MONDOmagazine

By Todd Aalgaard
Photos by Tavishe Coulson

Coming down off the high of Live Earth and a North American tour with She Wants Revenge, Universal recording artist Kenna and I took fifteen to talk about life, music, passion, the challenge of facing down the 21st century, and our culture’s deficit of intensity.

Well, after we geeked out for a minute about Halo 3. The picture of chill, he pointed to the XBox 360 resting on the couch.

Kenna: My friends from all over the world — literally all over the world — are on Halo 3. All our friends are hanging out, killing each other.

MONDO: Well, you might as well do it from the road.

K: And we were in Detroit yesterday.

MONDO: Nice, how did that gig go?

K: It was dope — Detroit people are amazing. You know what it is? Justin Warfield from She Wants Revenge said it from stage. He said that you don’t want to step out of line, but if you do a great show, they’re with you. You don’t want to step out of line, though, let me tell you.

MONDO: So is this your first time playing in Toronto, or have you played here before?

K: No, I’ve played here before. I came here with Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode. I played Koolhaus a long time ago, and then I think I came here one other time and I can’t remember where we played. It’s been a few years. Toronto, specifically, is a very musical and creative place. I would say they’re more like a New York crowd but maybe a little more varied in their interests. They’re very open, a very kind of interestingly European openness to music and to art as a whole.

MONDO: Yeah, there’s a real eclecticism around here.

K: Very eclectic, yeah.

MONDO: And I would imagine that you really speak to that crowd a lot, because that’s what I noticed when I was listening to you — and a lot of people have apparently noticed this as well — that there’s a real eclectic sound. What influenced that?

K: You know what? It’s the journey of music that interested me in the very beginning. The first record that I listened to was [U2’s] The Joshua Tree, the first full album that I listened to, and I think, as an artist, you’re always influenced by the first thing you listened to. For me it was this expansive, cinematic, you know, passionate, intense album that spoke of literally the journey — just the journey itself. It was this album of journeys: they came to America, they were pursuing the knowledge of a new place, and at the same time they were in search of themselves and stepping out of, you know, their history of sounds and things they were creating before and trying to be something new. It’s so indicative of how I feel all music should be and that’s what moves my music, and so that’s how I started; and then the DNA of who I am, and the history of my life, and the inheritance that I have as being Ethiopian, as well as being from the suburbs, as well as living in inner-city Cincinnati and having experience with all different types of people — all my life fuels the premise of everything that I write — the beats versus the rock versus the… it’s just a travelled mentality, you know?

MONDO: The lyrics, “All this pressure is building up/And there’s a chance it’s gonna explode/I can’t promise you when or where/(but) I can tell you it’ll happen for sure” really jumped out at me. What were you trying to express that way?

K: Oh man, you know, my albums, my songs usually have fifteen meanings, and what I try very hard to do is write loosely so they can breathe, all their meanings can breathe. For me that had significant personal reference but at the same time it was a very worldly statement, lyric, because I felt like, you know, we try not to acknowledge what’s happening in front of us. Maybe we’re de-sensitized, maybe it’s just happening so much that we just can’t take it on — call it post traumatic stress disorder of life, you know? But we have this trauma that keeps hitting us and so we just literally numb ourselves to it, and I felt like, “It’s cool, you can pretend it’s not happening, but it is….” For me, at the end of the album — the song “Wide Awake” — is like me trying to wake myself up. You know when someone’s pushing you, when you’re trying to wake up, someone’s like, “Wake up, wake up, we gotta go,” and you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m awake, I’m awake,” but you’re really not?

MONDO: …You’re just rolling back over.

K: That’s where I am at the end of this album, where I’m trying to wake up — I really am. I’m not trying to sleep through this, I want to sleep because it’s easier. But I’m trying to wake up.

MONDO: I guess if anybody — and like you said, there’s fifteen different meanings that you could imbue your music with — but if I were sitting down to listen to your album for the first time and you wanted me to take one thing away from what you’ve got to say, what would that be?

K: I couldn’t do one thing.

MONDO: Good answer.

