How do you start a revolution? Maybe all you need is a song.
For the better part of the past two years, Denver hip-hop group Flobots has been leading workshops across the country with one express goal: to give communities in unrest the tools to effectively rage against the machine.
For Flobots, that means teaching people how to sing. Not classically or even well — just together.
“Music makes action,” says Flobots MC Stephen Brackett, adding, “When you’re at a protest and you have songs that you all know, it’s so much more powerful than just screaming (at the police).”
Flobots have always had a revolutionary slant. Their biggest impact on the music world (and probably the reason you know their name) was the song “Handlebars,” a catchy, fast-clipped rap about the potential of the individual that peaked at No. 37 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 2008. The single thrust them into the national spotlight, a popularity they’ve ceded in favor of staying on message.
Last year, the death of the group’s mentor, professor Vincent Harding, compelled them to re-evaluate what that message was. Harding, an activist and speechwriter for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., would always ask the group the same question when they met at demonstrations: Where are the songs?
“At first we said, ‘What do you mean? We write them all the time,’ ” Brackett says. “But we realized that we weren’t writing music for the revolution — we were writing about the revolution.”
Flobots set out to study what Brackett calls “songs of the people.” They listened closely to Pete Seeger’s understated protest music and the songs of the American civil rights movement, including “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” These were simple songs — and often not all that original. “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” was derived from an old call-and-response slave song, and most of Seeger’s music was based on the same handful of cowboy chords.
Once they had the lesson, Flobots started teaching it. They took up residencies across Colorado, inviting communities such as San Luis’ Centennial High School and the Southern Ute Tribal Powwow to participate in their experimental music workshops.
The first step is persuading everyone that it’s OK to sing in public. “We say right off the bat: This is going to be awkward,” Brackett says, laughing. “Even though we’re professional musicians, it isn’t comfortable for us either, because there are so many unknowns.”
With a level playing field, they lead the group through a series of activities designed to find commonalities in everyone’s musical repertoire — what Brackett calls “proof of a cultural network.” Pop, rap, holiday music — any melody will do. Then, they begin the small task of finding the issues the community wants to address and setting them to their shared songs.
Brackett says the workshops have been successful, but the band can’t be everywhere. That’s where the new Flobots LP comes in. “NOENEMIES” will be a double album, featuring one disc of workshop-born protest songs and one of alternative hip-hop songs. True to form, the band is using the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter to forgo a record label and leave it to the people to decide whether it’s worthy.
The people have spoken: The band has exceeded its goal of $50,000. When the album gets funded, the band will go on a tour incorporating both discs of “NOENEMIES”: performance and community empowerment. Surplus funding would make the tour even more ambitious. They’d like to be able to build a performance rig that would let them tour off the grid.
They envision playing Denver’s Ogden Theatre one night, a barn in Cheyenne the next and an abandoned shopping m
all in Sacramento later that week. Brackett imagines shows as a mash-up of camping and concert, where fans could watch them perform and then hang out with them “by the bonfire out back” afterward. The next day, they might lead a workshop with those fans or hit the road.
If the band’s next phase sounds impossibly idealistic, that’s the point. “Protests are the most beautiful of civic arts,” Brackett says. “In that same spirit, we want our music to speak beyond performance.”
Dylan Owens: 303-954-1785, dowens@denverpost.com or @dylanacious
