Atlanta producer and lyricist UNDA presents the aqueous album that is Tomorrow Never Comes. From the get-go, the six-track compilation plays proof of its condemned title. As the sole character, UNDA narrates the candid desires of his liquidated mind; under an intoxicated trance in his intro track “Dear Aquarius,” he spills out not-so-sweet nothings to an estranged someone. His words seem to seek this assumed lover’s echo while they tread through the prolonged thrashes of an electric guitar. The tone is set and this drunken tale is assumed to be damned.

In anticipating the non-arrival of a hazy morn, Tomorrow Never Comes is the gray area between now and then – that is, if then ever arrives. UNDA and guest artist Kazhmir Haze entertain the suspense. With spoken word interjections and the pings and womps of an numbly expressive synthesizer, the album itself is a trip – a trip with no beginning and no end, simply a lingering suspect. “My life’s best slogan wasn’t spoken”, says UNDA.

And, at any rate, neither is Tomorrow.

~

Aside from the story, the album’s cross-breed demeanor makes it fitting for any context. Mixing space age electronica with Hip Hop and jazz, Tomorrow Never Comes experiments with the innovative sound. Stepping foot into the genre-less age, the direction UNDA has taken Today with his music may allude to that of Tomorrow.

London-based artist Word To Mother‘s latest collection of works features his distinctive visual assemblages of figures, patterns and typography painted in mixed media on wooden panels. Drawing from his own experiences in recent years, the state of the economy, and riots on his doorstep Can’t Afford To Be Broke sees Word To Mother showing a sense of desperate yet hopeful pieces, using familiar references of both current and vintage popular culture icons, which evoke a sense of humor amongst more melancholic figures. Delving deeper into his exploration of color, Word to Mother expands into more primary tones alongside his usual favored natural palette. Gestural marks are layered and ‘buffed’ to create textured expanses of muted tones with injections of fluorescent reds and oranges appearing like small explosions of optimism amongst an overcast sky.

Drawing from his own experiences in recent years, the state of the economy, and riots on his doorstep Can’t Afford To Be Broke sees Word To Mother showing a sense of desperate yet hopeful pieces, using familiar references of both current and vintage popular culture icons, which evoke a sense of humor amongst more melancholic figures. Delving deeper into his exploration of color, Word to Mother expands into more primary tones alongside his usual favored natural palette. Gestural marks are layered and ‘buffed’ to create textured expanses of muted tones with injections of fluorescent reds and oranges appearing like small explosions of optimism amongst an overcast sky.

With wooden assemblages featuring smaller studies, text pieces and collections of salvaged items next to large scale paintings, there is a balance of subtlety contrasted with Word To Mother’s sense of humor and directness that can be summed-up perfectly in the “Fuck You Pay Me” Baseball bat pieces. Can’t Afford to be Broke sees a maturity in painting and a hand-crafted feel that is ever-present in Word To Mother’s pieces, resulting in what we believe is his strongest collection of works to date.

“Everyone’s perception of ‘Broke’ is different. It’s all relative to our situation. In situations where celebrity riches and materialistic lifestyles are portrayed by the media, we have been conditioned to feel more valued as an individual based upon what we own, rather than our actions.

People are emotionally broke, financially broke, and physically broke, from the structure of the society we live in. Unless we educate ourselves, work hard, and take the right risks, we won’t get anywhere. We won’t get out. We will continue to be broke.

I can’t afford to be broke.”

- Word To Mother

I’m sitting in Panera Bread feeling plum crazy.  I don’t know if it’s the whirlwind of daily chaos or my excitement of hearing Fiona Apple’s new song, “Every Single Night.” I don’t know what it is, but I do know I feel crazy. As I have learned, feeling something and being something isn’t the same thing. Although, I’ve also learned being and feeling is not that far of a discrepancy.

The beginning of “Every Single Night” is a lullaby that makes me feel relaxed and inspires thoughts of dancing sugar plums in my head. My heart rate slows. My mind is focused solely on the melody, and my head feels lighter. Just like that, I went from feeling relaxed to actually physically being relaxed. Changing a feeling to a state of being is as easy as Sunday morning, and takes less time than Fiona Apple takes to put out an album.

