Opinion: If ‘Baby Shark’ represents the worst of children’s music, this is the genre’s best
LA TimesIt was date night for me and my husband, the first since our daughter was born. In stark contrast to Raffi’s catalog, much modern kids’ music has been criticized as “nauseating,” “terrible” and “enough to drive any loving parent to complete insanity.” It’s a problem for children as well as parents, especially considering the importance of music in early life. Still, most popular children’s songs today continue to owe a debt to “Baby Shark” — the “ trash heap ” that cracked the Billboard Top 40 while amassing millions of streams a week in the run-up to the 2016 election. Inspired by artists such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, he tried for years to make it as a folk singer, though according to his autobiography, he “hated singing to inebriated audiences who couldn’t care less if was there or not.” In the mid-1970s, Raffi was invited to play music for children at the school where his mother-in-law worked. He is not only a great kids’ artist but also, as one critic put it, “a great modern folk singer who just happens to sing children’s songs.” For all its tranquility, Raffi’s music was born in the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, a time with parallels to our own.
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Baby Shark beats Despacito to become most viewed YouTube video ever
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