It’s no longer unusual for friends and peers of Penny Lane to hear an idea of hers for a documentary and be surprised by the angle she’s taking, whether it’s a look inside the Nixon White House with the warmth of a home movie as a plot to cover up Watergate was underway (“Our Nixon”), a rigorous consideration of the smooth jazz pleasures of Kenny G (“Listening to Kenny G”) or investigating altruism with a donation of her own kidney (“Confessions of a Good Samaritan”). Still, it can be a surprise for her to hear their response, as it was when she began to immerse herself in the world of children’s music for “Happy and You Know It.”
“Every time I told someone I was making this movie, they were like, “Oh, it’s about “the dark side, like pedophilia,” and I’m like, “What?!?’ Why do we go there?’ recalls Lane, gaining an additional sense of purpose in telling the story of those who make careers out of spreading joy in a cynical world. “And I know there are going to be some people [now] that are like, ‘Uh, no thanks,’ because their cringe meter is too attuned to allow themselves [to enjoy it]. But I’ve got to tell you, kill the part of you that cringes. It’s worth it. This music is actually so life-affirming. Everyone on the team benefited from watching zero to five-year-olds have this pure, beautiful, untainted relationship to art. We benefited from like singing fun, catchy, cute, funny songs all day. It was worth it.”
Just in time for the holidays, “Happy and You Know It” feels like the gift that you give to yourself as it premieres as part of the Ringer’s Music Box series on HBO and Lane’s latest is bound to get the mind moving as much as the hips with a look into those bouncy earworms for children, detailing how certain songs like “Baby Shark” become global phenomenons and the craft that goes scoring hits with the world’s toughest crowd. Lane profiles five different artists at different stages of their career, from Divinity Roxx, a touring bassist for Beyonce who is just getting her feet wet playing for kids, to Anthony Field of the Aussie sensation The Wiggles, who play to packed arenas. The grind itself may be no different than it is for most modern musicians as Lane finds with Laurie Berkner, who not only is compelled to churn out new tunes at a rapid clip to satisfy demand, but increasingly has to put herself out on social media to keep her audience engaged, but in a genre that has never been all that respected, the threat looms large of being wiped out completely by AI-generated material when the highly repetitive rhythms may be easy to replicate even if the spirit behind the songs is not.
Packed with personality, “Happy and You Know It” makes as strong a case as anything could for the human touch when the care and consideration that each of the artists put into pleasing their young and irascible fans seems to have greater meaning on both ends because of the connection they make and the film itself is leavened by Lane’s distinctive sense of humor but also unusually poignant due to the questions she raises about what’s being passed onto the next generation, likely to be overlooked by any more mechanical treatment. With the film about to get stuck in people’s heads for reasons beyond the infectious music being played, Lane was gracious enough to talk about how she found such a provocative subject in the least controversial music around, her keys to getting great interviews and how she found a professional parallel that made the story resonate so deeply for her.
How did this come about?
We all had such a great time working on the Kenny G movie together that when the Ringer was putting together season two [of the Music Box series], we started throwing ideas around for music docs. It’s hard for me to like react to just like name a famous person. I don’t know how to make a movie like that, but what happened was “Baby Shark.” I’m a childless cat lady, and it had never crossed my consciousness, never once. I’m sure it was in the background somewhere, but I just didn’t catch it and I didn’t know what it was, but finding out that the most viewed YouTube video of all time, and not just by a little but by a factor of two, the idea that “Baby Shark” is the most viewed YouTube video of all time by a huge margin, and that it’s a song that toddlers love, was a real opening for me. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as toddler pop music. And I had no idea they could exert such a strong market preference that they could make that kind of impact on the planet.
Then I learned about the copyright drama that was in there and I brought all that to the Ringer and they were like, “We love this, but we didn’t think that ‘Baby Shark’ [alone] was a feature.” I don’t think anyone would watch it either because unlike me, the rest of the world was already like pretty saturated with “Baby Shark.” But we devised the idea of an ensemble cast [of musicians], like a mini survey that’s more of a small ensemble cast, so that we could go deep with each person and then see what’s going on in that world.
What was it like to find the right pool of people? It seems like you limited yourself to a contemporary group, as opposed to going after, say, Raffi.
It would have been easier just to do a true survey where we just had a hundred talking heads that show up for two sentences. But I don’t want to make that kind of movie. I like to really get to know the people I’m featuring, so five people is the maximum amount you could have and still like have the opportunity to go deep with each one of them. It was a real puzzle because we knew we wanted some kind of global superstar that could have been Raffi and it ended up being the Wiggles, but it was the process [of finding out] who was interested and who was available. We also wanted like someone who was just getting started, and that was really hard to cast because they’re not that famous yet, so how do you find the person who’s just getting started? That’s how we found Divinity Roxx. Then we wanted a regional artist, like someone who’s that guy at the park on Saturdays and we were lucky that that person [Johnny Only] also was involved in the Baby Shark controversy. We did have archetypes that we were casting for and it took probably good eight months to cast the movie.
