2014 April

Apr 23
3

Interns, Ludacris, and Discovering Music When it Matters

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Hey friends! Meet one of our intrepid interns, Maddie. Maddie came to us with a huge love of rap and hip hop, and when she told us that she bought a Ludacris album when she was barely old enough to know curse words, we knew we had to let her tell her story. The music we discover when we are young always makes an impression, and we are so happy hers led her to work with us.

It is the day after Christmas 2004 and I am sitting in the back of my parents car clinging onto my most precious possession. That year I had received matching Hello Kitty headphones and a Discman. This was the greatest gift of my young life because finally I could buy CDs to start my very own music collection. I had my parents up bright and early that day to drive to the store so I could buy CDs . As I sat in the car impatiently staring out the window I thought about what I wanted.

I did not grow up in the Seattle area, I was raised in the south, born in Atlanta before spending some years in North Carolina. This meant I was exposed to a different musical landscape growing up. I remember hearing rap and hip hop on the radio as far back as my memory goes. Not only were the southern radio stations simply playing hip hop, they included local acts and more experimental rap on their stations. The ‘Dirty South’ provided me with my first glimpse into the complexity and creative energy of hip hop. I was intrigued by this music, because unlike many other genres I had been exposed to, it didn’t feel stagnant or boring. It was alive and growing and creating sounds no one had heard before.

I already knew what CDs I had to purchase. The most important one I could think of was The Red Light District by Ludacris. Ludacris would soon become my favorite rapper, and today I still consider him to be one of the best. As a kid I was attracted to his style because it was outlandish, cartoonish, filled with humor, and his music was as catchy as you can get. I mean, have you seen the cover? I thought it was the funniest thing when I first saw it.

As soon as I got home I plugged in my headphones, plopped right down on my bed, and turned on Ludacris. I knew that many of the things he was rapping about were probably not things my parents would love, and of course that added to the appeal. But I was young, and if I’m being honest, I usually had no idea what he was talking about. My first experience with rap was listening to how the words resonated and played off the beat. I heard music in a different way from then on, focusing on how each part of the song connected to create the experience. The song that influenced me most from that album, even though it has an amazing track list, was “The Potion.” The production made it sound like something from the future. It sounded brand new and I loved it.

In 2008, when I was in 8th grade, I moved from the South all the way to the awesome Pacific Northwest, where I experienced some intense culture shock. A lot about the South was different than Seattle, but the biggest shock was that my friends weren’t listening to rap. They were living off a musical diet only of folk and indie rock. I saw that rap was considered incredibly uncool, the opinion being that it was too corporate and not relatable to at all. I was at the risk of not fitting in with the other kids in school, a fate worse than death at that age. I decided to immerse myself in the indie rock scene of Seattle. It was then that I first started listening to bands like The Lonely Forest and The Long Winters, and I saw that rock in Seattle was the same as rap in the South – it represented the community I was in. This was the last time I was going to exclude myself from any genre, and thanks to the musical diversity in Seattle, I listened to as much divergent music as I could find.

Thankfully, the opinion on rap in the alternative mainstream would change in the Pacific Northwest and around the country. Nowadays Seattle is quickly becoming a city with heavy influence in the hip hop scene. Rap is in an extremely exciting place right now. You can experience the best of creative collaborations between genres. You have Danny Brown working with Purity Ring, and Big Boi with Phantogram. You have rappers like Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, out of Chicago’s Savemoney crew, experimenting with live instruments and a plethora of influences in their music. We have even had some first hand experience of this in the Lively Lounge when Aer came to play their blend of rock, pop, reggae. It’s as exciting as it was when I first plugged in those Hello Kitty headphones and had my world changed when I was just discovering what I loved. I can’t wait to hear what happens next.

Apr 11
1

Our Shared History: Nirvana in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

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Hey Lively readers, Kathleen here. I want to qualify what I am going to write, because it will be purely my voice. I am our marketing communications manager; it’s my job to help create, curate, and grow the voice of Lively. It is not often that I will use the Lively blog to write from a personal perspective, because we have many voices here, and it’s my aim to represent all of us.

But I started as a music writer, and on occasions such as these I will step out of the obscurity of our social media feeds and be bold enough to speak, in my own words, for this collective of people I sit with every day.

Many of us at Lively did not grow up in Seattle, but many of us did. We range in age from those of us who danced to Young MC at our proms, to the Backstreet Boys, to Earth, Wind, and Fire. We grew up loving all kinds of music, and our divergent, winding paths led us to fall in love with Lively and the work we do here.

If you talk to any of us, though, you’ll find that no matter our age or our place of birth, we were drawn to or rooted in Seattle in part because of the legacy of Nirvana and the movement it was deeply entrenched in.

Almost everything that could be said about Nirvana and how they lifted Seattle’s profile as the city where rebels ruled and their anthems played on the radio, has been said. Biographies have been written (my personal favorite is Heavier than Heaven by Charles Cross), cover songs have been sung (even Horse Feathers did a very pretty rendition of “Drain You” that makes the macabre lyrics even starker), and countless articles penned from every angle imaginable.

I even felt at a loss when deciding what, if anything, a person who was too young and far away in Nirvana’s era should or could say. I didn’t discover the ’90s until 2004, and it was a really sore spot as I blasted Bleach in my car, feeling like I showed up to the party to find empty Solo cups rolling around on the sticky floor – ghostly evidence of a good time.

But what I am realizing today is that Nirvana’s legacy stretches beyond their time, their records, or Cobain’s sensationalized and tragic death. It gave Seattle a history to be a proud part of, no matter when or where you were born. There is no going backwards from Nirvana. The integrity and spirit of the movement that shook the ‘80s and ‘90s in Seattle crackles on today, and it’s up to all of us who are planted here to keep it buzzing. We have to honor the riot grrrls, the slackers, the losers, the kids who came out from under the overpass to wail poetry over distorted guitar. We find new ways to change the status quo, with innovators like Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl as examples. Not to mention Bruce Pavitt, Calvin Johnson, Kathleen Hanna, Josh Rosenfeld, and so many more. We push forward, because we came from somewhere. And we are proud of where we are going.

Last night Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the performances did a better job of filling a room to the rafters with what Nirvana has meant to music than my words ever could. All I can say is – we will continue to try to live out what was started in our city, as a company full of people who have buried ourselves in the work of giving music the kind of immortality it deserves. Thank you, Nirvana.

Apr 08
0

My First Show // The Grahams

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We all remember our first show. For most of us, it spun into a lifetime of music loving, not music making. For some, though, it stirred in them a sense of purpose. For the month of April, we’ll be asking some artists we love to write about their first show, the one they saw when they didn’t know what was coming, but they figured out what they wanted it to sound like.

First up, we have The Grahams! The Grahams are lifelong romantic partners, Alyssa and Doug Graham, who lit out for adventure from New York City to make music along the Great River Road. The Grahams will be playing the Lively Lounge next week, and you can win exclusive tracks and other prizes here. Now, Alyssa tells the story of their first show, when they were just kids.

It was the year of, “A Touch of Grey” and my older brother (who was one of Doug’s best friends) reluctantly gave me my first tie dye t-shirt after much begging. I say reluctantly because he made me name 10 Grateful Dead songs before he would relinquish one of his precious T’s. I barely knew who they were, as I was still listening to a lot of Cyndi Lauper and Carol King, but I really wanted to be part of my brothers’ “cool” world. I was miraculously able to ramble off 9 songs but the 10th was a stumper. Finally, it came to me, “Box of Rain!” Well, my brother gave me the T-shirt but he was genuinely angry that I knew that song. “Box of Rain” was his favorite song and he didn’t think a newbie like me deserved to even utter the words “Box of Rain.” Not yet anyway.

However, my brother also wanted me to learn and learn I did. The next month, The Grateful Dead were coming to Brendan Byrne Arena and of course he was attending with his cool group of hippie friends. To my surprise, he offered not only to chaperone my girlfriend and me to the concert but he asked one of his friends (who drove a van!) to take us with them to the show.

Nobody had a ticket, which I found very strange, as this was my first concert and I thought a ticket was a pretty important part of the “attending.” However, once I reached the parking lot (the van experience was a whole other story I could tell) I was thrust into a new world and the concert itself seemed negligible. It was a world of, to be cliché’, Peace, Love & Hippies. I wanted to be in that world forever. The colors, the scents, the sounds, the chaos, and the wonder opened up a new way of life for me and I never left… well, not in my heart anyway.

After a few hours of bliss in the parking lot, I ran into my brother again and he had two tickets for Karen and me. Honestly, we had forgotten about the concert, but we were excited. This was our first experience, and it was already beyond our wildest dreams. That was before the music.

When we entered the arena, we struggled to find our seats through the maze of dancing beauties, drummer boys, and clowns, but soon got settled and were sitting next to a guy we knew from school. He was also older than us but very kind and hospitable as he immediately offered us some Opium. Yes, Opium! Well, why not, we had experienced so many new things already, one more couldn’t hurt. The lights went down, my heart was pounding, the crowd was screaming and, “The Music Never Stopped.”

I can’t remember the set list that night or the thoughts in my head but when the lights finally turned on I was changed. I had entered a world of music that gave me freedom.

When I exited the arena with the masses, I bumped right in to Doug. He had one side of his head shaved those days and was wearing a Rasta tam. He was indeed a sight for sore eyes and as always smiling from ear to ear. It wasn’t Doug’s first concert. He had seen Neil Young several years earlier at Madison Square Garden with his older brother (I learned later that prostitutes tried to pick them up after the show) and this was for sure not his first Dead show.

The last and most memorable moment from that night, the night of my first concert, was Doug (only my friend at the time) grabbing me by the hand and whisking me around the parking lot in a full spin singing out loud, “I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be, you’re gonna give your love to me, I wanna love you night and day, know our love will not fade away.”

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