The best thing about schools across the country getting the fall semester under way this week is that there’s less time for students to hang out in recording studios.

Not because people who spend their youths as entertainers have the propensity to end up passed out in the front seats of cars after a weekend bender in the Hollywood Hills, or anything like that. Rather, because featuring children peripherally on rock’n'roll albums is at best just plain creepy, and at worst downright wrong. It’s something about that naivety, that innocence, that makes their off-key voices ring of manipulation, even on the most good-natured of songs and regardless of how they’re used.

This is something that filmmakers have known for years. Give a child even the slightest dark edge (“The Good Son”), make them do anything a bit their senior (“The Other”), highlight their corruptible nature (“The Exorcist”), and they’ve got an instantly cryptic and haunting character, sometimes without realizing how deeply disturbing a child’s presence can be (“Home Alone”).

Music is no different, just without the projectile vomiting and obnoxious after-shave shouts. Which is why the images and audio clips etched in all our minds from the 1982 film accompaniment to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” are the children’s unsettling violent youthful urges carried out on adults that never outgrew their own.

But some entrepreneurs (read: opportunists) have figured out a way to further the manipulative relationship between adolescents and music. Two composers – Tellervo Kelleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kelleinen – have built an international following for their series, Complaints Choir, since 2005. The idea: Audience members compose beefs about anything from gas prices to the wacky neighbor down the street, and choir members will turn the concerns into song. The U.S. debut of this on-tour version of a letters to the editor page will be Nov. 3 at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

There’s nothing wrong with voicing concerns via music; rock’n'roll has a long history of protest songs. But some people, and rightfully so, have risen a concerned eyebrow as rumors have begun to circulate that the American tour might feature children. What could be more annoying than rows of shouting children? Rows of shouting children complaining. Although, anyone who’s been witness to toddlers’ temper tantrums can speak to their ability to get what they want. But potential effectiveness aside, it won’t be right if organizers include the persuasive power of youthful whines just to turn a bigger buck. Anyone with a conscience should be leery of adults making a better living than the talented youngsters they promote.

That’s not to say all performers who use children are irresponsible and teetering close to the line of child-labor laws. Many performers – such as hipster darlings and teen sibling duo, Smoosh – got into playing music on their own at a young age. Preventing youth from playing music is as much a form of child abuse as forcing them to. But the line between taste, talent, music and manipulation easily can get blurred. And the fastest way to do that is when adults use the kitsch of sharing a stage or track with people not old enough to drive, without realizing that they’re using the children only because they are, in fact, children.

Obviously there are things much worse than providing a 12-year-old the chance to sing with a band or tour the world. Given the choice between the working conditions of mass-producing shoes in a sweatshop and missing third grade to grace a few album covers and summer festivals, the choice is pretty easy. But that doesn’t mean the latter is entirely OK.

Take the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, for example. The group scours estate sales for antique slides and photo albums as fodder for their music. The band pens story songs about the images, which are projected on a screen during gigs. It’s a novel, although one-dimensional, form of performance art. The horror, though, comes in the form of drummer Rachel Trachtenburg… who is only 13 years old, and has been touring since single digits. And it’s not as if she can stop and settle into a better-suited routine of sleepovers and trips to the mall, because her two bandmates are her parents.

Don’t give her father and mother, Jason and Tina Trachtenburg, the benefit of the doubt. They’re using their daughter to carve out a further niche. Despite writing none of the music or lyrics, young Rachel is pushed to the front of most every press photo and has become the face of the trio. Why? Because of her age. Granted, if a should-be seventh-grader is going to travel to every last concert hall on Earth, it’s best to do it with her parents. But those adults should have more respect for their daughter’s upbringing than using it as a way to cash in on their own rock’n'roll dreams.

For as funny of a film as Jack Black’s “School of Rock” might be, the fictional character admitted in the film to needing to use the children for his own success. Unfortunately, it’s not just a movie.