A quality that I’ve really come to appreciate in your films are how you make clear the knowledge and expertise of the people you’re talking to, but part of what shines about how smart they are is acknowledging what they don’t know. Is that a difficult thing to achieve, either when you’re doing the interview or allowing that space for uncertainty in the edit?
Yeah, in this project particularly, I feel like I’m trying to help the person I’m talking to see what they’re doing in a deeper way. We all just go about our life, like when I talk to you and you reflect something about what I’m doing, which you just did, I probably don’t know that, but now that you say it, I’m like, “Oh, I can see that,” and with each person I spoke to, they had a little bit of an “A-Ha” moment about the work they’re doing, seeing it in a new way. That’s very gratifying to me. I want the process of making the film to feel like a net plus for the people who are in the movies. I’m sure it isn’t always, but that’s always what we’re striving for. So the interviews are very open-ended, we’re playful, we’re trying to have fun together and they’re very directed. I’m smiling the whole time because I want them to be smiling, trying to help them loosen up and not do sound bites and really get into it with me and talk.
What was funny in this movie was doing the interviews with the kids because we had this gag that the real experts would be the toddlers and we’re honing in on literally the zero to five-year-old range, bringing them in and give them the interview chair. The clapboard moment was actually really funny because it seems like it’s just a gag, but it actually was really meaningful. It really gets at the difference between adult mind and kid mind and kids are so physical. They don’t even want to sit in a chair. They have knowledge and intelligence and a way of seeing the world that is really beautiful and unique. It isn’t the way adults think and see the world, so you can try to put them in the interview chair, but it mostly fails, but then occasionally you get some incredible mind-blowing nugget of wisdom out of them.
One of the questions we asked the kid experts was, “What do you love about music?” Which is also, by the way, the first question I asked Kenny G in the Kenny G movie and his answer was, “I don’t know if I really love music that much.” And by the way, it’s also the last question that young William asks Russell, the rock star at the end of “Almost Famous” when he finally gets the interview and he answers, “To begin with, everything.” It’s this stupid question that I’ve been doing in all my music docs, which has a very important significance for me. Anyway, we asked this one kid towards the end [of that shoot], “What do you love about music?” And he said, “I like to sit next to my mom.” And I could like cry just thinking about that every time, like truly, what an incredible answer.
That is the heart of what I learned about music from kids and art, but what I also want the audience to relearn about music from kids and art in general, which is that it’s really ultimately about connection — connecting to yourself and to the people around you and to all of humanity — and connecting to your parents if you’re a kid is a very important part of your life.
Was there something that took this in a direction you didn’t expect?
The AI piece was not something I was looking into at the beginning. AI just really exploded and now it’s even more of a conversation, but it was not on my radar when we started and what I realized in the process of making the film is that any form of art that we devalue or think is easy to make, that’s like a wedge. It’s the beginning of where AI will dominate. So if we think that music for kids is easy and stupid and anyone could do it, which the movie goes to great pains to explain, like “Here’s a group of 30 kids, try to hold their attention for 10 minutes. Good luck to you” – that’s most at risk. Throughout the process of making this film, [I was] realizing that there are just endless YouTube channels that are essentially just completely automated, made by robots with no human intervention whatsoever, and that really is a real growth industry. And these artists that I now have grown to believe are basically heroic, are really at risk to having their careers just basically destroyed. It’s already a tough life for an artist to make a living and to have this new threat was something I didn’t see coming and I really felt for them.
You always take your subjects seriously when that may not always be the case amongst the world at large. Do you feel like it takes them by surprise?
Absolutely, and you’re making the film for the audience ultimately and the people I’m interviewing are not the audience. However, they are an important part of the process. And I was really happy that the main thing I’ve gotten back from them is that they feel like they were honored and that it’s not often in their lives that they feel like people are honoring them for the work they do or really trying to understand it. Even the Wiggles are a commercial powerhouse, but that doesn’t mean that they get “respect,” right?
That’s something Caspar Babypants says in the movie. There’s a very remarkable moment where he talks about getting some career advice from Madonna when he was in the Presidents of the United States of America, and Madonna said to him, “Because what you’re doing is funny, and it has this playfulness to it, you will never get the respect of critics and no one will ever honor you for the craft of what you’ve done.” And he said that was great advice for him to get early on because not looking for that saved him a lot of heartache. And I have to say, on some level, I related to it. I feel a little bit of that in my own life because I’m putting so much love and craft and work into these films, but the films have a lightness and humor to them that might belie the amount of work and craft and care and intelligence and work I’m putting into them, so maybe occasionally it makes me feel like I’m not getting credit for the work I’m doing, so I felt like I needed to hear that career advice from Madonna too. But these people are really amazing. They are true heroic people and if you don’t think that the people who are making art for your children are heroes, then I don’t know what to say. They’re loving, attending to our children.
“Happy and You Know It” premieres on December 25th on HBO at 9 pm PST/EST and will stream thereafter on HBO Max.