking,' but they're saying the f-word with the -ing on the end." (Friending? Finding? Frying? No, not those...)
Sounds pretty innocuous, right? Then parents started listening to the free CDs. Some thought they heard something they didn't expect on the Kidz Bp cover version of Gavin DeGraw's "I Don't Want To Be." What were they hearing?
Well, there are a couple of options.
Here's the original lyric from DeGraw's tune (emphasis added):
I'm tired of looking 'round rooms wondering what I gotta do
What some parents think they hear on the Kidz Bop disc is the following:
I'm tired of f**king 'round rooms wondering what I gotta do
Is this a horrible marketing error, or a case of parents overreacting? One ParentDish reader told us that she doesn't know what all the fuss is about. "I listened to the whole thing twice and heard no F Bombs - 'tired of lookin' round' in the chorus was the closest thing..."
KidzBop.com has a video of the song in question; again, the lyric we're talking about is about 45 seconds in. Our take: It may or may not say that four-letter word. It definitely has a weird giant dog in it and makes very little sense.
To make things a little easier for us, NBC New York put the versions together. The first version is DeGraw's, the second is the Kidz. Click here to listen. Same content warning applies.
Personally, I think it's just poor diction. I doubt that anyone at Kidz Bop would risk their popular franchise by changing a song's lyric to something dirty. Heck, even Weird Al doesn't do that. That said, I do think that in the Kidz version, it sounds quite a bit like they are saying the f-word.
So listen (with headphones on if you're at work) and tell us what you think. Does the new "kid-friendly" version of the song put an extra "f" in "fast food"? Or, to paraphrase another part of Mr. DeGraw's song, are we surrounded by liars everywhere we turn?
Source: ParentDish US