All I really need is a song in my heart

December 22, 2015 11:56 AM

Sheila Heti (previously) profiles Raffi: The wondrous — and occasionally weird — relationship between the children’s-music superstar, his fans, and the man he used to be.
posted by Cash4Lead (32 comments total)

My one and only conversation with Raffi was backstage at a UN Children's Summit on the Environment. He asked me if it was Abbey Road that was recorded before, but released after, Let It Be, or if it was the other way around. At the time I knew and was disproportionately proud to settle this for Raffi. Now I don't remember.
posted by Beardman at 12:01 PM on December 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

I'm pretty sure The Corner Grocery Store was the very first record I owned. Now every time I see it in a thrift store (which is, like, always; he must have sold ten million copies of that thing in Canada) I check to see if my name is written on it. I mean, my old copy is probably in a landfill somewhere, but you never know.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:09 PM on December 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

I haven't been a huge fan of what I've read of Heti's fiction, but I also liked this essay about her experience singing "Tomorrow" on a tv show named "Big Top Talent" that Southwestern Ontarians of a certain age may remember.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:23 PM on December 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

This was a really nice article and reminded me of my love for Raffi. What I am more interested in is his later anti-internet stuff though and I would have liked to read more about it. Based on the cover info I read at the Salt Spring farmer's market it seemed somewhat out there. I think I'm going to have to break down and just buy it. Good news is if I buy I'll get to talk to him! There's always a line for Raffi!
posted by wyndham at 12:28 PM on December 22, 2015

That was lovely. Thanks for posting this.
posted by schmod at 12:32 PM on December 22, 2015

I was struck by the author's observation that like Raffi "many children’s entertainers and writers (Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Tove Jansson, Beatrix Potter) weren’t parents" (am I right that Bill Watterson also belongs on that list, as far as people know?) Heti and Raffi discuss a couple of possible explanations: that the creator who is not a parent finds it easier to identify with children, or that creators who do not have children use their art as a way of connecting with children.

But it made me think that probably people without children (along with people who don't spend much time with their children) are overrepresented among people who have done basically anything, because children are extremely time-consuming. Indeed, this would have been an earlier comment on this thread but my three-year-old woke up from her nap while I was writing it and I had to read her George and Martha.
posted by sy at 12:32 PM on December 22, 2015 [24 favorites]

Well, Sendak was gay (and kept that fact private until shortly before his death). Even if he wanted to have kids, adoption would have been very difficult at that time.
posted by schmod at 12:41 PM on December 22, 2015

Margaret Wise Brown also belongs on that list.
posted by saladin at 12:47 PM on December 22, 2015

I confess I had never heard of this guy till now but wow - this is fascinating.
posted by misterbee at 1:19 PM on December 22, 2015

Related: Bullseye interview with ~YoungAmerican.
posted by Cash4Lead at 1:28 PM on December 22, 2015

What I am more interested in is his later anti-internet stuff though and I would have liked to read more about it.

Maybe I missed something -- in what way is he anti-internet? The article describes him as "one of the most active political tweeters in Canada."
posted by teraflop at 1:47 PM on December 22, 2015

More Singable Songs was one of my first records when I was a kid and I listened to it all the time. I was hoping to share Raffi's songs with my kids but they aren't into it yet. My daughter did learn "Douglas Mountain" in kindergarten last week so hopefully the education system can once again step in where my parenting has failed.

Raffi's version of "Good Night Irene" is my default lullaby for my kids. It isn't quite long enough to put them to sleep by itself but it gets the process started and after that I can sing pretty much anything.

Maybe I missed something -- in what way is he anti-internet?

Towards the end he talks a bit about screen time. It also mentions that he has written a book for parents on social media called Lightweb Darkweb.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:55 PM on December 22, 2015

Wait, was Bill Watterson writing for children? (That's an honest question.)
posted by fiercecupcake at 2:02 PM on December 22, 2015

I didn't discover Raffi until I had my own kids. I try to pass on Raffi love during my library storytimes, because a lot of young parents don't know him at all. In my baby group we sing "Shake My Sillies Out" and "The Sharing Song" every session. In fact, I've been using "The Sharing Song" as my closing song for almost 20 years.
posted by Biblio at 2:33 PM on December 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

For me Raffi existed so completely in that dreamy pre-language/pre-consciousness childhood memory state that it's always a little jarring to find out he's a real person, other people have heard of him, he's still around, he knows what Twitter is, etc.
posted by bleep at 2:49 PM on December 22, 2015 [8 favorites]

My mom bought me "Evergreen Everblue" when it came out. I was five at the time, apparently. I know the songs on that album better than most albums out there. I don't think I've heard it in twenty years. It's definitely not a fun album, or a great one, but it says something really deep and wonderful about Raffi that he felt a need to make it when he did. We loved him in my family because he was the most famous Armenian we knew of.

I have fond memories of a car trip during which we got so into making up verses of "Down by the Bay" that my mother threatened to pull over if we didn't shut up. My dad made threats like that all the time but I think that was the craziest we'd ever driven my mom in the car. To be fair we were visiting relatives in the Bay Area so it made total sense to sing "Down by the Bay" as we were literally in view of a bay.
posted by town of cats at 3:00 PM on December 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Maybe I missed something -- in what way is he anti-internet?

I don't know if he's anti-Internet per se, but Bananaphone (a song about the simple pleasures of imagination) very pointedly includes the line "don't need computers or TV to have a real good time".
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:32 PM on December 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

in what way is he anti-internet?