That’s a comforting thought, until I revisit me feeling crazier than a soup sandwich. It’s not something I can just ignore or suppress. I am what I am, and I does what I does.  This feeling of insanity is far from a habit waiting to be broken. This is a part of me as embedded in me as my gender, race, and sexuality. It’s probably a huge part of why the devil can’t get around me. Essentially, I was born this crazy.

Even crazier, culturally speaking, is the fact that I have been preconditioned to not discuss when I think something shifty might be going on in my noggin. Depression, bi-polar, ADHD, trauma, and all of those other things are to be closeted and swept under the rug. Therapy is for crazies, and there’s nothing going on in your mind that God can’t fix. And in extreme cases when God doesn’t move fast enough, we can call on Oprah.

The result is me waking up in the morning to a cup of coffee to shake the depression. Not before long, I have a cigarette in order for the nicotine to numb the trauma. I create different lives via social media to ease the intensity of the bi-polar. Finally, I work too hard, self-deprecate too often, and love entirely too many people at once to pacify the ADHD. Alas, every single night is a fight with my brain. It’s a tribal stomp of warfare. Archaic growls can be heard in the white strait-jacket crescendo that often happens right before my slumber. That’s when the pain comes in like a second skeleton trying to fit beneath the skin. It’s the art of crazy and war; it’s a requiem for insanity.

I soon fall asleep and wake-up, and do it all over again. Not telling anyone because that’s the law of culture, and the mind game that I decided to play with myself. Besides, I’m already slightly paranoid and I don’t need a crazy little secret to come out and make the paranoia worse. The weed intensifies it, but the tequila neutralizes it.

Sometimes, there are moments of clarity between the funk. Moments where I think of how it would be to be able to address what it is haunting me.  Let the caterpillars that I call my problems transform into what they were meant to be, and let the butterflies loose in my brain, and flood out my mouth into a professional’s ear to land on their mind like a sunflower.  Those daydreams of a free mind and conscious get trapped in a glass jar, until they suffocate because society says no. The reason is still unknown, but I suspect it’s because a lot of people are a little crazy and don’t want to discuss it because their thoughts are too demented to spill out on a big, comfy couch. I’m left with my own insanity and that’s okay.

Like most crazy people, I don’t really want help. I desire acceptance. I don’t think that idea is too disturbed, or far-fetched.  I’d enjoy going through this life as boy, interrupted as long as I was given my due credit for my bravery and patience. I don’t want to medicate myself into numbness just to oblige other people’s comfort. I want to live joyously and insanely and openly. Simply, I just want to feel everything.

“‘Cause I does what I does“

Good music speaks volumes… rather than impose analysis, step back and expose linguistic artistry… why critique that which has achieved perfection at its own masterful conception… listen, look, and linger in fantastic rhythmic reality: lyrically speaking

Kenna – Baptized in Blacklight (2007)

Like a healer she comes to me with solace for my spirit
Thoughts in cages locked in mazes hearin’ echoes of yesterday
Met my demons, fightin’ angels 7 times a million ties
Through phases and ages consumed by the fire

Still when the sun goes out and the night is all a haze
Let the flood come down and wash it all away
Baptized in blacklight, I feel your touch and I’m whole again

Now I’m a criminal who surrendered, found my truth in the consequence
Blind but guided, divided with a mind that’s born again
When I needed you entered, you entered, you entered
Fixin’ broken, broken pieces, singin’ hallelujah

When the sun goes out and the night is all a haze
Let the flood come down and wash it all away
Baptized in blacklight, I feel your touch and I’m whole again

Still when the sun goes out and the night is all a haze
Let the flood come down and wash it all away
Baptized in blacklight, I feel your touch and
Baptized in blacklight, I feel your touch and
I’m baptized in blacklight, I feel your touch and I’m whole again

After being away, moving into a new flat and studio UK based painter George-Morton Clark has finally got down to some painting. And from the looks of these new oil paintings George sent over to us, he’s up to his same magical tricks. The twist is the shards of an evolved style which now plays off a collage like style he achieves through brushstrokes.

