Greg Rollett of Gen-Y Rock Stars and Label 2.0 chats with MobBase’s CFO and Director of Business Development, Alan Khalfin, about how you can create your own iPhone app, engage the modern music fan, and build excitement around your iPhone app to drive awareness and installs.
Tag Archive for 'interview'
Can you ride your bike with no handlebars? Most likely, the image has crossed your mind lately if you listen to the radio. Radio stations all over the nation are getting flooded with requests for the single “Handlebars” by the Flobots. I gotta say… the song is catchy, it grows on you. Although, the Flobots are SO much more than the song “Handlebars.” Last night I attended the Flobots, People Under the Stairs and Busdriver concert at the infamous 9:30 Club in Washington, DC. Last week I had the pleasure of chatting on the phone with Flobot #5 who is one of the lead MC’s of the group. After the interview and seeing these guys on stage I realized they’re out for so much more than having a hit single, selling albums and moving t-shirts. These guys (& girl) are out trying to engage with young minds and encourage people to go out and make a change. The Flobots are extremely passionate about their message. I usually hate musicians who go on stage and “preach” but this was entertaining and motivating. They got the crowd involved with their music & their message. Absolutely one of the most exciting live concerts I’ve ever seen. Also, their encore was too cool. The viola player came out and sang “Heartbreaker” by Pat Benatar. She was fantastic… rocking out all over the stage. It was like the cute, geeky, orchestra dork busted out of her shell and became a hot female rock star in flip flops. At the end of the song the MC’s came out and freestyled while the band played the “Heartbreaker” melody in a super amped up rock style in the background. It made for a great ending to a great show. The Flobots are 2 MC’s, a viola player, drummer, bassist and guitarist. They have a ton of energy and I feel like we’ll be hearing a lot more of them in the future. Honestly, it’s refreshing knowing that there are still musicians out there who don’t focus on the glitz and glamor of being a rock star. The interview with Jamie (Flobot 5) proves true…
Flobot #5 Phone Interview: 7.30.08
LG: MixMatchMusic really digs the Flobots’ mixed style of genres. How did your sound piece together? Was it an idea that you searched after to create?
F5: “I think it came together out of a general openness on the part of everybody in the band to stretch themselves a little bit genre wise. The other MC and I were performing with Mackenzie the viola player… so at first it was just the 3 of us with some DJs. Then Andy suggested hey, why don’t you combined this into a live band? I think if you had a cool band behind you it would work. So we tried it for one show and the audience responded and we enjoyed it and then it became what you see today.”
LG: What was the Flobots’ first live performance like and where was it?
F5: “it was a Rock the Vote sponsored show in Denver. We were also involved in this effort called voter cruise. We had founded this effort to do youth voter engagement through music. So we had been getting good responses, the 3 of us with DJs. Having the live band behind us… with people moving around a lot more… it just felt more full. I think just for our particular combination of people it worked the best.”
LG: What online platform helped the Flobots promote themselves the most?
F5: “We have our own site… FightWithTools.org specifically for our street team. Basically what we did… a lot of people find our music powerful and leave our show all charged up with no where to go. So we created a non-profit organization that has its own infrastructure set up to provide a place for fans to go. It’s FightWithTools.org. It’s a way for music fans of all sorts can connect with each other and start making a change in the community, beginning with voter registration and moving on to other things next year. We’re really excited. We hope it can be a model for how music can be harnessed for social change.”
LG: Is there a certain sound or instrument that the Flobots would like to add to their band in the future?
F5: “You know… a 6 person band is a lot of people and a lot of dynamics. I don’t think we’re looking to add anything. I think we’re excited to write new songs ourselves, stretch our instruments… stretch our sound in new directions. There’s a whole lot more that we can do and we’re really excited to do it.”
LG: What overall message would the Flobots like to give out through their music?
F5: “I think it’s several things. One, that music is powerful. I don’t know if people are recognizing how powerful music is. If you look at any social movement in the United States, music has been a big part of it. Look at the Civil Rights movement. People were singing songs as they were being threatened with beatings and threatened with arrests. As they were in jail they kept themselves energized by singing. They were able to stand up to folks and claim the moral high ground by singing. There’s a lot of history there… the music being powerful. We wanna try and reclaim that and do it in a way that’s relevant for 2008.”
LG: How do you feel about what’s happening in the music industry (ie big labels crumbling, CD sales dropping, everything happening online, indie artists promoting themselves online, etc)?
