This year marks the 40th birthday of one of the world's most recognizable cartoon characters: Hello Kitty. The watermelon-headed feline, a creation of the Sanrio company originally known by the less creative moniker "the white kitten with no name," has gone to find her face on almost every possible product you can imagine, from shoes to bowling balls, as well as spawning spinoff characters such as the adorable frog Keroppi and the pinky penguin Badtemaru.
Hello Kitty has gotten some musical mentions as well, although few of them are nearly as friendly as the themes within her television shows and video games. We'll start with the sanctioned Sanrio music and then look at where Hello Kitty went wrong in music.
Hello World
Despite being a pop culture phenomenon, Hello Kitty didn't get an official soundtrack album until just this year, in the form of Hello World (much of the problem in turning Kitty into a music star is that she never speaks...an admirable trait we wish was true of the Chipmunks and many others). It was a family friendly album featuring performers such as Keke Palmer and other voices best know from their child network backgrounds, such as Nickelodeon's Cori Yarckin.
"Hello Kitty" by Avril Lavigne
I think you all knew where we were going when we referred to the Hello Kitty brand being misused over the years. The most notorious example is 2014's single "Hello Kitty" by Avril Lavigne, which already reeked of an insensitive approach to foreign culture before we saw the music video. And then we saw the music video. We admit, watching J-Pop music videos often tickles our funny bone. But Lavigne's all-out accost on the senses with this vid was particularly desperate (and potentially racist). The song hardly has anything to do with the Japanese icon (if you can stand to consider the lyrics)...so why did those poor Japanese girls have to suffer through this video?
"I Heart Hello Kitty" by Blood on The Dance Floor
Lavigne deserved all the crap she took but she was far from the worst offender in the misuse of Hello Kitty. That award has to go to Blood on The Dance Floor for its track "I Heart Hello Kitty." At least Lavigne has kind of given up on the whole faux-punk look and hired some legitimate producers to make a beat for her track. BOTDF dresses like they're the 20-something version of Tokio Hotel (the real Tokio Hotel has grown up, thankfully) and spit sexual obscenities like they're an Eminem born without flow. Guys, Combichrist kicked you off of its tour for a reason. For alleged pedophiliac behavior specifically.
"Hello Kitty" by Wiz Khalifa
It's as if Wiz Khalifa and his buddy Kev The Hustler were sitting around trying to come up with the most innocent children's cartoon character they could to name their track-which features lines such as "Shawty make me feel like we f----n' on the pill" and features absolutely no references to animation of any sort-just to be a--holes. "Maybe we should name the song 'Charlie Brown,'" we imagine Kev suggesting. "Nah man," responds Khalifa. "I at least have some bit of human being left inside of me. I'm not trying to smear Charles Shulz's legacy. Let's just call it 'Hello Kitty.'" And then they released this song:
"Hello Kitty Kat" by Smashing Pumpkins
Sometimes it's cool to hear the tracks that didn't make the original versions of your favorite albums and then see the light when new deluxe editions come out years later. Sometimes you just wish that the performer had left the track stored away like the Ark of The Covenant in Raiders of The Lost Ark. A 2011 rerelease of Siamese Dream allowed Smashing Pumpkins fans to hear demos of unreleased tracks such as "Hello Kitty Kat," which is more of a bitter diatribe from an angst-ridden Billy Corgan than a tribute to Hello Kitty herself. Let it be known that Corgan is a very big fan of cats in general as his recent feud with Anderson Cooper demonstrates.
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