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Groove on Grove
Tris McCall

A Million-Dollar Snub: Pop Musicians Are Artists, Too

June 10, 2022/in header, Narrate, News, Opinion, Performing Arts, Trending Now /by Tris McCall

Through its Arts and Culture Trust Fund, the City of Jersey City will soon distribute almost a million dollars.

Very little of that money will go to local bands.

Or local rap crews. Or singer-songwriters, or emo or punk outfits, or reggaetoneros or bachateros, any of the hundreds upon hundreds of practitioners of popular music who live, work, and, under vexed circumstances and extreme scarcity of opportunity, play in Jersey City.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.  The Arts and Culture Trust Fund was sold to us as a boon for all Jersey City creators.  We consented to this tax — and the Fund is indeed a tax — because we believed the money raised would be distributed equitably and fairly.  We didn’t think that an entire segment of the arts community would be left out.

We should have known better. The million-dollar snub by the Arts and Culture Trust Fund is only the latest indignity that rockers and rappers have had to suffer in this town.  Ask your neighborhood strummer, and she will tell you: It is brutally difficult to be a popular musician in Jersey City.  Places to practice, and perform, and congregate, have always been tough to find.  Over the decades, musicians have faced open hostility from politicians, neighborhood associations, and police.  Shows have been shut down. Clubs have found it impossible to operate, or they’ve been regulated out of existence or demolished to make room for more development.  Other cities preserve and commemorate their live music venues; in Jersey City, our most famous annual event acknowledges in its name the destruction of one of those spaces.  If there’s a single group of artists in this town who desperately need practical help, popular musicians are that group.

The list of awardees is not quite a worst-case scenario. Goatchella and Groove on Grove, two enterprises that provide stages for local pop, rock, and hip-hop musicians, received grant money — although not nearly as much as comparably established arts institutions working in other fields. The deejays of the Chilltown Collective were awarded a program grant. Riverview Jazz, the organization behind the invaluable Jersey City Jazz Festival, received as much money as any organization in town: $25,000.

But the local working band — the basic building block of any independent music scene — was shut out of the grantees list.  By contrast, other types of music organizations were given enthusiastic nods. Con Vivo, the fine classical ensemble, received a program grant of $17,500. The Statuary, a lovely outdoor jazz space in the Heights, will be getting in excess of $13,000. More than $8,000 will go to Cantandes in Cordibus, a choral group headquartered in a beautiful Bergen-Lafayette church. These projects deserve recognition and acclaim. But when a group of Gregorian chanters gets more money from our Arts and Culture Trust than Goatchella and Groove on Grove put together, that’s a good indication that something is misaligned.

It is no excuse for the City to say that bands and rap crews did not apply for the grants. The administrators of the Trust Fund were obligated to educate artists — all artists — about funding opportunities. If it became apparent to them that the money was about to be unevenly and irrationally disbursed, somebody in authority needed to recognize that and slam on the brakes. There was no reason the grantmaking process had to be as speedy as it was: the City’s haste gave an enormous head start to arts institutions accustomed to writing applications, and put popular musicians, who tend to have no such experience, at a major disadvantage. That disparity is reflected in the roster of grantees, which is led by the largest organizations in town: Art House Productions, Nimbus Dance Works, and the Jersey City Theater Company all received maximum funding. These are worthy recipients. They do wonderful work. But the work is not the problem.

Punk rockers, rappers, and singer-songwriters are often inclined toward anti-establishment views. They may not want anything to do with government money. That’s understandable, and even commendable. The trouble is that the existence of the Arts and Culture Trust Fund puts a firm and decisive finger on the scale — and that affects everybody. Even at the incremental level, tax policy is incredibly powerful.  Subsidizing anything means there’ll be more of it; taxing anything means you’ll get less of it. Popular musicians are being taxed in order to subsidize larger arts organizations that do not, in general, even know that those musicians exist. That’s great for those big organizations, but it’s going to have a chilling effect on a local music scene that doesn’t need any more splashes of ice water.

For a long time, it’s been apparent that political leaders (and their allies in the arts establishment) do not view popular musicians as legitimate artists. The Arts and Culture Trust Fund is just the latest instantiation of a prejudice that dates back at least as far as the Schundler Administration. Nevertheless, I notice that the members of the public, who are shouldering this tax, don’t agree with this assessment. Whenever and wherever the City has allowed popular music to happen, the crowds have gathered, and they’ve been enthusiastic.