F5: “I’m actually pretty outside the loop with the music business. I’m not honestly affected by it or a part of it. Personally…. for me, the most important thing as an artist, is for people to hear something I’ve created. That’s the most gratifying thing. Obviously it is good to make a living off of it as well. My feeling has always been when you’re really small you want people to hear your music. So I don’t care if people burn the CD while I’m small cause I want them to hear it. When you get big enough… you get to the point where you’d kinda be an asshole if you got too upset about it because you’re doing what you love. You’re living off of it. In the middle… there’s an artist that really makes a lot, there’s a sense of support any way you can. Truth is … people make their money off of live shows. I think the way that it is changing… it’s inevitable. People that understand that and adapt to it will be the ones that come out on top. We don’t focus all of our energy on loss of CD sales. We focus our energy on our live show and word of mouth. We get people excited enough that they want to support us however we can. I think that’s the way to succeed.”
To conclude, I was pleasantly surprised by The Flobots in concert. They’re touring the country right now. I strongly suggest you go see their show if they’re coming to your town. The shows have been selling out everywhere so get your tix quick! Check out their tour schedule.
See More Pictures
Check Out “Fight With Tools” (my personal favorites are “Rise” and “Stand Up”)
Get Involved
This week we have posted two parts of our exclusive interview with Immortal Technique. In these interviews Tech has discussed his method for writing music, the effort it takes to self-produce an album, his views on global politics and current events, and insight into the creation of his upcoming album, The 3rd World. In this final segment, Tech talks about music revenue, the remix culture and the upcoming Presidential election.
AC: Going off of that in terms of revenue and economy, there has been a lot of talk of internet piracy hurting the income of musicians. In “Obnoxious,” you advocate people to “burn it off the fucking internet and bump it outside,” so you obviously don’t feel that piracy is hurting you. What do you think the difference is between the reality of what musicians make from song and album sales on iTunes, and what the record industry wants consumers to believe they make in order to discourage music piracy?
IT: I definitely would like people to purchase The 3rd World in stores and purchase it online, but I think it was more of a way for me to express my frustration with the music industry. I can’t believe they have the audacity to call anybody else a thief. As much money as they steal from artists, as much as they don’t have a health care program for any of their artists, and I look at stuff like that and I’m disgusted. They go to these conferences and tell kids, “How can you steal a record?” I’m like really?
AC: They’re stealing from their own artists.
IT: How come you steal from your own artists? How come you’re selling the masters of your own stuff to be bootlegged in order to generate a buzz in the hood. You’re doing it to yourself and then you want to blame other people? You Godless piece of shit. How dare you try to take the moral high ground with the rest of the society by claiming that someone else is a thief? Really? What about all the Black artists who R&B and Soul were based on, whose masters were bought up in a fucking fixed contract? How about all the people who never got the money that they deserved because someone else slapped their name on a fucking recording, who didn’t have anything to actually do with the process of making this music, or didn’t participate in any of the song writing? How about all the publishing that you owe people? That’s tantamount to reparations that you owe the Latino and African-American communities. So before they talk about stealing money, they should realize that when you point the finger at somebody, there’s three fingers pointing right back at you.
Besides all that, I think that even though it‘s a great thing to be able to download music, there’s bad things to it too. Like when you don’t want a record to leak yet and then it does. So it’s not like I think downloading is great all the time. I definitely don’t want my record to be leaked before it’s ready to be leaked, cause it might not be the correct version of the song, or I might have wanted to change something to complete my artistic vision. But I think also that what needs to be said is that it’s not downloading that’s killing the music. It’s the fact that a whole bunch of people who don’t know shit about music are in charge of a music department. Like I’m glad that you went to the Wharton Business School, I’m glad that you know how to market a record, but that doesn’t mean you know shit about music. Unfortunately, that’s the problem with Hip-Hop, that’s the problem with our culture. We have a whole bunch of people who have no connection to our culture dictating everything for us. We’ve given a valid opinion to people who are not connected to us, over us.
AC: In the musical aspects of your recordings, how much control do you feel it’s necessary to have? Would you be in support of remix work as long as it didn’t distort your artistic message?
IT: I don’t know, remix work is touchy. I understand people sampling a track or something, but being able to take all of your work and re-do it and release the project and not give you a cut off anything, that’s different. You want to take a song and burn it off the internet, that’s fine. But if you’re burning my music off the internet and then selling it, that’s a whole different type of fraud. That’s not just regular fraud, that’s a violation. That’s some shit that’s going to get your IP address tracked down and beat the fuck up. If you follow my tour with a fucking camera and then try to release a DVD of all my shows, and you’re trying to charge people for it, you know what, I’m not even going to let the law handle you, I’m going to handle you motherfucker.
And I think that this is the point that I’m trying to make…it’s acceptable for people who can’t afford your music or can’t find it in the record stores, which was the issue with Revolutionary Vol. 2 to do that, but I always felt like it didn’t affect me as much because the people that really believed in my work and really believed in my music, they were the same people that were willing to go to the record store after they heard it and try to find the album, or they downloaded it and said, “You know what, I really like this so I’m going to support it.”
