Author: Cait

Student organizations that create their own material (videos, choreography, digital content,) perform it, and collect a wide fan base almost entirely own their own are sparse and a precious gem when discovered. It may be due to my relative newness on campus or general disconnect, but in the past month I’ve just discovered the high energy percussion group GROOVE. You may have heard of them as well, for they’ve been performing daily on the Diag in promotion for their recent and final performance of the year, Canarchy.

On a spur of the moment decision to attend with a friend on a Saturday night, I too strode into the Michigan theater and picked up a playbill from one of the parents of a GROOVE member, functioning as an usher. The moment I realized that this was so much cooler, respected, and worthy of my excitement came when the projector began playing a self-written, directed, edited and produced video on the screen to which the audience began to scream, hoot, clap, and cheer for. I turned in my seat to survey the audience and what I saw surprised me, the house was packed, floor and balcony.

This attendance, the amount of energy and excitement, the amount of support from students, parents, and apparent out-of-towners was justified in a two-part set in which digital shorts, live performances with collaborations from several dance groups, and audience-interaction pieces set the show on fire. The transitions between songs were seamless with an equally applauded jam-band filling with head-bob worthy improvisation.

Songs exploded in lasers, lights, STOMP-like trash can percussion, costumes, hilarious skits,  scaffolding climbing drummers, and of course smoke machines. Canarchy was exactly how GROOVE describes themselves: high-energy. The crowd screamed to the performers on stage with the same hysteric excitement of fans in the Big House. Gasps and hoots broke out when the performers crescendoed together to a roar or the lights surged to reveal flawless coordination or a flip to a set of black lights.

The group maintains a supportive alumni base that returns to Ann Arbor for shows, a dedicated group of parents that sell merchandise, and enough fans and friends to sell out the Michigan Theater. If this amount of backing isn’t enough proof of the phenomenal group, then one must simply read over the setlist as distributed in the playbill. Nearly every piece presented was arranged, selected, and performed by the student drummers exclusively. Not only must these percussionists perform with finesse and coordination on their instruments, they danced, acted, memorized lines, but they wrote the music themselves.

The final song performed included a pyramidal mountain of trash cans that were thrashed upon with passion. Every member of GROOVE was on stage, drumming with passion, sweat, and a fierce smile. The crowd screamed and clapped and gazed in awe of the lights, the smoke, the all-in-full-body sticking. The performers were entirely in sync with one another, listening to one another, feeling the rhythms, the pauses, the breaks. They beat their props in a frenzy and the song ended with a unified, coordinated boom on their instruments. The drummers raised their sticks over their heads in an “X” and grunted in unison. The stage lights were a fiery orange and the performers glistened with the pride of quite literally “leaving it all on the stage.”

What is incredible, what is laudable, what made my heart pound with excitement in the Michigan Theater Saturday night was the immediate jump to their feet the audience made in a standing ovation for GROOVE. We screamed, hollered, whistled, clapped, and stomped for these kids who had an outstanding show.

Whether you have heard of GROOVE or not, I cannot endorse them enough. The amount of musicianship, performance, and musical integrity executed in this group is exquisite. It was beautiful noise that flowed through, proving endless rehearsal. Canarchy blew me back in my folding seat and I cannot wait to be the first in line to buy a ticket to their next show.

 

My professor said something along the lines of:

We’re taught that love, at least “real love” is unconditional. If you really love someone, no matter how low they or you get, you are supposed to love them. We’re also taught that within that “unconditional love” is a clause that suggests when we really love them, we love them all of the time and there are never moments in which we do not love them. And that is simply just not true. Actually, that’s impossible.

I didn’t think much into this little lecture hall aphorism beyond nodding my head and thinking, “yeah people I love really piss me off.” The realization and perhaps the real implication of that lesson from my professor came this week.

Sometimes you fight with your family and sometimes you fight with your friends. Sometimes it’s you throwing a (in retrospect not-so) witty retort at your sister up the stairs only to receive an ample glare from your mother. Other times, it’s about something that matters.

You can swear they broke your trust. You can swear “that’s not what a real friend does.” You can swear “This is the last straw.” You can swear “We’re not talking again.” You can swear up and down and cross your heart and point your finger above your head and raise your palm flat before you. You can pound your fist on your desk when you tell your other friends and you can cry or you can be a stone-cold rock.