K: I couldn’t — it’s not possible. I think it’s to be open, be willing, and be unabashed. I think those are the three things. You have to be open to hear this music and you have to be open to accept the things that are around you. Be willing to take it on because it’s going to be yours, and be unabashed in your response to it, because there’s going to be a lot of ridicule for you being strong about something. Be strong about something. Because without everyone being strong and being focused on things that are important, we end up being de-sensitized like I said earlier. We just end up being empty and feeling so lonely, when in actuality there are so many people who feel the same way. You know? I would say: be open, be willing, and be unabashed.

MONDO: And that’s a really valuable message to impart right now, because, like you said, things could turn in any direction at this point in history. But I think the one thing that none of us can afford is to not be passionate. Would you agree with that?

K: Yeah. What happened to intensity? What happened to being invested? What happened to that? There’s so many people now that I watch listening to things and they’re doing it with one ear, but their other ear’s someplace else. That’s because artists, number one, aren’t doing anything that matters. I mean, I’m up on stage and I do everything I possibly can. I go to the nth power and I come back and some people think that it’s disingenuous or that it’s weird, but I don’t spend a minute of my life not being genuine and not being as electric as I possibly can. And it doesn’t mean that they have to fall in love with my music or buy my CD — I could care less about that. I just want them to walk away, going, “I gotta do or be different, or better, because I felt something.” I’m here to give everything I have. The secret to life is giving, anyway.

You can check you Kenna’s website here.

Darkwave for your parents.

Interviewed by Todd Aalgaard
Photos by Tavishe Coulson

Two missed streetcars and a last-minute cab ride from hell left me loitering in front of the Opera House, drawing a complete blank.

The MuchMusic-happy use of the word “darkwave” left me loaded with assumptions about She Wants Revenge. I expected to be dredging up question after question in a desperate attempt to keep these aloof darkwavers on my level. Preconceptions of goth-y indifference and gloomy reticence had me trawling my brain for something — anything — interesting to ask. I had, after all, listened to SWR for the first time about four nights earlier.

Though by talking to Adam 12 I learned that not only are these guys more club-land than casket, but that you can ask three or four really, really simple questions and an interview will damned near write itself.

MONDO: This is your second time coming through Toronto, right?

Adam 12: That was two thousand and… one? Two? I was working with a girl named Esthero. I met her in Los Angeles and we became friends and then she invited me to come here to finish our songs that we had started in Los Angeles and, uh, I came and lived with her for about two and a half months.

MONDO: Was this while She Wants Revenge was coming together?

A12: Way before. I’d say, like, almost two years before me and Justin hooked up.

MONDO: So how did this whole thing take off?

A12: We have known each other since we were kids, although we never really kicked it, we weren’t really friends, we just knew the same people. … So I’d seen him out at clubs and stuff where I was spinning and I became a producer, and we just kept hearing about, like, what each other was doing and our one mutual friend kept on trying to hook us up but the timing was always bad. We finally hooked up through that mutual friend who kind of told us one day when she knew we were both free, she said, “You guys need to go and hook up right now and go work.” So we did.

We both come from hip-hop backgrounds, so we thought what better way to get started than to go into the studio and make hip-hop beats? … After about four of five months of making hip-hop beats together — like I said, we come from hip-hop backgrounds, and around that time it was kind of, like, hip-hop to us just was not the same. We come from maybe the early 90’s…

MONDO: … sort of the Run DMC scene?

A12: Run DMC, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, and then like Tribe and Jungle Brothers… we consider ourselves coming from the “golden age” of what we consider hip-hop. When we were making beats, we were finding that it wasn’t really about being creative as far as the beats were concerned, it was more, like, what else is out there? We didn’t want do what everyone else was doing. As far as people wanting to buy beats, the marketplace at that time for hip-hop was like, you know, “This song is a hit and this song is a hit, so give us a beat that sounds like that,” instead of where hip-hop comes from and that is just being creative, doing whatever you want to do.

