Is it seriously too late to start regretting?
Oh boy, a children's song that I have to cover. So now I not only have to explain why kids deserve better, but why most children's songs suck. I think the main problem is that they have absolutely no appeal to anybody who has grown passed the age of five, maybe six. I mean I do enjoy my fair share of simple songs, but a lot of these are beyond simple, and I get it, children and very young children on top of that, so obviously they won't have any appeal to people outside of that demographic, and even though some would say that they should, Suicide Silence released an album where they tried to appeal to people outside of their genre, and I'll get to that soon, but first "Bananaphone", which by the way should be two words and not one, and no I am not misspelling it myself, it is a literal Google search.
I understand that this is a children's song first and foremost, however, I hate when people use that as an excuse to pretty much say "You can't criticize this", because here is the thing, Avatar the Last Airbender, SpongeBob Square Pants, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Animaniacs all of those things were made for kids, and all of them are amazing. Just because something is for kids doesn't mean it can't be criticized, if that were the case than we wouldn't have those amazing cartoons. However, what makes those shows amazing kids shows is that they also appeal to adults, the people who watch these things with there children. This is the happy balance that people often miss, you don't just have to entertain the children, you have to also entertain the adults. Which is the first problem with this song right off the bat.
This is song might be good and fun for young children, but for anybody else, it gets grating fast. It's funny to hear Raffi sing the opening bit once, but after that you start to realize what you're listening to. I didn't grow up with this song, so I don't have the nostalgic immunity from it, but I can tell you that a lot of the songs I listened to as a child, still hold up. I re-watched a VeggieTales special on their Silly Songs, and I enjoyed all of the ones they presented.
The problem with this song is prevalent in the first couple seconds, it opens with just a bunch of random noises that you use to entertain babies. The first ten seconds of this song already feel like the equivalent of waving your keys in front of an infant's face. Look, shiny!
Although Raffi is a good singer, which actually makes this one double hard since I criticizing children's music from a guy who seems to be genuinely nice, but the novelty of hearing "Ring-ring-ring Banana Phone" wears off after the first time it's heard. It doesn't help at all that this is the majority of the lyrics, alongside other "humorous" ways of saying the same thing, see, he changed the lyrics to Ping-pong-ping "Panana" phone, isn't that humorous? I can't believe I'm saying this but, um... Richard Cheese, you know that guy who I criticized in the past for not being humorous with his covers and expecting the novelty of lounge jazz covers of heavy metal to be humorous enough to sustain a career, you know that guy? Well, his cover of "Chop Suey!" A song from one of my favourite bands of all time, is a funnier song than this.
We do get a decent instrumental solo, and since I'm on positives, the instrumentals themselves are good, I mean they are upbeat and would make any child jump around, but I feel as though this song would lose it's ap-peel to anybody over the age of five.
What also makes this worse is the lyrical content, I mean it starts off amusing with some old, but still clever wordplay, then it gets a little to complicated for a children's song. Not that I'm saying that we should talk down to children, hell no, but I doubt children will understand the words "Cellular, modular, interactivodular", I mean I read Dr. Seuss as a child, but just because I could read big words too (like Constantinople and Timbuktu) did not mean I understood them.
The song ends with more wordplay which may or may not entertain a child, I don't know it depends on the child because around the age I would have been listening to this song, I was watching Looney Tunes and waiting for the Coyote to get squished by his next failed attempt to catch the roadrunner, it wasn't until later that I really started to get into wordplay.
This, is not a terrible song, and I guess it's fine for little kids, which was the intent. However, the novelty wares off quickly and if you're a parent or older sibling and have to heard this song on repeat over and over again, I'm sorry. Really, there are worse songs to have your kids listen to, I would much sooner take this over "Mr. Blobby" any day of the week, but this song is only for the really little kids, and that is probably it's biggest issue.
If your kid wants to hear this song, go ahead, but don't teach them how the repeat button works.
I'm the Dark Entity and I think it's weird how in a review of a children's song, I talk about a grindore band... I am such a musical nerd.
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