It is in these moments that my professor’s theory rang true. In those moments of fierce resentment and your roommate pretending not to notice the blood vessel demanding to pop through the skin on your forehead that you do not love that other person. And the thing is, that’s O.K.

The more important and implicit meaning (in my opinion) of my professor’s point–and maybe this is what those people who claim we always really actively love were getting at.

Those punctuated spans of loving are occasionally and abruptly ended with a misplaced period, a misplaced word, a misplaced action in the heat of the moment. But by loving the person at all in the first place, you open the door for the possibility of that moment being punctuated with a comma or a semicolon. Love allows you to finish your thought with the possibility of restarting it again.

Even in the times you stop loving for a brief moment, or three days, or a couple weeks, the cursor keeps blinking. You have time to finish your thought, to start a new thought, to remember what you forgot your train of thought was. You get to fall in love again.

We don’t love everyone all the time or even ever. But we are lucky enough to fall in love with our friends and family. Occasionally we fall out of love with our friends and family. But love means being able to talk, being able to grant space and be granted space. Most importantly, love means being able to forgive and be forgiven.

Unconditional love is not real. We fall in love. We fall out of love. But the funny nature of love is, it plants a comma in our hearts, allowing us to fall in love again. Love is not a continuous stream of doting and fairytale friendship. Love, thank goodness, isn’t a run-on sentence. Love is often underlined in green. Love is written in fragments with awkward punctuation interrupting a thought that was interrupted by something that got in your way. Love is full of dashes and semicolons and commas. Love is a fragmented and claused and a broken up language with half-realized thoughts ended unexpectedly.

But the important thing is that you can always pick up your sentence where it left off.

The important thing is that you can still read.

 

Love you, G.

 

**The album successfully went live and is available in its entirety on iTunes and Spotify.

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We stare down what looks like a tunnel void of anything but an eery bluish light. The camera tightens in and what is revealed to us isn’t a dark deserted road, or orbs of light, we’re looking at something a little more frightening: a single person with his face in the palm of his hand sitting on a living room couch. The music video is set up in a ghostly glow with us encircling and frequently squared , face-to-face with Earl Sweatshirt. Earl is talking to us, one-on-one. He’s imploring us to hear him out. We follow him as he staggers, one hand graced with a lit blunt and the other tracing a guiding wall. The video for Grief by Earl Sweatshirt was dropped on March 17th and has already racked up over half a million views. Additionally, the album art as well as the single were dropped (reportedly too early) to iTunes on the 17th available for pre-order. The point of this post? The album is expected tomorrow March 23rd. I implore you: buy. the. album.

Earl is a talented, unparalleled, and extremely young rapper than I am in awe of every single time I turn on Chum and now when I turn on Grief. The young rapper was discovered by rapper/producer/designer Tyler, the Creator as early as 2009 (which would put him at a mere 15 years-old at the time) and immediately turned on to Odd Future’s unreleased mixtape. Earl’s beats are enough to make you swallow–hard. They pump your heart for you with their deep thuds and swirling mids. Grief in particular forces me to close my eyes every time I press play. The second the song begins the true sound of his mix cannot be described in a word any better than Grief. The sound is somber, it’s brooding, its brow-furrowing. You want to take up the same posture as Earl when you see the way he’s doubled over on what could be his mother’s couch. His genius is only further by his lyrics:

We had females come in every hour on the dot
And the shit sound like a gavel when it knock
Focus on my chatter, ain’t as frantic as my thoughts
Lately I’ve been panicking a lot
Feeling like I’m stranded in a mob
Scrambling for Xanax out the canister to pop
Never getting out of hand, steady handling my job
Time damaging my ties

The young rapper, now 21, is about to drop his second LP in a few hours. The artwork is as dark and brooding as the music video: a black plane lit only by white ghostly light in the distance. The track list is reported to include:

1. Huey
2. Mantra
3. Faucet
4. Grief
5. Off Top
6. Grown Ups (ft. Dash)
7. AM // Radio (ft. Wiki)
8. Inside
9. Dna (ft. Na’kel)
10. Wool (ft. Vince Staples)

If you’re about truthful lyrics, about a young man fighting demons with art, about truth and perfectly-under-hyped music, I cannot point you towards Earl Sweatshirt enough. Whether you like rap or not, our peer is turning out truly astonishing beats and lyrics. Tyler was right to take him under his wing. SONY is right to have signed him. He is a poet, tortured like any other and more than deserving of kudos.