On Left: “” BURIED IN LEAD  On Right: “LAUGHABLE VIOLENCE” 100CM X 70 CM OIL ON CANVAS

“FIVE” 100CM X 70 CM OIL ON CANVAS

“If you take your clothes off, it’s amazing what will happen,” said pop superstar Lady Gaga on her 2011 David Letterman appearance. Gaga spoke of playing in a club in New York pre-fame, when her name was still Stefani Germanotta, and commented that no one paid attention to her during her set until she stripped down to nothing but bra and panties. Of course, that was just the tip of the iceberg for Lady Gaga’s attention-catching fashion choices and controversial stage performances. But it leaves one to wonder, is a complete one-eighty-degree flip in image and performance necessary in order to follow one’s dreams? And more commonly, with enough shocking and captivating pieces to make headlines for the next five years, is it shock value, or is it art?

Gaga will be the first to tell you that she writes each song with an outfit in mind. “It’s all about everything together – performance art, pop performance art, fashion.” There’s a valid, and descriptive reason for each shocking piece. Her iconic, hanging dead from the ceiling, 2009 VMA performance of Paparazzi, arguably the one that solidified her stardom, represented how fame kills. The most notorious of Gaga’s fashion statements is undoubtedly the raw meat dress she wore to the 2010 MTV VMA. After much controversy and angry statements from PETA, Gaga stated that “…If we don’t stand up for what we believe in and if we don’t fight for our rights, pretty soon we’re going to have as much rights as the meat on our own bones. And, I am not a piece of meat.” At the 2011 VMA, Gaga performed her single, “You and I” as her slick-haired, cigarette-smoking, alter-ego Jo Calderone. Seeing as he made an appearance in the music video for You and I, it only made sense that she included him for her stage performance and her appearance for the entire night, even making sexual jokes towards pop princess Britney Spears. Gaga’s most recently dubbed controversial piece is the one she created for her single, “Marry the Night.”

“But, I’m an artist. What do you mean give up?”

So how exactly does one ‘marry the night’? Gaga showed the world her struggle to the top in her music video for the single and illustrates being dropped from her record label and the breakdown that followed. The video is close to fourteen minutes, with the first eight minutes consisting of the singer attempting to light a cigarette on a hospital bed, wearing menstrual pads on her breasts, and pouring Cheerios all over her nude body. It is only when she is on the phone with her label, lying on a mattress on the floor with eyeliner winged to the high heavens, that she utters in protest, “But I’m an artist.” Preceding her breakdown, she bleaches her hair blonde and makes over her style, telling the viewer that she did what any other girl would do, she “did it all over again.”

Would you do it all over again? If you’re looking to climb your way to the top, maybe a reinvention or two couldn’t hurt. Whether it’s by bleaching your hair blonde or donning a dress made out of stuffed Kermit the Frog dolls, or even developing a male alter ego. It worked for Stefani Germanotta, and it worked more than well. Whether or not she is simply expressing her inner Boy George or attempting to keep herself relevant for as long as humanly possible, it’s safe to say that Lady Gaga is here to stay. The year is still young and we can expect a whole new string of wild and gaudy fashion pieces and explanations of said pieces on Leno the next day. Is it art? Possibly. Does it turn heads in one-hundred-and-ninety-five countries? Without a doubt in anyone’s mind. Cunningly enough, she’s got us all right where she wants us – in captivation, in awe, and in near-hysterics over the legitimacy of her image, and the authenticity of her mark as a true artist.

“Every bit of me is devoted to love and art.”

- Lady GaGa

Good music speaks volumes… linger in fantastic rhythmic reality: lyrically speaking

A boy is born in hard time Mississippi
Surrounded by four walls that ain’t so pretty
His parents give him love and affection
To keep him strong moving in the right direction
Living just enough, just enough for the city…

His father works some days for fourteen hours
And you can bet he barely makes a dollar
His mother goes to scrub the floor for many
And you’d best believe she hardly gets a penny
Living just enough, just enough for the city…yeah

His sister’s black but she is sho ’nuff pretty
Her skirt is short but Lord her legs are sturdy
To walk to school she’s got to get up early
Her clothes are old but never are they dirty
Living just enough, just enough for the city…um hum