So we were feeling really frustrated with the way hip-hop was going and, at the same time, I had met Kenna who’s on tour with us through Esthero. … So I did a beat for Kenna and I played it for him over the phone and he freaked out. He was, like, “Dude, you have to e-mail that to me as soon as possible.” And as I was finishing it up, Justin came over to work on some hip-hop and whatever and he heard it, and he said, “Dude, what is that?” I said, “This beat I made for Kenna.” He was, like, “hold him off for a couple days — don’t send it yet, let me take it home and let me try and write with it for a bit. Maybe play bass or guitar.” So he took it home and he brought it back and that would be our first song. It was indirectly thanks to Kenna that we came up with that first song and we were like, “Wow, there’s something there….” The feelings we were getting from this first song really were kind of reminding us about how we felt about a lot of the music that we grew up with — Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Smiths. … We just kept on going through it and going, “Wow, now we’ve got two songs that make us feel that way. Let’s do another one, let’s experiment, let’s research what keyboards and equipment they used when they made those albums that we loved so much, and let’s go buy that gear.”

We have a friend in Los Angeles that owned a shop that basically sells all that vintage shit so we asked. We were like, “What did they use on that?” And he said, “I’ve got a couple of these things in the back; I don’t normally like to tell people about them, but you’re my friends so I’m going to hook you up.” So we’ve got like a couple of secret things in there that people don’t really know about, that come from like the late ’70s/early ’80s. We just got into, like, that part of it, finding really cool vintage keyboards and letting the sound of those keyboards and drum machines kind of dictate where each song would go, and we were just, like, having a ball. Sooner or later we had eight or nine songs and we were like, “We have something here. Let’s give it a name.”

MONDO: So do you figure your appeal has to do with the way you came together, being from a hip-hop background with such diverse influences?

A12: I think it’s a lot of different things, really…. You take my experience as a DJ, you add in the fact that we both come from a hip-hop background — and there a lot more hip-hop elements in what we do than people actually realize or search to discover. Take that, and the fact that we were influenced by a lot of ’80s bands like Depeche Mode and The Cure and that (Justin) writes a lot of catchy things…

But then you get the people our age and older, you see them out there at the shows that grew up listening to the same shit. We get young kids at shows coming up like, “I didn’t know about you guys until my dad played this for me.” Then we’ll meet the father and he’ll be like, “Yeah, you know, I grew up listening to the same shit you guys do and this really reminds me of it and makes me feel…” You know, one thing we hear is “it makes me feel” a lot from people that really, really dig it. That’s something they say more than “it sounds like.” “It sounds like” is more like a journalist’s kind of thing to say. Add all those things up and it kind of describes why those people on the dance floor are there.

Virgin Music Festival
on Toronto Island
September 8-9, 2007

By John Hastings
Photo by Tavishe Coulson

Day 1 – Saturday

Last weekend I went to the Virgin Festival on Toronto Island. Now you’d think that, with a name like that, there’d be several thousand 20-something males in short shorts and sweat bands sporting clumpy, unattractive facial hair arguing about who is the most uncool and whether Devendra Banhart will ever be as great as he was two years ago. You’d expect some comic book geeks. You’d expect the 40-year-old virgin at VIRGIN FESTIVAL. But great expectations lead to great disappoints and sometimes great underestimations lead to exciting and unexpected adventures. Virgin Festival was not what it seemed, and I’ll tell you why.

I can’t vouch for the virginity of anybody but a few close friends last weekend, but I can say that there were all sorts of people boarding the ferry and crossing the harbour to check out this summer’s most anticipated outdoor mega-concert. Despite reports of two-hour lineups, I was able to basically walk onto the ferry at Harbourfront because we waited until about 4pm to head across. As a seasoned outdoor festival-goer, I’ve learned that most people don’t actually think about the logistics of getting into the concert until they’re already several hundred people deep in a massive line with no nearby washrooms and not a beer tent in sight. I like to sacrifice seeing a couple of early bands just to save myself the anxiety of waiting for three hours just to have my ass patted down. That, or I’ll go wicked early for the same reason and catch every band the festival has to offer.

