The Ukulele Alphabet: Kiss the Girl by Sebastian the Crab

For the second K in our Ukulele Alphabet, we travel from Kermit’s green swamps to the blue lagoon in… whatever Mediterranean-ish kingdom¹ Prince Eric is doofishly and half-assedly ruling when he’s not killing it on the recorder.

Remember, the theme of my K songs for the Ukulele Alphabet is Childhood Education — namely, what I have learned from singing animals.

So about The Little Mermaid: As an adult, yes, I agree that the plotline of the movie is not a feminist’s dream.

Nor is this song super focused on consent (which is why my old friend Lin-Manuel Miranda changed the lyrics for the live-action remake).

But you cannot deny that Alan Menken can write earworms for days and I’m not going to hold the lyrics against Howard Ashman, whose collaboration with Menken was one for the ages. Have you watched the documentary Howard on Disney+ yet???

And for the record: What I took from The Little Mermaid (the o.g. version)² as an 11-year-old — and what I took from Beauty and the Beast after it — was not that you should change who you are to get a guy to like you.

Instead, what I absorbed more than anything was that if you wanted to do something other than what your parents expected you to do with your life, if you had a different hope or dream or desire that wasn’t quite what society thought was cool, if you were just an oddball in your own way… whether it was reading lots of books or collecting whosits and whatsits and snarfblatts, well, then that’s perfectly valid.

And somehow, some way, even if it involves magic (especially if it involves magic!), it’s going to turn out OK in the end.

Listen to the original version of “Kiss the Girl”:

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Read more about The Ukulele Alphabet project:

1. Just kidding (not about Prince Eric’s recorder skills, though) — I did both of these songs in the same place.

2. Also, one of my former co-workers once referred to Toy Story as “one of the old Disney movies” and I died a little inside.