Her brother’s smart he’s got more sense than many
His patience’s long but soon he won’t have any
To find a job is like a haystack needle
Cause where he lives they don’t use colored people
Living just enough, just enough for the city…
Living just enough…
For the city…ooh,ooh 

His hair is long, his feet are hard and gritty
He spends his love walking the streets of New York City
He’s almost dead from breathing on air pollution
He tried to vote but to him there’s no solution
Living just enough, just enough for the city…

I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow
And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow
This place is cruel no where could be much colder
If we don’t change the world will soon be over
Living just enough, just enough for the citayyyy

La, la, la, la, la, la,
Da Ba Da Da Da Da Da Da
Da Da Da Da Da Da
Da Ba Da Da Da Da Da Da Da

Justin Timberlake can bring sexy back, but he couldn’t revive MySpace if he tried. And while I loved discovering new music, having a selective Top 8, and spending hours editing the html coding on my profile layout – there’s no sense in beating a dead horse. In 2008, Facebook slowly crept its way into popularity. It was new, fresh, easy to use, looked nothing close to MySpace, and it took the majority of today’s youth along with it.

We didn’t want our parents on MySpace, for fear of them cramping our style or reading our personal blog posts. Now, times have changed, and we don’t want our parents on Facebook for an entirely different list of reasons. What sixteen year old girl wants her father to see photos of her playing beer pong on a Tuesday night when she was supposedly out studying, or what seventeen year old boy wants his mother to see his repeated explicit statuses about ‘pussy, money, and weed’? MySpace was the secret social life we had in addition to our already real-life social life. We kept the two almost separate, and our online self was like an alter ego.

Now, we’ve combined the two. We put our entire life on our Facebook page – risqué bikini photos, public break ups, where we go to school, why our minimum wage jobs suck – and we think we’re completely safe. We think this is what we have to do, that is the quota we have to fill, that unless we drink until we’re sick and make fourteen statuses about the color of our vomit, we’ll be condemned to the ‘un-cool’ side of life. How do you expect to fit in with the popular kids if you post statuses studying, pictures in one piece swim suits, and stay out of heated group message arguments?

But there’s that Drake-made popular saying again; you only live once. So why care about what potential employers or college recruiters see if they typed your name in to the Google search engine? You’ve only got one life to live, and you might as well live to the fullest. That’s what any teen will tell you, but they’ve sadly taken it into the absolute wrong context. The saying means to take risks and chances – going on a first date, climbing Mount Everest, applying to the school of your dreams even if you’re afraid you won’t get in. Although I’m quite sure Drizzy Drake was talking about that kind of living, I don’t think he was encouraging kids to abandon all morals.

Of course, not many parents listen to Drake, and not many parents are aware of what their teenager does online.  They know they spend x amount of hours on Facebook talking to their friends and it’s because of that they feel the need to make an account themselves in order to connect with their child on that friend level. What they don’t expect, is for their child to block their profile immediately upon receiving their friend request. Having your parent as a Facebook friend – the thought of them actually commenting on your photos where your friends would see – is the very definition of un-cool. Not only is it ‘totes lames’ but what would your Mom say to seeing your posts about ‘gettin’ fxed uuupp11!!1’ or pictures of you tonguing the college guy who rings up your produce at the market down the street? Not sure if that’s a conversation that would go well at the family dinner table.

Despite all of the ugly, Facebook has its benefits. You can reconnect with old friends or send an IM to someone from your History class to get an assignment you missed or you can even keep up to date with your favorite bands or musicians. Teens post photo albums of their Quinceañeras, trips to the beach, concerts, and post statuses about acing their final exams or hanging out with friends. Adults use the site like a more modern Classmates.com and find people from their senior high school class.

So no, not all of us put our lives online and use our social network profiles to showcase our Friday nights out with the girls or our weekend parties. But whether the Internet is used for good or for evil, fact of the matter is that the Digital Age has taken over. We can’t keep our youth off the Internet, no matter how hard we try. We can either charge towards it with torches and pitchforks, or sit back and wonder if our children’s children will be Facebook pros, or if they’ll even remember the site at all. Either outcome, the Digital Age has got us right where it wants us, and it doesn’t plan on letting us out any time soon.

