I have a feeling this album was approved for production based on the cover design alone, but it’s an amusing listen, too—in 1966, Happy Time Records (motto: “Hi-Fi for Small Fry”) released Kiddie Au Go-Go, an LP’s worth of “Nursery rhymes with the teen dance beat of today!”, boasting textbook greeting-card psych bubble lettering and a fabulous photo of a little girl in Mondrianesque mod-wear and a toddler boy dressed like his mom thought it’d be “darling” to send him out on Halloween as Quentin Crisp.
 

The U.S. Happy Time release, 1966
 

The UK Allegro Records version, also 1966
 

No damn clue whatsoever, International Award Series Records. This image comes from the Way Out Junk blog, which offers this commentary: “For kids in the sixties that wanted to be cool and parents who wanted to keep them tied to the children’s classics, here’s an album that probably didn’t make either group happy!”
 

”33 1/3 RPM UNBREAKABLE.” This is my own copy, so we won’t be testing that claim.

As advertised, the album features nursery rhymes (some of them more like children’s folk songs, but that’s probably a petty quibble) set to music associated with the Frug, the Jerk, the Watusi, the Monkey… which is to say that they all sound pretty much like teenage garage bands playing “Twist and Shout” to me. Notably, Happy Time was a subsidiary of Pickwick Records, which really good weirdos will recognize as the label that gave Lou Reed a day job as a session guitarist and songwriter before the Velvet Underground made him notorious. The 1966 release date makes it entirely possible that this was in production during Reed’s two-year tenure at the label, but oh, dear reader, I hunted high and low for any evidence—even the merest suggestion—that Reed might have played on this album, but a lengthy rabbit-hole dive that ate up too much of a nice afternoon turned up zilch. The LP label itself names the band as “The Mod Moppets,” but no session information is forthcoming anywhere, and Discogs lists this as the only release by the anonymous “band.”

Someone really ought to steal that band name.

Have a listen, after the jump…

 
On some level, a lot of the music we play for kids—and the music we teach them to sing—is propaganda. Not necessarily overtly so, but beyond learning the alphabet and numbers, the music we offer children is always going to serve as some manner of cultural value metric. And such music originating from a hypernationalist, militaristic culture is sure to seem utterly nuts to cultures that don’t go so completely all in for that kind of thing.

Case in point: China. A friend of mine with the dually cool distinctions of being both a university librarian and a badass sludge/doom bass player turned me on to some Chinese children’s (and other) records, dating I think from the early ‘70s, which had recently arrived in her employer’s collection via a donation. They were all pretty amazing—just the song titles alone sound alien enough to underscore incredible cultural differences:

THE PEOPLE IN TAIWAN LONG FOR LIBERATION

PATROLLING ON THE GRASSLANDS

THE OIL WORKERS ARE FULL OF ENERGY

CHAIRMAN MAO IS THE RED SUN IN THE HEARTS OF ALL NATIONALITIES

The killer item, though, was an 11-song 7” children’s record called I am a Sunflower, with wonderful cover art of smiling children marching with shouldered rifles and songs expressing totally overt themes of youth para-militarism:

LITTLE RED GUARDS GROW STRONGER IN THE FIGHT

GROWING UP AT THE SIDE OF CHAIRMAN MAO

LITTLE RED GUARDS ATTEND A REPUDIATION MEETING

I’LL GO TO THE BORDER REGION, TOO, WHEN I GROW UP

Now, it’s maybe easy to be cast aspersions at all that, but we have our school kids sing “The Star Spangled Banner” which is forthrightly a war song, and the differences between the Young Pioneers/Little Red Guards and the Boy Scouts are surely more a matter of degree of fanaticism than of kind…

CRITICIZE LIN PIAO AND DISCREDIT HIM COMPLETELY

OK, holy fuck, WHAT? That’s pretty disturbing: Lin Piao was an officer in the People’s Liberation Army, and was instrumental in the communist victory in China’s civil war. He died in 1971, in an iffy plane crash. After decades of enjoying high rank in the party—I mean HIGH rank, at the time of his death he was Communist Party vice-chair and Mao’s presumptive successor—he or his son led the Project 571 coup against Mao. The family was attempting to flee after the coup failed, and it’s been pretty widely speculated that the plane crash may have been an assassination. He was branded a traitor posthumously; his name was scrubbed from the Little Red Book, and there was a goddamn children’s song about how hard he sucked. Here it is. I will fully cop to having ripped this from the record and uploaded it myself. Ordinarily that’s a HUGE no-no, but I’m making an exception in this instance because I’d quite enjoy the comic irony of a DMCA copyright takedown coming from China.
 

 
That’d be really cute if you had no idea what it was about, right?

Keep reading after the jump…