AC: Politically and philosophically, you’re the most in depth rapper when it comes to discussing important issues. But a lot of them, racism, poverty, crime, terrorism, religion, breakdown in the educational system, corruption within the political system, these are all tied together, so it becomes like a ball of string. Where do you start unraveling?
IT: I think sometimes I try to take a historical approach more than anything else. Try to talk about how racism came about, talk about the history of terrorism and the history of our involvement in a country, talk about the history of a war and our dealings with specific countries. Then we create a chronological order to follow wherein we take note of specific time periods and the progression of the way in which we became enslaved or became free, or the way we advanced ourselves so we can break them down into subsections. That way we can say, “Ok, this is the origination of this, these are the contributing factors of what made this happen, this is how this plays to this.” Then you start with the origin in history of all of these things because they all do have an origin in history.
Slavery has been around since the Hammurabi period in Mesopotamia, so I think we can look into the origin of lots of things. In terms of whether it’s Communism or Socialism, I mean, it doesn’t start with Karl Marx. I’m sorry to disappoint the adamant White left that sees him as a god. He’s not the father of Communism, he just decided to write down some ideas that were prevalent in all societies going back thousands of years. African and indigenous peoples had a sense of collectivism before Europe even had a structured civilization. That’s not to talk down to Europeans or anything, but just to make the point that this has been going on and the history of our people is older than we can imagine it being. Even the kingdom of Egypt is 4, 5,000 years old, and that doesn’t even begin to describe the kingdoms that came from the Nubians that gave rise to the Egyptians, even though Egyptians are touchy about that subject. But it’s true. These are things that we need to acknowledge, we need to embrace so we can understand our civilization better rather than just falling into the category we always do of being hateful of every civilization besides our own. We need to learn the lessons from history or we’re going to be doomed to repeat them again.
AC: On that note Tech, I have one more question for you if you have time.
IT: Sure.
AC: Basically, our current Administration in this country is a joke. They’ve infringed on our civil rights, deleted emails, judicial firings, and they’ve gotten us into wars we shouldn’t be in. On “Freedom of Speech,” you say, “I love the place that I live, but I hate the people in charge.” We have an election coming up. Do you see any real potential for change in either of these candidates or does it look like more of the same to you?
IT: I think it will be more of the different. It’ll be different things. Obviously we’ve made trillions of dollars of investments in Iraq, and as much as I’d like to believe Barack Obama, who by the way I did vote for, because I vote in every election. Not because I necessarily believe Democracy can’t be circumvented, but more so because when presumptuous motherfuckers come up to me and be like, “Did you vote dude?” and I’ll be like, “well actually I did and it didn’t make a motherfucking difference so get the fuck out of my face and organize something different. Stop thinking that the only way that we can appreciate the democratic rights that we fought for are by voting 25 times every century.” I think that democracy is the institution we set up, not just for voting, and I think that Barack Obama, if he’s elected, will be able to implement more social programs for the benefit of the average American than John McCain. The war will not end. Barack Obama talks about change. You know what’s going to happen? The war’s not going to end, the war’s just going to change. It’s going to be a different war. America tried having a war that was justified by nonsense, a war that was narrated by an idiot. Now they’re going to have a war that is justified and narrated by an incredibly articulate and incredibly intelligent man, if Barack Obama is the one that’s elected. But he’ll have an excuse for it, and for everything, and just from his speech at AIPAC, I don’t think that America’s position on the Israeli-Palestine conflict is going to change. I really don’t think that we’re just going to up and leave Iraq, like I said, the war is just going to change.
AC: And again, that’s assuming we’re intelligent enough to put Obama in when this is a country that for 8 years went with Bush.
IT: Right. He might not even win. We have to realize that the places he beat Hillary Clinton were because people didn’t want Hillary Clinton to win because of the Rush Limbaugh factor, where people were saying, “you know what? We need to smear Obama, we need to make sure he doesn’t come out of this looking rosy, so I want Hillary Clinton to be voted for.”
AC: Right. Well Tech, I won’t take up anymore of your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk today.
IT: No doubt. And remember, June 24th, you’ve got The 3rd World, Immortal Technique and DJ Green Lantern, will be on sale in every store, be on myspace.com/immortaltechnique, and of course you can preview the record on viperrecords.com.
So there you have it folks, Immortal Technique’s exclusive interview for Evolving Music. Start getting excited for The 3rd World to drop as the tracks I’ve heard off it are phenomenal. They continue the trend of excellent music supported and punctuated by vicious and powerful lyrics and masterful delivery. Evolving Music and MixMatchMusic would like to thank Immortal Technique for his time in doing this interview, as well as Dennis Paredes, Sam Donado, Public Wizard and Viper Records for helping to make it possible.