Sleep evades artists. At least the ones I know. Because, what are dreams to a dreamer when the grind and the night elope?

As The City Sleeps opening this Saturday at the MINT Gallery in Atlanta, GA plans to chronicle the mind’s of artists while everybody else is nodding off. Curated by Atlanta artists Brandi Supra and Sean Fahie, the exhibit will feature artists Emily Pidgeon, Estela Semeco, Jane Garver, Nikita Gale and Will Mitchell and focus on the artists’ interpretations of what “Night” and life during this time represents to them.

Freedom, that glorious word which drives America through each day and each era and is so important to us… it’s been completely revoked from our new milieu, and we’re totally okay with it. Freedom of speech is currently under siege (SOPA and PIPA). We don’t have freedom of choice—and we love it. Creativity, too, is gone; restriction strictly enforced. Individuality, au revoir. It’s the Internet age, babe, better get used to it.

Plugging along through the plugged-in world most of us have grown so necessarily connected to, a revelation quickly reifies: our treasured social media is the business district of the Internet metropolis. And if the Occupy movement has proved anything, it’s that the business district is a deplorable one. Suits move like a pinstriped tide in and out of towers wherein profit-mongering companies operate, grow, and absorb through means of control and restriction. A grey metaphor? Perhaps. But not entirely inaccurate—save for the villainous picture it paints of big business, because not all big corporations, after all, are freedom-revoking socio-economic control freaks—dictators of a new dimension—but it sure seems like it to the average user. By and large, we like our web-based freedom, and we like it free. Yet, looking back just a handful of years in the past and it’s clear: freedom means little, and little is free.

By whatever degree of legality you care to uphold within the electronic world (or the elemental one, for that matter), you can’t deny the fact that said free-ness is cool. Remember when Napster took the block out from under the music industry, damn well sending it into an economic Jenga-wobble thanks to free tunes for everyone? That was cool. Remember when AOL e-mail cost money? Probably not, because that was lame, and in no time cool Hotmail and Yahoo came along and were free. Damn cool! G-mail is pretty cool; it has all kinds of gadgets and toys, all free. And MySpace? Short lived, but free, and effectually cool. So cool, Facebook came along and humbled it, asserting social media as both the new cool thing, and impossible if not free.

Thing is, there’s a bevy of money in that free and, as I’ve stated, not a lot of freedom. What more does Facebook allow you to do that you couldn’t do before with any number of programs (or in the real world with a phone number and a mailing address)? Practically nothing. But here’s the catch: no self-expression. Imagine you and your thousand-some-odd Facebook friends standing in a uniform line… anyone who’s attended private school is going to have despairing recollections of sameness. Apart from your faces and freckly epidermis (i.e. profile picture and other apps) you and your friends have nearly exactly the same appearance. But it’s cool, we’ve been convinced, because it’s clean, trim, and sharp, and if you want creative, individualized freedom, go elsewhere on the Internet. Like Instagram.

The problem being, while the futures of dot-com businesses were previously uncertain, modern web-based companies are finding solid ground and a safe road ahead, with economic security all but assured. Google, Amazon, Facebook … these guys made it, and they’ll be sticking around for a while. One form of proof is in the exorbitant funds exchanged in deals and acquisitions; most recently the latter’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram. To many people, the buy, which happened April 9th, is new news. For others, it was an iniquitous move and a blow to cool. Because, even though Facebook’s hottest feature is photo-sharing capability, there were people out there who shunned that aspect of the social media giant and went elsewhere for cool image sharing. Instantly, to this faction, Instagram was no longer cool.

Devotees of the camera phone flash-editor may look at the recent acquisition and sigh (sigh), make statements of retort amongst their hip clique, and spout claims of abandonment and claims of “uncool,” but take an objective view, like from a high loft overlooking all things, and ask yourself if Instagram is really, actually, truly cool. The Instagram ideology in a nutshell: take a downward-view picture of your shoes (or any common thing in view) with your eight-mega-pixel smartphone, blanket it with a retro filter, post it to Facebook (not that you have to, but you would) so people can “like” it. What talent! Damn, you’re a skilful photographer. Meanwhile, there are properly hip dudes and chicks out there with 8mm film, tweaking the aperture on their Rolleiflex to actually create laudable images.

