Anyone with well-connected relatives will tell you that nepotism can be a very good thing. For instance, it's hard to imagine that, say, Nancy Sinatra, Lisa Marie Presley, Miley Cyrus, or Ashlee Simpson would have any sort of career without a little help from their famous families, or that Fiction Plane (a band fronted by Sting's son) would have otherwise landed the opening slot on last year's Police tour.
However, nepotism is not always a very good thing for us--i.e., the public, the audience, the little people. Because while it's reasonable to believe that at least some celebrity spawn actually inherit a bit of their respective family's talents, pop-culture history has proven that for every artistically endowed progeny like Rufus Wainwright, Liv Tyler, Stella McCartney, or Jeff Buckley, there's a Frank Stallone, Brooke Hogan, Haylie Duff, or Rockwell. Sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree.
So the phenom of music-biz nepotism and the issue of apple/tree proximity will soon be explored in a new MTV reality show debuting Thursday, Rock The Cradle. On this program, the sons and daughters of Bobby Brown, MC Hammer, Olivia Newton-John, Kenny Loggins, Dee Snider, Joe Walsh, Al B. Sure, Eddie Money, and some dude from the Doobie Brothers will compete to make their parents proud, and show they have what it takes to carry on the family tradition. In other words, to quote the Rock The Cradle press release, these kids are out to prove that they really possess "the rock 'n' roll DNA."
Although in the case of A'keiba Burrell-Hammer, I'm not so sure her dad MC Hammer is genetically blessed with rock 'n' roll DNA in the first place...
Anyway, check out these sneak-preview video clips of some of the Rock The Cradle contestants, and decide for yourself if the rock 'n' roll gene skipped a generation...
WATCH: