I'm eleven years old. My teenage cousin Stacey is holed up in the spare room, avoiding the family. I barge in, aware that I'm probably not wanted, but she doesn't kick me out right away. When I see the cassette case sitting on the bed, it's like catching an R-rated glimpse on HBO. It's 1983; Ozzy Osbourne is far from becoming the cute old mumbler who'll one day hawk cell phones on TV. He's in full bat-head eating, parent-terrorizing effect. The cover with his snarling face reads “Speak of the Devil” at a time of epidemic paranoia about satanic cults. Stacey takes off her walkman headphones and lets me listen for a few seconds. I don't really get what I'm hearing, but who cares. Next time I find myself at K-Mart with $7, I'll come home with a copy of “Bark at the Moon.” My parents will not be overjoyed.

Now that I'm a parent myself, I should have known it would be an older cousin who hooked my children on the vilest music of our day. This is what older cousins are for. They know about things dangerous and mysterious. The sound coming through their headphones could transform your life. When my brother's daughter pulled out her earbuds and cued up her favorite track on the mp3 player, how could my daughters resist? How could it not end in please please please will you get us some Kidz Bop?

Uh uh. No way. Kidz Bop, in case you don't know, is a series of CDs in which studio musicians team up with child singers to reproduce current hits, from Britney to Kanye, Nickelback to Beyoncé. Can you imagine? If not, try their versions of “Kryptonite” and “Umbrella.” But don't blame me when they make you curl into a ball and weep for humanity.

To my children's delight, their mother took a somewhat more flexible approach to the Kidz Bop issue. One day she took the girls to Target, where they discovered “More Kidz Bop Gold,” a collection giving the Kidz Bop treatment to pop classics from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The Go-Gos. Van Halen. The Jackson Five. And so on. Well, she thought, if they must have Kidz Bop, this doesn't sound so bad.

At least, not until you get it home and put it on the stereo.

Perhaps you have had occasion to ask yourself, upon hearing Kool and the Gang's “Celebration” or Van Halen's “Jump”: could this song be any worse? I can tell with some authority, alas, the answer is YES. If you've lived through these monstrosities as many times as we have, you may understand why the Strawberry Shortcake song sounds pretty good by comparison. And of course decent songs like “We Got the Beat” and “Walk Like an Egyptian” become travesties with their Kidz Bop makeover. Really, the only songs with any hope of surviving the translation are those that were sung by little kids in the first place - like “ABC” or “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

Of course, even then, I prefer the originals. Not only prefer - I crave them. If you had told me ten years ago that I would actively seek out the original version of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” I would have hurled a spork at you. But now I'm borrowing CDs from friends with titles like “Now That's What I Call the 80s!” (I told you Kidz Bop was evil.) It's as if the original songs are my only antidote to the Kidz Bop venom. I need them for myself, but not only for myself. One day my children may remember me as the weirdo ripping out his hair and pointing to the speaker, rasping, “You hear that, kids? That's what it's supposed to sound like!” At least I'll know they were listening.

Don't miss next week's exciting conclusion: the Anti-Kidz Bop maneuver!

Scott Beal is a stay-at-home dad whose head just exploded as he imagined a Kidz Bop rendition of “Bark at the Moon.”