To be bothered by our allocation of public money, you do not have to believe, as I do, that popular music is the best thing that human beings do. All you need is a sense of basic fairness. Fortunately, our course is correctable. The City of Jersey City must place people involved in the independent music scene on the boards that decide who gets grants. A pattern of neglect and hostility toward popular music must end. Authorities behind the Fund must appreciate the centrality of popular music to public culture and act accordingly. Above all, everybody involved in the Fund must do a better job of reaching out to musicians. Because musicians are not hard to find. They’re pretty loud. I think it’s about time they got a little louder.

 

trismccall@gmail.com

Photo courtesy of Groove on Grove, Dancing Tony and HDSID

 

Gonzalo Bergara
Tris McCall

Rogue Waves June: Jersey City Jazz Festival and More

May 31, 2022/in Columns, Downtown, header, Latest News, News /by Tris McCall
Jersey City Jazz Festival @ 107 Morgan Street (June 4 & 5)

 

There’ll be other cultural events on the calendar. But in Jersey City, the J in June stands for jazz. Our excellent local jazz festival has grown from a small get-together in a Heights park to a two-day Downtown blowout with multiple stages, international talent, and satellite events scattered all over town. It’s now the largest jazz festival in the New York metropolitan area. Its ascendancy is reflected in a recent name change. What began more than a decade ago as the Riverview Jazz Festival is now the Jersey City Jazz Festival: citywide, full of local pride, forward-looking, but still radiating a certain ramshackle Hudson County spirit.  Target audience: you.

And though JCJF has attracted name artists — not to mention corporate sponsors — it retains much of the distinctive personality of its founder. Sax man Brian Beninghove loves jazz, but he’s the farthest thing from a purist. In his time on the local music scene, he’s played manouche, gritty fusion, John Zorn-like no-wave, crazed soundtrack music with his Hangmen, and, he’s handy with traditional bop, too. The common denominator is a certain pleasant rowdiness and party-friendliness.  Beninghove clearly sees jazz as celebratory music, and the eclectic lineup at the Festival reflects that.  We’ve singled out three attractions below, but quality control at this Festival has always been very high.  Whenever you show up, you can expect to hear something interesting, and maybe something joyful, too.

(Music starts at noon on Saturday, June 4 and runs until 8 p.m., and begins at noon on Sunday, June 5 and runs until 6 p.m.; visit www.riverviewjazz.org for full schedules and more information. Most Jersey City Jazz Festival events are free to the public, but if you’d really like to blow it out, you can get a two-day VIP ticket for $125 that guarantees you reserved front-row seating for both days of the Festival, and access to a refreshment tent.)

Winard Harper @ Jersey City Jazz Festival (June 4)

 

The Jersey City Jazz Festival continues to provide a platform for the tireless Winard Harper, the veteran drummer and music educator who, through his ongoing series of jams at Moore’s Lounge (189 Monticello Ave.), has kept the flame burning through some lean years for local music.  If anybody deserves to be part of the Jersey jazz revival, it’s Harper, who, like Beninghove, takes an expansive view of the possibilities of his chosen form, and is always looking for ways to push his music, and his accompanists, forward. Should you want to groove to a Jersey City legend, Harper will appear with his Jeli Posse on the Bank of America Stage on Saturday at 3 p.m.

Little Johnny @ Jersey City Jazz Festival (June 4)

 

Some Latin drummers are wizards on the conga. Others are skilled at the bongo.  Vincent Rivero — who performs as Little Johnny — is a revelation on both instruments. Technically, most of his fans consider the East Harlem-raised musician a conguero first, but no matter what he’s hitting, he’s a master percussionist and a charismatic bandleader who has moved crowds all over the hemisphere. While Little Johnny is plenty dexterous and lightning fast on the congas, he’s primarily a virtuoso of feel: his pocket is as warm and comfortable as a bathing suit left out in the Caribbean sun. He’ll close out the first night of the Festival on the Bank of America Stage at 7 p.m.  It should be quite a party.

Gonzalo Bergara @ Jersey City Jazz Festival (June 5)

 

So: do you dig those gypsy jazz nights at Madame Claude?  Of course you do; you’ve got a pulse. Ever wonder what a fearless, imaginative, world-class guitarist could do with that Django Reinhardt sound?  Argentinian Gonzalo Bergara is the best kind of experimentalist: his playing is so smooth, so fluid, and so effortless, that you might not even notice how far out he goes. His fretboard work is a blinding fusion of Parisian sophistication and Argentinian folk melody, and as dazzling and lyrical as his leads are, his rhythm playing might be even more mesmerizing. He’ll thrill the local manouchebags on the Exchange Place Alliance Stage at 2 p.m. on Sunday.