People might call "So if you’re a 3-year-old and you have unrestricted access to screens, I shake my head because the light speed at which things happen in shiny tech counters the experience of real life for a 3-year-old who’s only had two summers. I’m all for the imprinting of the real world in slow time.” anti-internet. But I wouldn't.
posted by Obscure Reference at 3:54 PM on December 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

Wait, was Bill Watterson writing for children? (That's an honest question.)

I think there's a lot of ways to interpret "writing for children," and I feel like Watterson would could potentially come down on both sides of the issues depending on how you parse that phrase. But ultimately, despite the art and philosophy references, and despite Calvin's GRE vocab, he knew his strips were being published in the funny page and his anthologies were big sellers at elementary book fairs.

But he's fairly consistent about crafting Calvin in a way that included the inherit selfishness of childhood but also looking at the years without any wistful memorializing. As he said, “People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.”
posted by midmarch snowman at 4:07 PM on December 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

I never had any exposure to Raffi as a child, but Banaphone holds a special place in my heart after finding friends and bonding over it at an ale festival of all places - a drunken organiser (on his night off, drinking rather than serving) kept running up to the DJ booth and pulling rank to get it put on (like every half hour or something all night) and then the few of us who were on board would run around until we found each other and loudly and joyously sing along to it. Every single time.

Just for that gift to humankind - Bananaphone - Raffi has my eternal gratitude and respect.

🎵Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring... BANANAPHONE! (Doop doo de doopy doop!) 🎵
posted by Dysk at 4:15 PM on December 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

A most enjoyable article. My kids loved Raffi when they were young, but I always had a preference for Sharon, Lois and Bram. Interestingly, both entities are Canadian, something I didn't know about Raffi before now. Thank you, Great White North!
posted by lhauser at 4:47 PM on December 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Watterson has a daughter but she was born after C&H ended.
posted by Ber at 5:21 PM on December 22, 2015

Radio Raffi is actually a pretty genius album - the bit on time is amazing.
posted by GuyZero at 5:22 PM on December 22, 2015

I didn't hear Raffi until I had kids of my own (now 4 and 1 yrs), but what struck me, apart from the songs themselves, is that he has a very pretty voice. Noticeable especially on songs like the one the title of his post is taken from.
posted by statolith at 6:09 PM on December 22, 2015

I saw Raffi in concert as a kid when I was what - maybe four or five? It was at my local public library auditorium. I still remember it. I had Singable Songs and More Singable Songs as a kid, and they were the first albums I "owned."

So, later in life I get into playing bluegrass, and lo and behold, there's Arkansas Traveller as a pretty standard fiddle tune cropping up as standard repertoire. Well, I still think of it as "Peanut Butter Sandwich," because that's the first time I ever heard that melody, and Raffi's voice wants to stay in my head with those lyrics while I play it decades later.

I'm pretty sure The Corner Grocery Store was the very first record I owned. Now every time I see it in a thrift store (which is, like, always; he must have sold ten million copies of that thing in Canada) I check to see if my name is written on it. I mean, my old copy is probably in a landfill somewhere, but you never know.

I didn't have this one, but the neighbour kid across the street did. It didn't take too long for two kids for whom this album was roughly age-appropriate to listen to the title track and decide that "there were plums, plums [insert verb here] their bums..." would be an endlessly hilarious subsitution.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:07 PM on December 22, 2015

The Card Cheat: I haven't been a huge fan of what I've read of Heti's fiction, but I also liked this essay about her experience singing "Tomorrow" on a tv show named "Big Top Talent" that Southwestern Ontarians of a certain age may remember.

I share The Card Cheat's assessment of Heti's fiction, but that Big Top Talent piece is highly recommended.

Uh, context for the unacquainted:

"The masters for the show were destroyed some years ago." But there are extant VHS rips on youtube.

A US equivalent would be many a local Public Access TV talent program, that you vaguely remember like a fever dream, for which VHS rips bubble up every so often to confirm that it was a thing.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:22 PM on December 22, 2015

Raffi's sister, Ann Cavoukian, was the Information and Privacy Commissioner for the province of Ontario from 1997 to 2014. I'm sure they both have lots of opinions about the internet.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 7:22 PM on December 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

Also: Playtime's over: What is Raffi doing blasting away at the Prime Minister on Twitter?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:48 PM on December 22, 2015

As a so called Beluga Grad myself, I feel like I might be betraying Raffi by saying this…. When I saw Raffi in concert a couple of months ago, I couldn’t help but cringe when he busted out “Day-O” with his fake Jamaican accent. With such a large volume of material, perhaps he could’ve played something that didn’t reek of cultural appropriation/thinly-veiled racism. Still, I teared up when he sang “All I Really Need.”
posted by rozee at 8:10 PM on December 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Arkansas Traveller
Peanut Butter Sandwich

Both wrong. This song is clearly "I'm Bringing Home A Baby Bumblebee".
posted by Daily Alice at 8:26 PM on December 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

This is such a weird article. Lots of great writing, but sandwiched between her sexual fantasies?
Why include that, and the part of the interview where even Raffi shoots you down?
And how can you get through an entire interview and not even touch on his own sexuality?
posted by Theta States at 10:37 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

My folks didn't believe in children's music (I'm being charitable--could be, they just weren't into it), and so, as a younger kid, I just listened to the same stuff (oldies and classic-rock radio, mostly) that they did.

Over the years, I've mostly been happy about that--it gave me a nice cultural-literacy level of knowledge about pop/rock music, which otherwise mostly isn't my thing, and, when I got a little older, it helped inform my listening of sample-based hip-hop.

This article did a great job of making me consider what I might have missed out on.
posted by box at 12:36 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]