For Happy and You Know It, the latest documentary in HBO’s Music Box anthology, director Penny Lane considers the ocean of children’s music that surrounds a big fish like “Baby Shark” and its billions of streams. How do the artists who make this music deal with the age-old, still elusive, and still kinda dumb question of what’s cool? How does one write an effective song for kids using language that validates and includes them? And will artificial intelligence taint the innate joy of human voice and movement – of hearing a beat, and kicking out the jams – just as the technology is slopifying everything else in our culture?
The Gist: Happy and You Know It focuses on four children’s music creators as it considers the industry and cultural climate where they work. When preschool teacher Laurie Berkner realized she couldn’t reach her young pupils, she began to write and perform original songs – often about dinosaurs – from their perspective. Chris Ballew enjoyed success with his alt-’90s band The Presidents of the United States of America, but after music industry burnout, released numerous records as Caspar Babypants. Musician Divinity Roxx, former touring bassist for Beyoncé, fused hip-hop with positivity in her own turn toward kid’s music. And for children’s entertainer Johnny Only, releasing his version of the old summer camp singalong “Baby Shark” in 2011 became a legally sticky signpost on the road South Korean company Pinkfong took to unleashing its own “Shark” take into the worldwide bloodstream. Copyright drama, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, corporate fat cats vs. the little guy, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, etc.
For Anthony Field of The Wiggles, the story’s a little different, mostly because his band has become a children’s music behemoth. The combo’s been making records and playing shows for decades, and are such an institution they’ve inspired generational fans, who now pass Wiggles songs like “Fruit Salad” and “Hot Potato” onto their own kids. Happy And You Know It includes lots of footage of Wiggles concerts that are arena-level sellouts, and bemused TV news reporters saying things like “Toddlers going berserk over a rock band? I have my ticket.”
Inside all of this discussion are questions about the validity of what they do. Berkner trying to replicate the facial expressions people make when they learn she only writes and performs music for children, as if that’s cute but not legit. Ballew calling kid audiences punk as fuck because they demand authenticity. (Roxx agrees: “It’s not until you start doin’ it that you realize this is not easy at all.”) But Happy also questions the nature of music for kids on the whole. What do we teach them through singing, repetition, and the central pull of rhythm? And perhaps it’s not about education at all, because the music – the feeling – was already in them, uncorrupted by ingrained behavior. “It’s not often adults allow themselves to be playful,” Laurie Berkner says in the Happy. “Unless they get drunk enough.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2023 documentary Hot Potato: The Story of the Wiggles went deep on the history and legacy of the Australian group, who’ve become one of the most successful children’s music groups of all time. Parchís: The Documentary shows a fascinating – and at least in America, forgotten – slice of children’s entertainment from a different era. And Happy filmmaker Penny Lane also directed Listening to Kenny G, another doc in the Music Box series, which tried to thread a love-hate needle through the career of the smooth jazz heavyweight.
Performance Worth Watching: The makers of children’s music featured in Happy consistently confront a question, which basically boils down to the same old cool-or-lame binary. So it’s interesting to catch them in home studios, or jamming with others, or strolling through the forest with a ukelele, looking for inspiration. These people are professionals, and they’ve gotta put in the work. Writing a great song requires writing a great song, no matter if the end result features stomping dinos, big red cars, or the genius of buttered noodles.
Memorable Dialogue: For Chris Ballew, writing songs for kids was “a beautiful opportunity to have children’s experience with media, and music and movies be rich and imaginative.” Or, you know, the opposite of “shoddy and trashy and simplistic.” (Ballew: “COUGH ‘Babyshark’ COUGH.”)
Sex and Skin: As we know from the 2016 Caspar Babypants single “Jellyfish Jones,” the song’s main character’s got no bones. But if he did, one of the first things he might do, when freed from a life floating in the sea, and of course after learning how to belly dance, would be to get fitted for some jellyfish pants.
Our Take: Maybe it all comes down to three chords and a hooky line about poop? No one really comes out and says this in Happy and You Know It, but the doc’s allusion is that children’s music embeds a pathway to universal human enjoyment. Kids love a repeated pattern, maybe slightly variegated in a way they can anticipate. (So, a familiar musical hook.) Kids love noise, movement, and a sense of endless fun. (So, the abandon contained in a timeless pop song, or the consuming potential of a beat on the dancefloor – just as Mon Mothra.) And kids have no problem engaging with how this makes them feel, no matter who’s watching. (So, no grown-up hang-ups about perception.) Chris Ballew gets closest to this sonic building block connection in Happy when he describes the “cartoon light bulb” that switched on over his head. Freed from the “culture of cool” that dominated alternative music, he could apply the whimsy already hardwired into PUSA material (“Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the one she got was sorta rotten and insane”) to his work for kids as Caspar Babypants. Writing something catchy and memorable isn’t exclusive to serious compositions or even silly love songs. It’s key to how we understand music on a nervous system level.
We believe in the musicians featured in Happy And You Know It, and are confident they’ll keep working on their craft. But this doc also made us a little sad. Comparing their work as songwriters to the AI that’s contaminated children’s music spaces on YouTube, as Happy does, is really no comparison at all. The former category is full of creativity and the light touch of a personalized lyric; the latter is like telling one of those burrito delivery robots to actually make a burrito. Happy doesn’t really have an answer for this larger phenomenon, but it doesn’t really need one. (It’s trying to stay positive, after all.) Instead it’s part of a larger, sadder commentary that even in an industry corner like children’s music, a technology no one asked for is overtaking the best parts of being human – like the simple, learned act of enjoying a song – and replacing it with clickable nonsense created by robots. As writer and cultural critic Willa Paskin says in Happy, “It’s antithetical to what we want to be doing to our two-year-olds.”
Our Call: Stream It, especially if you’re a parent. Happy and You Know It unpacks what can make children’s music beautiful, what can make it earworm-y – in good and bad ways – and what can make it bland and grossly marketable. When all of these varieties of kids’ music are happening at the same time, it creates a challenge for an industry that keeps thriving with every generation born.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.