Lily Mastrodimos @ Fox & Crow (June 11)

 

Though it was released in 2015, “Heights,” the first true full-length project by Lily Mastrodimos of Long Neck, anticipated much of the sound of contemporary independent pop-rock: female-fronted, anguished and lovelorn, guitar-forward, gritty, witty, indebted to Liz Phair, Tracy Bonham, and other formally experiment rock songwriters of the ’90s.  By “World’s Strongest Dog,” Long Neck had figured out how to bite —the group forged a tough, lean rock sound that matched the obsessions and the emotional intensity of the song’s narrators. Lily Mastrodimos’s knack for melody has never deserted her, no matter what she’s done, and this June, she’ll be appearing as a solo artist in the room best suited for intimate musical expression: the Parlor at Fox & Crow.  She might keep it mellow. Or she might blow the doors off.  (Fox & Crow, 594 Palisade Ave., 8 p.m.; visit www.foxandcrowjc.com.)

Prateek Kuhad @ White Eagle Hall (June 24)

 

If you didn’t know his backstory, you might mistake Prateek Kuhad as a typical sweet-singing folk-rock auteur, indebted to Elliott Smith, Vance Joy, and Jose Gonzalez. When he starts singing in Hindi, he tips his hand a little. Truth is, Kuhad is a pioneer: he’s one of the few Indian-born pop artists to win a dedicated audience in America. You won’t necessarily hear his Jaipur roots on “Cold/Mess,” the shattering 2018 breakup ballad that’s still his best-known song in the States. But you don’t have to dig too deep in his catalogue to encounter tracks that make the distance from Rajasthan to Jersey City feel like a walk around the block. And that is, in Kuhad’s quiet way, revolutionary. (White Eagle Hall, 337 Newark Ave., 7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show, $27.50; visit www.whiteeaglehalljc.com.)

GOMO’s Pre-Summer Open Mic @ SMUSH (June 16)

 

Dance shows, photography exhibitions, community-themed discussion forums, movie nights, workshops, boardgame parties; SMUSH sure smushes a lot into that tiny, pretty space on the border of Journal Square.  Now they bring us an open mic, variety show, and musical event hosted by… a ghost?  Should you be terrified?  Nah, it’s just the SMUSHers being their playful, giddy selves. They’re far too friendly and welcoming to spook anybody.  I think. (SMUSH, 340 Summit Ave., 7:30 p.m., $10 – $30; visit www.smushgallery.com.)

Hudson West Folk Festival
Jim Testa

Hudson West Folk Festival To Bring Americana, Blues and Roots Music to Nimbus

October 9, 2021/in Downtown, header, News, Performing Arts /by Jim Testa

Folk music ain’t what it used to be – at least in Jersey City –  as evidenced by this year’s Hudson West Folk Festival, which takes place on Saturday, October 16 from noon to 10 p.m.

The annual all-day celebration of Americana, blues, and roots music moves to the state-of-the-art Nimbus Arts Center in the Powerhouse Arts District this year, with an eclectic lineup ranging from the “swampalachian” stomp of Swamp Cabbage, L.A. bluesman Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, Long Island Americana sextet Quarter Horse, Nashville superduo Side Pony, and much more.

The festival will not only feature an eclectic mix of performances and workshops but will also showcase the work of local craftspeople, artists, and photographers. Original stage backdrops will frame the performances, and the festival has teamed with Welcome Home Jersey City and Refugee Chefs to provide unique food and drinks.

Women loom large on this year’s bill, from Hudson Valley singer-songwriter Amy Rigby – a veteran of Manhattan’s early punk scene and Eighties Hoboken – to one-gal band Zoe Lewis, whose 10-album discography spans vintage jazz and world-beat music, to the three women and two men in the family folk band Miles To Dayton, to the Nashville duo Side Pony.

For Side Pony’s Caitlin Cannon and Alice Wallace, playing a folk festival seems a natural extension of their experience and influences. “Alice in her artistic projects executes traditional country and I lean more into alternative country, I like to push those genres and bend them a little bit,” Cannon said.  Side Pony, she explained, is “the Alice-Caitlin smoothie you get when you put those influences in a Vitamix.” 

“Where does that fit into the folk world?” she asked. “Well, now we have Americana, and folk festivals all over the world are incorporating other sounds, whether it’s alternative country or blues or an indie singer-songwriter. The umbrella has to stretch to incorporate all those genres that are being produced by up and coming artists. And we’ve all been influenced by all these different kinds of music – my songwriting heroes are Woody Guthrie and Patty Griffin – so it’s only natural that our music would reflect multiple genres.” Side Pony’s debut album, “Lucky Break,” released on October 8, brings Wallace and Cannon to Jersey City riding the crest of  industry raves. Americana Highways called the album, “a fine display of songwriting,” raving “Wallace and Cannon know how to turn a phrase that can make you smile or make you feel something deep in your heart.”  

Both women had solo careers before meeting and teaming up in Nashville. “It’s the only place where it’s acceptable to be writing songs even if you’re not making any money,” Cannon joked. “You’re either a working songwriter there or, next best thing, you’re an out of work songwriter. But we all seem to end up in Nashville, no matter where you’re from originally.”

Based on the songs on “Lucky Break,” fans at Hudson West Fest can expect a rollicking set soaring with harmony vocals, peppered with humor and sass, and mixing country pop with a bit of  honky tonk.

“We wrote every song together, 50/50,” it’s absolutely a collaboration,” noted Wallace. “And we really set that bar for ourselves right from the get-go of making sure that we both felt connected and represented in every song that we wrote.”

For headliners Swamp Cabbage, the Hudson West Fest will represent a homecoming for singer/guitarist Walter Parks, a longtime Jersey City Heights resident who, with his wife Margo, played a large role in the local music community, booking the Fox & Crow, the Vault Allure festivals, and other events.

The couple left Jersey City for St. Louis in 2020, in part to help Margo’s elderly parents. “One of them had a hip replacement and the other started kidney dialysis, so they couldn’t help each other,” Parks explained. “This was in March, just when everyone started taking covid super serious. And then, everybody in the arts, you know, everybody’s work just dried up. It was a super, super tough decision, but when family is in need, there’s really no decision to be made, you just have to do it.”

Parks, who had been folk legend Richie Havens’ accompanist for years, started Swamp Cabbage in his downtime, teaming with a New Orleans percussionist named Jagoda. “Richie wanted two guitars on stage, but I said, what can I do to kind of weave in with Ritchie’s galloping style?” Parks said. “And I came up with this kind of banjo picking style on the guitar. You know, if you play it on a banjo, it sounds like a banjo. But when you play it on a guitar, it just sounds like something different.”

“I grew up in Florida, an area of the country that was quite unique in terms of its sound,”  Parks continued. “It wasn’t quite New Orleans, it wasn’t quite Nashville, but the southeast part of the US – meaning like, Southeast Georgia, Northeast Florida –  they had a whole different thing going on there. A lot of people know it is as Southern rock, you know, Lynyrd Skynyrd,  38 Special, and the Allman Brothers came from there. Besides having more of a rock edge, I think there’s also a black influence in the sound that’s different from country music. If you listen to Skynyrd, you listen to some of the grooves, there’s a kind of a funkiness to it, almost a James Brown quality that you don’t hear in country music.”

Coincidentally, Parks had just returned from a tour before the covid lockdown and was in the process of reassessing his own music. “I just didn’t want to play with bass anymore, it was just too much sound on the stage,” he said. “I still had Jagoda on drums playing his New Orleans style. And I got a call from my buddy Rob Curto, who’s an accordion player I’ve known for years. He’s one of the best musicians that I have met in my life. He’s an accordion player, but he knows how to really throw his whole body and his whole energy into the music. He just doesn’t stand there, he understands the energy of rock and roll, he’s got the capacity for jazz and classical harmony.”

This version of Swamp Cabbage – Parks on guitar, Jagoda on drums, Curto on accordion – will be on display at the Hudson West Festival. “We worked some things out, like the Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’  accordion and electric guitar and New Orleans style drumming. Oh my god. I mean, people’s jaws drop. On one hand, it’s absurd that the accordion is playing the Who. But when we pull it off with the intensity that you would expect a Who song to be played with, people who just can’t believe it.” 

But, Parks added, Curto brought more to Swamp Cabbage than his intensity. “The irony of it is, and this is really important because we’re getting ready to play at a Folk Festival, it took an Italian- American guy living in Philly to expose me to Irish reels and old Scottish hymns. This is stuff that really, I should have in my blood, but here comes this Italian American guy from Philly, and he says, ‘listen to all these reels, and these jigs, we got to play this stuff.’  So I just cranked up the electric guitar, and he comes in with the accordion and we got this guy playing a New Orleans style drumbeat, it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard. It’s a laughably weird concept, but it’s completely natural and very rootsy. So  now we’re playing all this folk music, this Irish music and Appalachian music and mixing it with my swampy, bluesy style and this New Orleans drumming groove, I have, frankly, never heard anything like it.”

This year’s festival has also dedicated two slots to local up-and-coming performers, according to festival board member Laura Foord. “This time around we wanted to take a closer look at the talent pool in our own backyard  and so we held a Talent Search last July-August,” she stated. “Musicians in Hudson County were invited to send us videos and links of their original work and performances. And we were quite surprised and pleased by the responses we got.”

A panel of six DJ’s and other local music industry professionals reviewed the submissions  and chose two artists to perform at the Fest, Mark Aaron James of Downtown Jersey City and Brett Altman of Hoboken. “The idea is to highlight, give a boost, to someone who might not be well-known and who lives right here among us,” added Foord. “So I’d like to see them get as much attention as possible, before, during, and after our Fest.”

Tickets for the Hudson West Festival are $37.75 online from laurahudsonwestfestorg.ticketleap.com or $40 at the door. The Nimbus Arts Center is located at 329 Warren Street, Jersey City. 

Proof of vaccination is required for entry and the audience will be asked to wear masks in the theater and workshops.

SCHEDULE

Noon –  Doors open
1 p.m.   Miles To Dayton
2 p.m.   Mark A. James
2:30 p.m. Side Pony
3:30 p.m.  Blind Boy Paxton
4:30 p.m.  Brett Altman
5:00 p.m.  Zoe Lewis
5:45 p.m.  Dinner Break
6:15 p.m.  Quarter Horse
7:15 p.m.  Amy Rigby
8:15 p.m.  Malcolm Holcombe
9:15 p.m.  Swamp Cabbage

Workshops
2:00 p.m.  Jagoda
3:00 p.m.  Amy Rigby
4:15 p.m.  Side Pony
6:45 p.m.  Zoe Lewis


 

 



 

 

Felipe Rose
Tris McCall

Jersey City’s Felipe Rose of Village People Performs This Weekend

August 11, 2021/in News, Performing Arts /by Tris McCall

“Human beings,” says Felipe Rose,“ are tribalistic. We dance for sorrow. We dance for happiness. We dance together for days and days until we can’t dance anymore. We dance for many reasons — even at funerals.”

For over a year, dancing in a communal setting was something that Rose couldn’t do. The pandemic has been tough for all performers to navigate; for a disco vocalist, dancer, and songwriter like Rose, who first came to fame in the 1970s as the Native American in Village People, it’s been particularly brutal. Disco encourages togetherness: It’s an ecstatic kind of music, made for parties, clubs, and bars and anywhere else where human beings gather and interact. It’s music that elicits a physical response from listeners. Stuck at home in Asbury Park, locked down like the rest of us, this exuberant, gloriously extroverted character was an artist without a channel for self-expression.

“I was in a deep state of depression,” admits Rose. “I could barely get out of bed. I barely ate. I was writing some morbid shit on Facebook. I lost so many friends including Frosty Lawson, my producer of thirty years, who worked with me on all of my Native American music.”

Lawson, who won three Native American Music Awards for his work with Felipe Rose and co-wrote the Cherokee-themed lament “Trail of Tears” with him, didn’t die of COVID-19. Nevertheless, because his passing happened during the height of the pandemic, it was tough for his friends to mourn his passing properly. A devastated Rose rallied and channeled his grief, desire, longing, and pent-up excitement into a song — a disco anthem, naturally — about what he was most determined to do.

“Dance Again” is designed to be a club-floor burner. It’s also surprisingly poignant. Rose sings frankly, forcefully, and in economical couplets, about the challenges of lockdown: the glacial tick of the clock, the feelings of fear and frustration, the pain of distance and desire for intimacy. An aspirational chorus calls the revelers back to the party and invites us all to move — and Rose will deliver that optimistic message in person on August 14, when he’ll headline the fourth annual Fringe Fest Equality Rocks Spectacular at the Jersey City Pride celebration in Van Vorst Park.

Felipe Rose

Felipe Rose

“I told Tyler Sarfert and Benny Harrison, my producers, that I don’t want to sound like an old disco has-been,” says Rose. “I want to sound fresh. I want to sound like Post Malone. Auto-Tune? I want a lot of that!”

The beatmakers also brought in powerhouse support singer Ada Dire to complement Rose’s pent-up hedonism with a little heat of her own. The result is a track that radiates classic disco style and energy but one that sounds awfully contemporary, too.

“They took the guy from that era — the disco era — and fast forwarded,” says Rose.

The new single also foregrounds Rose’s lifetime love of dancing — dance as release, dance as communication, dance as a form of cultural conversation — and dance as one of the many languages of the LGBTQ+ community. Rose came to New York City as a teenager to be a dancer: Long before Rose did the YMCA with Village People, he appeared at Lincoln Center with Ballet de Puerto Rico. He was, however, doing a different kind of dancing at The Anvil, a legendary gay club on West 14th Street in Manhattan, when he met Village People impresario Jacques Morali in 1977.

“That’s where he discovered me,” says Rose. “He told me he wanted to ‘do something’ with me. He meant music. Well, at 2:30 in the morning at The Anvil, that implies something else.”

Village People would flirt outrageously with gay imagery for many years, tucking double and triple entendres into pop hits that made Middle America move. Famously, each member of the group dressed as a different butch male archetype: a cowboy, a construction worker, a leather-clad tough, a “hot” cop, a sailor man. Felipe Rose was the Native American in feathers and war paint, and while he wasn’t the lead singer, he might have been the group’s most recognizable member. “Village People,” the debut project, stole the hearts of gay listeners through joyous, party-hungry songs about Fire Island, San Francisco, Hollywood, and, of course, the West Village. The 1978 hit “Macho Man” won the affections of everybody else and cemented the group’s identity. They were multi-ethnic (Rose is himself part Puerto Rican and part Native American); they were playfully provocative and outrageously costumed, they were loads of fun, and they were above all danceable.

But for all the synchronized choreography of the group’s presentation, the real reason that Village People music endures is the sturdiness of the songs themselves. The writers knew how to mint and develop a memorable pop melody, and the performers knew how to sell a hook. Decades later, we’ve still got those choruses stuck in our heads, and that’s a testament to the genuine craft that undergirded the frivolity. Morali, his production partner Henri Belolo, and Village People lead singer Victor Willis wrote songs that were disco to the core, but they also drew from the pop-soul tradition, musical theater and cabaret and the rhythms and landmarks of New York City. Their most famous song was inspired by the McBurney YMCA on 23rd Street. And while Morali liked to party, Rose reminds us that he was a classically trained musician — and that that training informed and sometimes underpinned his writing. (That’s something that Pet Shop Boys exposed on their cover of “Go West,” which teased the chords from Pachelbel’s “Canon” out of the composition.)

Felipe Rose

Felipe Rose

“You had to appreciate the juxtaposition of a gay man from France (Morali) and a straight brother (Willis),” says Rose about the Village People’s songwriting team. Disco pitched a big tent: Everybody was invited to the party, and the dance floor was a place of strange and unexpected couplings. Then, as now, an epidemic changed the tenor of popular culture. The permissiveness and relaxed attitude of the late 1970s gave way to the sexual paranoia, suspicion, and cultural re-segregation of the 1980s. Jacques Morali succumbed to AIDS-related illnesses in 1991. Many of Felipe Rose’s friends and musical colleagues were lost to the disease, too.

No two pandemics are the same, and the virus that locked everybody down in 2020 doesn’t share many characteristics with HIV. Nevertheless, COVID-19 has given Rose flashbacks to the worst days of the AIDS crisis, and it’s not hard to understand why. Suspicion and fear, distancing, isolation, alienation from intimacy, fighting, ugly politics and rejection of science: It’s all been painfully familiar. For LGTBQ+ people denied their usual gathering places, the last eighteen months have been particularly hard.

“We’re a family,” says Rose. “We’re the ones who were either kicked out of our homes or left our towns behind. Maybe we don’t have a family, so we make families of our own. We go to the bars and the discos to dance, to find each other and be with each other.”

Rose is no stranger to the clubs of Jersey City. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, he lived on York and Grove and ran a recording studio out of a building that was once home to a city bathhouse. Ever in character and ever proud of his heritage, he called the space “Tomahawk.” Though he’s been a Jersey Shore resident for years, he remains connected with Hudson County. He had a kickass 65th birthday party at the Ashford before the pandemic made such things difficult to do. The Pride show is a homecoming: He’ll be singing and dancing in a public park that’s only minutes from his old townhouse.

“If you’ve ever lived in Jersey City,” says Rose, “you know that you’ll forever be part of it.”

 

Felipe Rose

4th Annual Fringe Fest Equality Rocks Spectacular

Jersey City Pride

Van Vorst Park

Saturday, August 14

3 to 7 p.m.

Also appearing: Evan Laurence, Lady Clover Honey, Riqi Velez, Cecile Williams, Nikki Horton, Frankie Alday, Tym Moss, Samore Love, Kenny Supremee

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tris McCall

Artists Explore Pop Music Icons in Two Local Shows

June 11, 2021/in Eye Level, header, Latest News, News, Visual Arts /by Tris McCall

“An Artist’s Duty,” at  SMUSH Gallery (340 Summit Ave.) through tomorrow.

“Top Ten Hits” at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) continues through the month.

 

Among other things, pop music is a form of visual art.  Rarely is it enough to mint a melody that makes the world sing.  That tune must also be tethered to a recognizable image.  The most efficient deliverer of the iconography upon which pop music depends is the artist’s own face. The face of the singer is a kind of brand, which helps to explain why it is often abstracted, and often estranged, from the work and placed on posters and advertisements.  It also helps explain why a massive mural of David Bowie now overlooks the Holland Tunnel.

Bowie the human being was a complicated and difficult man who openly flirted with Nazi imagery and ideology in the 1970s, and who may or may not have been in pernicious character when he said that Britain would benefit from fascist leadership.  Bowie the icon, on the other hand, has straightforward connotations: generational change, androgyny, transhumanity and sci-fi, artistic freedom. Embracing and broadcasting the icon diminishes and distorts the meaning of David Bowie’s very complicated songwriting, but without the icon, the work wouldn’t have sold, and we might not even know who Bowie was. This is the devil’s bargain that all pop artists make — a reduction and simplification of their personalities into something that can be easily understood and mass-marketed, in exchange for global visibility.

Janelle Monae by Stephanie Geremito

There’s a much, much smaller image of David Bowie in “An Artist’s Duty,” which closes at SMUSH Gallery (340 Summit Ave.) on Saturday, June 12. It was painted in acrylic on canvas by the curator of the show: Stephanie Geremito, a Long Island artist who takes the sociopolitical statements made by popular entertainers seriously. “An Artist’s Duty” is one of two local exhibitions that place the image of the singing star at the center of the show. Like “An Artist’s Duty,” “Top Ten Hits” at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) contains work that’s informed by street art and popular portraiture techniques, and it situates its famous subjects in a volatile world.  But the tone of the silkscreened and spray-painted canvases by St. Petersburg-born artist Denis Ouch is sharply different — and so is his understanding of the place of the pop star in the global imagination.

Not everybody depicted in “An Artist’s Duty” is a popular musician. Grace Kim contributes lovingly rendered oil paintings of artist-activists, including the Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá, transgender actress Laverne Cox, and a portrait of Frederick Douglass that, like all good images of the abolitionist, hurls a powerful accusation across time. Some aren’t even artists: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, is here, too, sort of, although she’s barely recognizable in a flat digital rendering by Sara Lauth. But the heart of the show is the series of energetic paintings of pop stars new and old by Geremito, which roar from their canvases like punk rock songs do. There’s a recklessness to these renderings that suits the subjects well. At their best, they channel some of the broad, bright-stroke, ungovernable energy that makes pop stars appealing to millions.

Which, if you’re a fan of pop, means that there’s a lot for you to enjoy here. But the thrills aren’t spaced evenly, and that inconsistency might say something about Geremito’s relationship to music, or to iconography, or both. While it would be unfair to call some of the portraits of older artists (a poised Jackson Browne, a steely Neil Young, an exhausted John Lennon) overly reverential, she’s not adding much to the popular understanding of the public characters that these Hall of Famers endeavored to project. She does better when she pokes the icon a little. Ironically, given her fascination with rock history, her most revealing portraits are the ones of current artists. Sia Furler, for instance, crackles with the childlike impishness and mischievousness that animates her best pop writing; she looks as if she’s about to reach through the frame and apply finger-paint to your nose. Childish Gambino emerges, shirtless and strangely vulnerable, from a background of smeared grey and green paint, head bowed, grim, radiating despair. Harry Styles – the only artist to feature in this exhibition and “Top Ten Hits” as well – cocks his head with the combination of camp insouciance and near-professorial discernment that always separated him from his groupmates in One Direction. Janelle Monáe, decked out beautifully in a jacket and tie, seems legitimately shocked that she’s even under observation.

Geremito’s inspiration for the exhibit was Nina Simone’s famous declaration that an artist has a duty to reflect the times she’s living in. (Simone gets a particularly sympathetic rendering here; she looks dignified, fearsomely intelligent, and a bit exasperated at the shortcomings of the audience.) The curator pairs each of her portraits with quotes from her subjects about the better world they’re determined to inaugurate. Yet the most telling quotation in the show comes from R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, who points out that the generation of pop musicians that did the most talking about artistic responsibility have presided over an unprecedented deterioration of political and environmental conditions. That’s surely not the artists’ fault, but it does undermine the claims of political significance that are often made on their behalf. How much of their activism was genuine, and how much was an extension of the altruistic, transcendent characters they were playing professionally?  Were they truly reflecting the times, or could it better be said that they were reflecting certain popular inchoate aspirations that have fallen, like so much else, to the steamroller of capitalist history?

The Weeknd by Denis Ouch

As a child growing up in Russia, Denis Ouch, who’ll be present at the Novato Gallery on June 19, had a scarier view of those historical processes in action. There, the American and British pop star was marketed like any other commodity: the pop icon was the smiling face on the fearsome battering ram of Western consumer culture. His exhibition demonstrates that Ouch loves pop music as much as Geremito does. But while “An Artist’s Duty” is broadly laudatory, “Top Ten Hits” has far darker undercurrents. Images of the impassive faces of current stars, silk-screened Warhol-style, float atop ghostly representations of weapons, military dictators in mid-salute, tanks, battlefield barbed wire. As Dua Lipa blows a flirty kiss from a yellow spray-paint circle, an insurgent in a balaclava lurks over her shoulder, and fighters in photo-negative white march across the canvas. Drake, decked in a sleek gold chain, is superimposed atop an array of grave, spectral military leaders, the Weeknd appears to be exhaling a strand of huddled refugees, and even the dove of peace turns out to be a company logo.

This is not merely ironic juxtaposition. It’s also an acknowledgement that the art star, flattened to two dimensions and rendered in high contrast like a corporate insignia, is an industrial export. Because Denis Ouch respects these musicians and understands the power of the images they’ve made — and because of his arresting use of bright spray-paint color, bright as the painted cosmetics on Warhol’s images of Chairman Mao — he’s able to keep the elements in his canvases in a kind of eerie balance. The face of the star, and the qualities it represents, captures the viewer’s attention and imagination first. Yet the closer you look at the canvas, the more you’ll see: foreign street scenes and hooded riflemen, cannons, the gigantic, crushing wheels of armored vehicles. Is pop entertainment just a distraction from the horrors of a world in grave danger, and are pop artists, however well meaning, simply agents of that distraction?

Those of us who believe in the power of popular music — and that includes Denis Ouch and Stephanie Geremito — would surely argue that it’s more complicated than that. Pop stars, even at their most superficial, really do have the ability to unite and inspire millions of people, and that influence is felt transnationally, in defiance of borders and government restrictions. Artists who’ve got the talent and charisma to project their personality and their ideas across the void of consumer space are vanishingly rare: if it was easy to manufacture a Taylor Swift or a Beyoncé, another one would have been fabricated by now. These artists may or may not reflect the times, as Nina Simone would have them do, but they certainly do channel and shape the dreams of their fans, and maybe even those who aren’t fans, but could be if they’d only listen without prejudice. That’s why we keep painting them, and drawing them, and silk-screening them, and emblazoning their faces on t-shirts and tote bags. It’s why we’re desperate to enlist them in our political causes, and why we chase after their fantastic energy like kids with butterfly nets. We all know it: what they do is the closest thing to magic we’ll ever find in this material world.

News Briefs

Mayor Steven Fulop joined Public Safety Director James Shea and Fire Chief Steven McGill today to announce two brand new fire companies and officially launch a newly created specialized response team, the JCFD High-rise Unit, to respond to all high-rise fires and all working fires as a Rapid Intervention Crew (RIC).  The last fire company added to the Jersey City Fire Department was in 1937.

The Hudson County Board of Commissioners has provided $195,000 for services provided to inmates through the Housing and Reintegration Program of the Hudson County Department of Family Services. The program provides services that inmates can use for housing, substance abuse treatment, clinical care, mental health, obtain medications and go to job training and job search services.

This program also provides the County Department of Housing and Community Reintegration access to 40 transitional housing beds. The program runs from June 1, 2022 through January 31, 2023.

Mayor Fulop has announced the creation of a $20 per hour Living Wage Statute for all full-time Jersey City employees. As part of the City’s 2022-2023 fiscal year budget, the Living Wage Statute will boost salaries for hundreds of current and future Jersey City residents and workers from $17 (already one of the highest minimum wage rates in the nation) to $20 per hour – which is $7 more than New Jersey’s current hourly minimum wage.

 

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