Kidz Bop’s Censorship of Lil Nas X — Innocent or Homophobic?

Kidz Bop, the brand that has covered pop music's biggest hits with kid-friendly lyrics for two decades, released their cover of Lil Nas X's #1 song "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)".

Typically, Kidz Bop changes the lyrics to be as kid-friendly as possible. Their censorship is "most often based on references to drugs and alcohol, profanity, and sexual references," according to Out. And that they did on X's song, which they included on their Kidz Bop 2022 edition.

X thought the changes were funny and shared them on Twitter:

But the censorship raised some eyebrows on social media. Sure, the removal of drug and sex references is pretty innocent, but what about any mention of boys? 

X only references the gender of who he's singing about twice, both times in the track's pre-chorus. "You live in the dark, boy, I cannot pretend," he sings. Kidz Bop changed that lyric to "You live in the dark, yeah, I cannot pretend."

Of the surface level, that seems like not too big of a deal. But on other tracks on Kidz Bop 2022, they keep the pronouns. 

Take Justin Bieber's song "Peaches" for instance where he, Daniel Cesar, and Giveon sing quite explicitly about their appreciation of women. In one of the verses, Cesar sings "I left my girl, I'm in Mallorca/Hate to leave her, call it torture/Remember when I couldn't hold her/Left the baggage for Rimowa."

Kidz Bop didn't change the lyric at all in their version. 

And it's not just because it was instrumental in the rhyming scheme. We also looked at Ariana Grande's POV, where the pop songstress sings, "Boy, I be impatient, but now I'm out here." That lyric was also left unchanged. 

So why did Kidz Bop change X's mention of a boy to "yeah" without changing Grande's? There certainly seems to be a double standard. The change, however subtle it might be, makes a very clear point that a gender singing about the other is kid-friendly while a person singing about the same gender is not.