An Artist With Integrity 🎶

The children’s artist Raffi became one of the music industry’s greatest figures by standing by his principles.

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We don’t use the word “hero” very often in this newsletter, but we will make an exception for Raffi Cavoukian, the children’s singer who has long stood for integrity in a world where it is too easy to destroy your principles for an extra buck.

Yes, this is the road we’ve chosen to take Lesser Tedium today.

Raffi, one of the biggest names in kid’s music for decades, gave the world “Baby Beluga” and “Bananaphone,” and was a big enough artist that he could have sold out stadiums if he really wanted to. In fact, he was given the literal opportunity to do so, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, along with numerous other large venues.

But he felt that his target audience was kids, and therefore a massive venue with tens of thousands of people simply wasn’t doing justice to the audience he had hoped to reach with his music.

“It’s not even a concert hall, it doesn’t even have good acoustics. Come on, you know, everything about it would be a challenge,” he said last year in a podcast for the website Fatherly. “Why would I throw myself into that?”

Ultimately, he felt that trying to engage with an audience that’s so young, especially on giant screens designed to support nosebleed seats, would go against the spirit of the music he was making.

“To me, my music for children and families has always been about the music, about the feelings, the qualities in the songs that play in the minds and hearts of the very young,” he added.

It wasn’t the only time his integrity led him in a direction that went against common music-industry logic. In 1991, he signed a new contract with a no-longbox rule for his releases, at a time when artists were pressured to embrace the bulky format as a way to ensure that record stores would not have to replace their vinyl record racks.

“I simply believe that the excessive packaging of cassettes and CDs can no longer be tolerated in a global environmental crisis,” he stated.

At the time, he was a big enough star that his stance meant something to the industry—and it proved to be one of the first major blows against the controversial practice, leading to its phaseout a year later.

He very rarely gets it wrong, but he shows a strong willingness to learn.

Like I said, Raffi is a hero.

» Wanna learn more? Read more on the history of children’s radio, including Raffi’s role, in 2021’s “Tuned Out,” and the story of how Raffi stepped in to stop the longbox in 2018’s “Ban the Box.”