Anyway, the crowd on Saturday was a nice mix of people. We met a couple with a newborn on the ferry who couldn’t wait for their daughter to experience her first concert. There were young and old, blond and brown, drunk and sober and everyone seemed to be enjoying the decent weather. After all, it was pretty much the end of summer last weekend and I think we all were counting our lucky stars that the rain had held off. I was pretty hyped to get to the island, and my first order of business was to get into the beer tent.

This is where things went a little south for me at Virgin Festival. You’d think that a huge corporately-sponsored rock concert would be well-stocked and well-oiled, but it wasn’t. First, you had to line up to get beer tickets. Then you had to jump in a queue to have your identification scanned and inspected. If you passed that test, you got into the beer tent where you had to line up again to get a beer. This process took anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes depending on when you attempted it. It was infuriating and very poorly-manned. Food was basically the same process. Plus everything cost a fortune. Not really in the spirit of rock n’ roll in my opinion.

There were four stages set up at Virgin Festival. I can’t comment on three of them because in all honesty I only watched shows on the main stage. I realize that there were a lot of great artists that didn’t grace the “Virgin Stage,” but I went with a large group of friends and really just wanted to have a few beers and see Arctic Monkeys and Interpol on Saturday. We just missed M.I.A. who I heard was probably the best act of the weekend, but anyway. With Amy Winehouse’s cancellation there was an hour of nothing before Arctic Monkeys hit the stage just after 6pm. They were loud, energetic, and pretty much played all the good songs from their two studio albums, including the crowd favourite “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” and my personal favourite “Fake Tales of San Francisco.” I saw a decent mosh pit frothing near the stage – when they called it quits, the crowd was sufficiently pumped for the arrival of Interpol. This band was the main draw for me and they didn’t disappoint. I was initially a little disappointed with Interpol’s newest album Our Love To Admire, but seeing some of it performed live has totally changed my opinion. They opened with an awesome version of “Pioneer to the Falls” and had me mesmerized for the remainder of the set. “Evil” and “C’mere” were definitely highlights and I’d have to say that Interpol was my favourite act of the weekend.

After Interpol wrapped up we snuck into a VIP tent which was anything but. A huge two-storey deck was constructed with handicap access which I thought was awesome, but someone in their infinite wisdom put a VIP tent BEHIND it, so needless to say we didn’t stay long. Bjork was the headliner on Saturday and opened with a killer laser show that, in hindsight, I would have liked to have seen more of. Despite the fact that I have nothing but respect for her and her music, we ducked out and left about four songs in. This was by far the best move of the weekend as we only waited for about 20 minutes for the ferry back to the mainland. I was safely home by midnight, and although I’d not been impressed with the logistics of the festival, I was pumped to get back to the island on Sunday.

Day 2 – Sunday

Sunday was the big day at Virgin Festival. The return of The Smashing Pumpkins in Toronto seemed to be the main draw, though a dozen awesome acts graced the stages that day. Again, I didn’t end up visiting any of the side stages, despite some stellar appearances by bands like The Clientele, Blonde Redhead, Explosions in the Sky, and Editors. It probably would have been a better idea to watch these bands on the second stage for most of the afternoon. We arrived in time to see Stars put on a fairly lacklustre 30-minute set that really disappointed some of my friends that love the band. Metric followed up with one of the worst performances I’ve seen in recent memory. It wasn’t that they sounded bad, but a massive outdoor concert is not the place to showcase drawn out songs that nobody knows and then follow up with forgettable tunes from the discs you’ve already released. I honestly almost fell asleep. The only saving grace for Metric was that Emily Haines (as always) looked super sexy rocking out in the late afternoon sun.

With Metric’s departure came a sense that the day was ruined. When you go to a concert and only watch the main stage big name bands and they suck, it’s a huge kick in the stones. We lined up for what seemed like hours to use the washroom, had a couple more beers and hoped deep down inside that The Killers would do something to bring the day back around. They hit the stage around 7:15 and totally enlivened a crowd that seemed ready to go home. I absolutely love The Killers and they absolutely rocked. I heard a lot of people bad-mouthing Brandon Flowers and Co. over the weekend, but I have to say that they know how to put on a show and I really think that it’s only rock-snobbishness that prevents people from appreciating them. Their set was awesome and turned a dour afternoon into something charged with energy.