Language evolved as a tool. Like any tool, be it a hammer, a fork, or a pair of hands, language was a set of pieces that we assembled to serve us. Grunts and hand gestures became patterns and rhythms. These patterns became words and phrases like screws and bolts and washers that held together end products that we wished to give or portray to someone. The purpose of a tool is to make jobs and challenges we are often obligated to complete easier or simply possible to complete. However, it has become apparent in recent years that we have allowed our tools to run away from us, to grow lives of their own. Our words grow personalities or reputations and sometimes these are ugly personalities or reputations paired with sneering faces. We turn away from these words when we realize we’ve made monsters. We let our tools control us and we cringe at the sight of them. What I’m talking about are words that raise goosebumps and receive ample squabbling in academic arenas: words like homeless, gay, feminist, addict, and limitless others. What I’m suggesting is that we reign back in these tools, that we don’t turn away and abandon our creations. I propose that we don’t use discursive language and euphemize truth.

In the name of being politically correct, we are often led away (or turn away ourselves) from the truth that we invented our words to represent. We cringe at words that reveal a downfall in our society. We ignore “homeless” and instead replace it with “experiencing homelessness,” we replace “poor” with “experiencing economic difficulty,” we replace “addict” with “struggling with substance abuse.” What we achieve while striving for empathy and avoiding offense is telling a big, fat lie. When we steer from these words, we euphemize, we shallow, we disenfranchise the adversity people face. We are telling a lie when we ignore what someone without a home, without dinner, without a job is truly going through. We use discursive language to point at something without acknowledging the full implications of its context. Do we know why it stings to call a loved one an “addict” or our previous neighbor “homeless?” My argument is that because we know that when we watch loved ones–or simply other human beings–suffer, we feel pain too, we suffer with them and turn away from our language. We turn away from our coping tool. We turn away from the means by which we communicate the truth and the breadth of our lives.

So what is the solution? Perhaps there isn’t a plausible solution, but what I propose is that instead of talking around, talking in circles and code and euphemisms about the shadows lurking behind our happy fronts, we cast out the shadows. Why change the tool when the tool was meant to cut down the problem? Let us eliminate the reason we have to use these harsh words. Let’s work on eliminating homelessness, supporting those with an addiction, understanding and hearing out our feminist friends. Let’s get rid of the reason we have to use these pin-prick words. Let us use the tool to kill the predator.

The purpose of a tool is to make jobs and challenges we are often obligated to complete easier or simply possible to complete. With this in mind, I vow to use language as a tool to serve me in the job I am obligated to complete as a human being: love and care for other human beings. I vow to use my language for what it was invented for, to explain the circumstances that surround me–be them good or bad–and recognize the volume of darkness that lives with us. I vow to use my words to spread awareness, kindness, and support for those that have fallen victim to the words we turn away from.

I refuse, I refuse, to let my tools turn to demons and rule over me. I vow to reclaim my words, take responsibility for them and take responsibility for the world I live in.

 

 

 

 

 

With the international success of Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ single Uptown Funk (for valid and obvious reasons–an incredible beat, catchy verses, hooks and a chorus) I was astonished that this genre was being praised as a newfound form of pop; a form of pop that rises far above our never-ending stream of blaseé singles. Good news kids: this genre has been around for more than half a century and was incredibly popular for its time. Groups like Funkadelic/Parliament pushed the boundaries of funk and music itself. Groovy yelps, general  noise, and colloquial dialogue superimposed over beats (think Uptown Funk but better) that make you bob your head relentlessly emanate from the only way to listen to this genre–vinyl.

My point? I love that the masses are eating up Uptown Funk, but what I’m asking of you is, while you appreciate Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars for their creativity and originality, remember that groups like Funkadelic and men like George Clinton (lol) then deserve excessive praise. Their outlandishness and fearlessness drove a culture that invented a form of dance, assisted disco, and brought a race together once again over their art form.

 

To prove my point, here are a few songs that will doubtlessly induce a copious amount of neck movements, shimmying, and a smile you can’t conceal as you strut across the Diag. Also, play some of these at a party and your friends will think you’re not only “super cool” but eclectic and hopefully a li’l jazzy too.

1. Dr. Funkenstein – Parliament
2. Funkentelechy – Parliament
3. Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off This Sucker) – Parliament
4. It’s Alright – Graham Central Station
5. So Goes The Story – Eddie Hazel
6. In The Stone – Earth Wind & Fire