The whole thing bares some resemblance to Indie music from the hipster point of view. Say you’re a talented unsigned singer. As your pirated album spreads, you become cooler and cooler in the low-key, underground music scene. Most of the world has never heard your songs, but hipsters have—and they like what they hear; they dig you because of your selective popularity. Then you get signed, become famous, receive massive radio play and numerous YouTube video reduxs. Now it’s not just the stylishly unshaven, tight-jean-and-plaid-wearing kids on campus who listen to you—everyone does. You’re so popular your every move is scrutinized by TMZ. You take a social swan dive into a drained pool, only to rebound thanks to an SNL parody of your pathetic performance… which suddenly makes you cool again. (“Ladies and gentlemen, back by unpopular demand, Lana Del Rey!”)

So what does Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram say about the perception of cool? Not a damn thing. In no time, if we haven’t already, we’ll forget the acquisition ever happened; we’ll continue on our day-to-day in our thousand-friend (anti)social media milieu, business as business, as it always was. The Internet meme will continue its exceptionally capitalistic parade. We’ll be controlled, we’ll backlash, we’ll acquiesce; then we’ll find something else cool and untouched by mega business. We’ll indulge and get buzzed for a bit on that lofty cool thing until the cyclical process repeats itself, and we’ll wish for the old way, the earlier version, and bitch again about the lost sanctity of our Internet freedom, which we never had in the first place.

It was the brooding energy of a sweaty dark night in East Atlanta nightclub, The Basement. That particular night was like most other nights, in Atlanta, surely around the globe, in which local people with the spattering out-of-towners gather for one ever connecting force: live music. Of course live music does not guarantee good music or even a good time but it does ensure that the lack of inactivity will provide a backdrop for the rest of the evening. I’m here waiting for singer/songwriter BOSCO.

And so, in the early part of the evening when the crowd had a few drinks in their system and swayed slightly from the prerecorded sounds we all waited with intense anticipation for the the first drum hit, the first guitar strum, the first words sung by BOSCO. Her empyrean vocals textured with the bands unblemished flow of sound created the type of energy that propelled the rest of the night forward and left an imprint on the audience. She later proclaimed to the world, via twitter “Tonight was my best performance ever. Never felt so [confident].”

I wanted to know where this new found confidence came from, but more importantly, where it was going. After all we are talking about a woman who is not new to publicity, has had international reach, multiple musical releases and a bevy of performances. I wait For BOSCO in the farthest corner of The Porter, a dark and wood laced bar nestled in Atlanta’s Little Five Points artist community. She is running a bit late but texts me her apologies. Soon though, she’s walking up the wide steps towards me. Legs exposed in tiny jean cut-offs and a loose white tee with big red lips splattered across the chest, she looks at me through large clear frames, “Sorry I’m late.” She says. “Are you eating?” And that is where our interview begins. We order a couple of beers and start our conversation. I tell her that I was thoroughly impressed with her performance and asked if her recent SXSW show had anything to do with her recent performance at The Basement. She tells me that her time in SXSW exposed to her such a great level of professionalism amongst artist and attention to detail that possibly that had something to do with it, but that is not the whole of it.

As we sip beers and eventually munch on french fries she tells me “I’ve had forty-eight rebirths,” and with a quick laugh she adds “and they are complete rebirths.” She could be talking about her love of changing clothes and looks, but she is not. The singer is talking about how she has gone from a neo-soul singer (or something like it) to completely out of the music industry (or something like it) and then reemerging as an ethereal post punk kid (or something like it). And this type of rebirth is most likely where her new confidence is stemming from, a place where creativity can thrive and grow knowing at any time, more, new or different forms of creativity can be born again and again and again. But even regeneration like this can’t combat everything that comes with being an underground artist.

“I need a mentor,” she professes and twirls her cropped curls with her fingers. She looks to the distance and sights that in the past female singers like Brandy had successful mentors like Whitney Houston to encourage and guide them. “Now,” she tells me “we have gatekeepers; you have to pay your dues.” The idea is that these “gatekeepers” are more interested in being the dictators of cool and maintaining their position and less interested in being anyone’s mentor. This may be in part why she parted ways with her long term management and instead is heading most of the decisions for the BOSCO Band. Luckily, in her band she has a lot of support and talent.