The Smashing Pumpkins closed out the Virgin Festival on Sunday night. I’d seen them twice before in Toronto over the years and had been badly disappointed. I told my friends that they would probably suck ass and not to expect too much. I was wrong. Billy Corgan (looking older and more decrepit, if that’s even possible) put on a show that was both original and diverse. They played the expected four or five tunes off of their comeback disc Zeitgeist but intermingled the set with classics like “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” “Zero,” “Hummer” and Billy Corgan doing “1979″ acoustically. There was a 20-minute long HARD ROCK mélange that really utilized the lights and took the band to a space that wasn’t new or old, but just cool as crap. The Smashing Pumpkins came back for an encore of “Today” and apparently were set to play “Muzzle” but were ushered off because of the Toronto Island’s curfew policy. What a sham.

Sunday was fun, but with the end of the show came 20,000 people lining up for one ferry to get them home. This was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. Talk about dragging people down at the end of something special. We didn’t even bother lining up with the masses. Instead we waited for an hour for a water taxi and ended up actually just paying some dudes with a houseboat to take us to the mainland. I was exhausted and angry and I have to say that despite some great performances, I will never go to a show on the island again. I usually go to small shows at small venues around Toronto, but when I pay to actually go to a huge corporate mainstream show, I expect that it’s going to at least run smoothly. Virgin Festival 2007 had its highs and lows, but not being able to get home for three hours after the show pretty much made it one of the crappiest weekend festivals I’ve ever attended. Maybe I should have spent less time in the beer tent and more time checking out the side stages, but for those fans who just went to chill and see the main stage, it was more of a hassle than anything. Kudos to the Pumpkins for putting on a rocking respectable set, and to Interpol and The Killers for really turning things up a notch. All in all: music good, venue brutal.

Oh yeah, and the tickets were nearly $150 each and I spent over $100 on food and beer for the weekend. Next summer I’m just gonna play some CDs on my deck and get a keg.

Dance Yourself to Death
Self-titled EP Release Party
at Ciao Edie Roxx
Febrary 23, 2007

By Andrea Philp
Photography by Tavishe Coulson

Taking their name from the old Alice Cooper song, Dance Yourself to Death are on the verge of very big things. Popular on college radio, featured as the prom band in the Elton John-produced film “It’s a Boy Girl Thing”, crowding clubs around Toronto, and making girls and boys swoon are just some of the things these ladies have been up to.

With Jen Markowitz on vocals and bass, Nina Martinez on guitar, and Susan Gale on drums and back-up vocals, they sound like The Ronettes making love to Chrissie Hynde and then having breakfast with members of Squeeze and XTC. They evoke a subdued version of Detroit Cobras, but I promise they’re not derivative. The band has a timeless sound, and that’s what makes them instantly charming. I’ve been able to catch three shows by them in the past year, and I can tell you that their crowd and popularity only grows.

Dance Yourself to Death’s brand-spankin’-new self-titled four-song EP contains infectious hooks in call-and-response arrangements of guitar and vocals, and each instrument is given a chance to shine. They don’t dilly-dally with long interludes or overindulgent guitar solos — they get straight to the point, and play some of the catchiest music around town.

Markowitz pronounces her lyrics tenderly and humbly, with tangible emotion. I’ve seen a few vocalists over the years who give off too much “in your face” attitude, but Jen doesn’t do this at all. There isn’t a stitch of ego in her performances. It’s punk rock, yes, but these girls aren’t the type to show up late and drunk to a show, smash their instruments over a table of beers, and then make out with all the hot young things in the crowd. They are responsible punk rockers, which makes them even more endearing. DYTD will be the next big thing from Toronto; it’s just a matter of time. They are friendly enough for pop radio, but still edgy enough for alternative and rock stations, and with their good looks, they could be video darlings to boot.