Where was I last week? Ah yes: driven mad by the need to hear Cindy Lauper's voice.

And why? Because of a bunch of pop song parodies based on the idea, as expressed by Kidz Bop co-founder Cliff Chenfeld, that “there was not a lot of music for kids who had outgrown Elmo and weren’t quite ready for Britney.”

I have some problems with this.

• Why must we divide music into “for kids” and “not for kids”? Why can't Elmo fans also enjoy Twisted Sister or Pachelbel? If the only music you play for your toddler is the Wiggles, aren't you a little nuts?
• Doesn't the Elmo-to-Britney continuum imply a pretty narrow range of available music? Must we usher our children from one childish aesthetic to the next?
• What makes Britney's music unfit for children? It's just an irritating voice over a dance beat - nothing that the Kidz Bop treatment is designed to change.
• If the problem lies in Britney's (and other pop stars') lyrics, won't replacing her voice with a chorus of 12-year-olds just make them exponentially creepier? (For a demonstration, see this Kidz Bop satire.)

When you boil it down, all Kidz Bop offers is condescension and bad taste. My kids fell in love with Earth, Wind & Fire's “Shining Star” as soon as they heard it. They didn't need the "Scooby Doo 2" soundtrack version to ease them in.

If only our kids could get the same mix of songs without the cheesy studio hacks and child singers.

Well, duh.

I owe this idea to the girls' hip, twenty-something aunt K., who created custom CDs for both girls one Christmas, labeled “Zoe's Fun CD” and “Jocelyn's Fun CD.” They were basically oldies mixes - The Coasters, The Beach Boys, The Marvelettes, Harry Belafonte, and so on - with a few Dr. Demento moments for good measure. It's a simple thing, but the fact that the CDs were called “Fun CDs” and had the kids' names right on them made the girls really excited. And though it might seem a stretch to call an oldies collection “hip,” they were a lot more fun than almost any “kids” album.

When you start making mix CDs for your kids, the options become endlessly liberating. Maybe my initial impulse was to replace “More Kidz Bop Gold” with a disc of the original versions. But then, why stop there? Why not cherry pick songs from Kidz Bop (and pretend that whole Van Halen thing never happened) and supplement with other songs the kids have hummed along with, or should?

To prepare my first batch of “Fun CDs” for my kids, I played them song after song from our collection and asked, "Do you like this? How about this?" And so, in addition to the real versions of “ABC” and “We Are Family,” I got them hooked on rockers as diverse as the Ramones, Aretha Franklin, Bjork, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and The Flaming Lips. I mixed in some Muppet classics (who doesn't love the Muppets?) so they would never suspect that the resulting CD was not a “kids” CD.

This is an easy, fun project guaranteed to improve the life of any parent who's overdosed on “children's music.” Start with your own collection, and then fill in the holes by sampling CDs from the Ann Arbor District Library and downloading tracks from iTunes or Napster. (I know folks who swear by swap sites like LimeWire and The Pirate Bay, though I've honestly never tried them. My piracy was always more the style that required a blank Memorex and a dual cassette deck.)

A new “Fun CD” was the first gift I gave Jocelyn on her birthday last week, and her eyes lit up. Now we listen to it every day, and I don't mind in the least. The playlist includes favorites of hers from all over the map, from 80s pop like “When Doves Cry” and, indeed, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” to obscure punk like Hot Snakes and NoMeansNo. We've got the Killers and the Beatles; we've got Antsy Pants and Tegan and Sara. And sure, Disney is represented too. You can do a lot worse than “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat.”

Scott Beal is a stay-at-home dad and probably more of a music snob than he has any right to be.

photo: "Cyndi Lauper at the 2008 Gay Parade, San Francisco, CA" by Franco Folini, 2008, via Creative Commons