The BOSCO Band which consists of Brittany Bosco, Ira G. a hip hop and r&b producer (electronics) , three members of the post punk and soul quartet Tandaberry; Shane Orange (keys), Jonathan Merenivitch (guitar) and Carlton Knight (bass) and John the drummer have chosen an interesting path to navigate. In an industry that is decidedly boxy and square, BOSCO is decidedly triangle. Whereas most bands might feel it imperative to stick to the standard songwriting model, The band has no issue with releasing a song with no hook or form of repetition. And, in their Latest EP, Let Go of Me, the song with the most commercial appeal, “Joker,” was released with a barefaced video about domestic abuse, rape and revenge. This group of musicians doesn’t do what’s expected of them, and they do that well. Their live show is headed by BOSCO who is simultaneously energetic and harmonious, and grounded by the band who seamlessly guide and carry her through songs. There is also confetti. “When you come to a Bosco show, it’s all encompassing; you’re in her world,” she speaks softly, and with a little self-thought she adds “you’re in its world.” It is here that I notice that there is a disconnect between the woman who I am calling BOSCO, the woman who she is calling BOSCO and the woman who I am talking to, Brittany. I don’t ask her about that right away; completely convinced it will come up again.

Instead, I ask her about the closeness of her band to which she informs me “We are close, we sometimes watch porn together.” I smile than giggle. And when I ask her will there be any more changes to the band that was once technically just one girl. She tells me with a virtuous tone “There are short term distance runners and long term distance runners but they are all on the same team.” And when I ask her what’s her relationship with her friend and band mate Ira G. she gives me the most riotous and cavalier laugh and before she answers, looks me square in the eye and asks why I am curious. Figuring that she has an idea where I’m heading with my questioning I tell her that I am curious if he produced any of her music. And giving full disclosure I confess that based and on what I have seen of them at shows and on twitter there seems to be a proclivity and trust there. She searches my face and in her hushed yet assertive tone starts to talk. “Me and Ira have a passion to get shit done. I met him a while ago and he said ‘I don’t care if we play together or not I want to do everything in my power to help you.’” She nods her head and sips her beer, then finishes “And he has stuck to that.”

“BOSCO,” I ask “what’s your love life like?” Without a pause or thought she quips, “Nonexistent!” We both laugh and then she corrects me, “You know BOSCO and Brittany are two totally different people, BOSCO consumes Brittany”. Bingo, we got back to it. “Men are intimidated by BOSCO and so they never meet Brittany.” I inquire about the differences between Brittany and BOSCO. “BOSCO gets what she wants and takes what she wants, I spend so much time being BOSCO that Brittany suffers, Brittany is the girl from Savannah, she’s very sweet, chill and loves nature.” She goes on to say “I don’t want this industry to make me cold, I feel like I’ve lost a lot of emotions in this career.” This fear of ruin is a very legit one. We’ve seen it time and time again. Sweet, normal and talented people are raised respectfully and then re-raised and tainted by the entertainment industry. And we’ve also seen the artist; underground, mainstream and otherwise who give it their best try and are under-appreciated and fizzle out. But this might be where she has the universal advantage with Brittany helping BOSCO and BOSCO helping Brittany and cumulatively being exactly who she is supposed to be, Brittany Bosco. She is equal parts business savvy and creative, demure and bold and protected and protective. She tells me from one part of herself that she “respects anyone who has a great brand and follow through.” Perhaps she is unaware that she possesses exactly what she respects. Since the time of this interview she has planned a tour, traveled across the coast for her brand, done radio spots and additional shows and continually marketed the BOSCO brand. From another part of herself she tells me “Sometimes I feel like if it doesn’t happen this year, this is my last real try.” Little does she realize (or perhaps she’s perfectly aware) that it is happening, and she doesn’t need to try because she is doing.

Philip Sportel created this awesome text based installation recently at Community 54 in Tornoto, Canada. The filmed footage became the visual accompanyment to Colin Munroe’s latest song “Invincible” featuring RZA & Memoryhouse.

Visit Community 54 to see the “Invincible” installation in person…