Musician Paul Green started an actual school of music children in 1998. The Paul Green School of Rock now has about 50 establishments across the U.S. – including three in Illinois. It’s no different from the thousands of soccer camps or cooking classes that enroll countless children each year, except that Green joins the students during much of the promotional material. If the school’s well-intentioned manifesto is true, which states: “Our goals at the Paul Green School of Rock Music are: to help our students realize their potential as artists, to put them on stage in front of as many people as possible and to help foster a new generation of incredible musicians,” then the school’s founder should stay in the shadows. Great coaches don’t join their team on the field; professors don’t follow graduates to their job interviews.

But he doesn’t stay hidden, and an establishment that might have started with pure goals – which most things do – now seems a way for a middle-aged man to capitalize on his pupils in the form of concert videos, radio spots and albums. Worse, it’s become a way for a music fanatic to weasel his way into dates at Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. That’s right, Lollapalooza’s kids stage, on which Green was ever-present.

Green’s school, as was Black’s film, was in no doubt based on the Langley School Music Project – the Holy Grail of rock’n'roll children eeriness, not to mention one of the most sought-after collectors items and cult outputs. It’s the epitome of the youth gone spooky, both in its nature and its legacy.

In 1976, an experimental music teacher, Hans Fenger, recorded 60 schoolchildren in a gymnasium in British Columbia. On a two-track recorder, the group riffled through renditions of songs by David Bowie, The Beach Boys and Paul McCartney, among others. Until the tapes were uncovered by a radio personality in 2000, the works had been long since forgotten. But in the past seven years, the bone-chilling recordings have taken on a new life – a commercial one. All the earnest, integrity and utter intrigue of those early Fenger tapes now have been co-opted by someone who wasn’t even involved three decades ago.

Irwin Chusid, a champion of fringe acts, record producer and author of “Songs In The Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music,” made it his goal to provide commercial copies of the Langley material, despite acknowledging on his Web site that the original composer/performers had no intention of ever doing so. Nothing like cashing in on some kids 30 years later by forging a deal with school’s administration and getting the blessing for the few students who were tracked down. Apparently $16.98 is a suitable list price for tracks that Chusid before referred to as “priceless.”

At least the modern-day equivalent of Langley, Kidz Bop, makes no bones about its financial goals or hides behind the veil of “art.” Now in its 12th installment – not counting Kidz Bop Country, Kidz Bop Special and Kidz Bop Jock Jams offshoots – the series features a group of children performing renditions of popular radio hits. It would be fine if the organizers of Kidz Bop chose the songs with a bit more caution. Yet something just isn’t right about having kids sing Modest Mouse’s “Float On,” with lyrics “A fake Jamaican took every last dime with a scam/ It was worth it just to learn some sleight-of-hand.” Without any awareness of the subject matter (not to mention or the coincidence of singing about being opportunistic), the Kidz Bop promoters keep kids awfully close to some not-yet -ge-appropriate topics.

Although there are different degrees of using children in music – ranging from the Trachtenburgs’ stage parenting, to the acts that bring in children for a one-day studio session – it all corresponds to the same idea… kids in adult rock’n'roll is weird. It stands out. It sounds out of place, no matter how it is used. Which undoubtedly is the reason behind most of it.

So when photos surfaced this month of Radiohead’s bassist Collin Greenwood surrounded by about 25 clapping children, speculation followed of what was in store for the band’s upcoming seventh album. Suffice it to say that nobody aside from Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood probably know, including the other three members of the band. Radiohead has been so tight-lipped about the material for the still-untitled LP, that the results of the kids day session most likely won’t be revealed until the album inevitably is leaked before its release date.

We can hope that it’s going to be just some kiddie giggles and playground songmanship. But that’s not to assume that people behind the Radiohead camp aren’t going to urge the iconic act to take the chorus out on tour with them. Let’s just hope that if someone does, Yorke has enough sense to fire the person immediately.

So until we know for sure, cross your fingers and hope it stays merely creepy… and doesn’t get inappropriate.

Northwest Herald, Aug. 24, 2007