Krazy Kuzins

Brothers-in-law Matt Lavan and Mike Griffith grew up listening to rap and hip-hop music, and when they became fathers, they wanted to share that with their kids. But they couldn’t find any hip-hop that was clean enough for their preschoolers to listen to. What’s a pair of hip, ambitious dads to do? Create their own, of course. Lavan and Griffith weren’t crazy enough to think that they could sing kids’ rap songs themselves. (Both guys are in their early thirties and neither is especially musically gifted.) So Griffith found some computer software that let him adjust anyone’s recorded voice to sync up to music, basically making them sound as if they were actually on beat even though they weren’t. Still reluctant to take the stage, the two were crazy enough to think they could get their kids (ages three to five at the time) to sing, or more accurately, rap.

So, the fathers grabbed their kids, coaxed them to say a few lines into a microphone and, whiz, bang, boom, a homemade CD. “He’s had a recording studio for a while,” says Lavan of Griffith, “and we would make beats and backgrounds, just messing around. Then we thought it would be fun to take the kids’ voices and put them over the beats. We would have them come in and say one or two lines — with his software you can [adjust it] so that it sounded like they’re actually rapping — and we made a CD. We were just passing it out to friends and family. Then he upgraded his studio equipment about a year or so ago, and the kids got a little bit older…”

“And we got a little bit more serious,” adds Griffith.

“There’s no hip-hop music out there for kids. All the kids’ music is folk or folksy rock, but no kids’ hip-hop. So we decided to make a whole CD,” says Lavan.

After ten months in Griffith’s home studio and endless bribes to the kids (“Just do it one more time and then we can get some Dairy Queen!”), the pair has produced It’s a Kid’s Thing, a Krazy Kuzins CD. Their kids — Jake, John Mike, Abby G and Jenny B — are the artists. (Don’t ask which kid is which dad’s; that’s not the point. In fact, the kids are never credited or shown on the CD; they’re represented by cartoon characters.)

Both men created the music, Lavan added lyrics and then they brought the kids in. “We’d go over [to the Griffiths’ house],” says Lavan, “and the kids would play while we were in the studio recording the music. Then we’d call them, ‘Jake, you’re up!’ or ‘Abby, you’re up!’ or whatever. It took almost a year because for each song we would have to do it one line at a time, over and over. The studio is their guest room, and the kids have to go into the coat closet to record.”

If all that sounds a little amateurish, the end result, It’s a Kid’s Thing, is decidedly not. Lavan and Griffith are in the midst of a nationwide publicity campaign, and getting good results. “We just got a write-up in Time Out New York Kids, right next to a Sarah McLachlan interview,” laughs Lavan. “And we put ourselves on the Grammy ballot. Why not, right?”

The two, working as Cool Front Productions, have also approached Nickelodeon with an idea for animated videos based on the characters on the CD’s cover, and are looking to get picked up by a label for future productions which might be more educationally oriented — It’s a Kid’s Thing songs are about things like thunderstorms and daydreaming, not multiplication tables or grammar rules.

Now, if they could just expand their sales base a little. “One [of the kids’] grandmothers has bought I don’t know how many CDs,” jokes Griffith. “We tell her, ‘Look, we can give you the CDs, you don’t have to buy them,’ but she does. Every time we see some sales, we get all excited and then we find out it’s usually her buying three or four of them. She passes them out to her friends in New York.” For more info about It’s a Kid’s Thing and other Cool Front Productions projects, visit www.krazykuzins.com online.