If punk music runs in Chicago’s blood, The Breathing Light is the force that drives the circulation. When we meet up on a cold Tuesday, they crack jokes about the security guards at Navy Pier speeding through crowds on their scooters, and then, just as easily transition into chopping it up about levitating vehicles being the future. The band mates met at Alabama A&M University, where it was chemistry and “brothers-and-sisters-love-at-first-sight”. They continue to ascend in the passionate, frenzied, evolving world of D-I-Y punk rock music in Chicago. Thug Scholar: Tell me how y’all fell in love with punk music. Kyle: I had got this video game; I guess, like, around 1997. And it was a skating game, called Street Sk8r, like S-K-A-8-R, and it had H2O and Penny Wise, and a bunch of other folks on there. At the time I was really into skating, and rollerblading and stuff like that, so I figured that if you’re gonna be a part of that stuff, you gotta listen to the music that they listen to. I just would play the game and listen to the music and just got into it, but I didn’t realize it was punk until later on. In high school, I started looking up hard core punk, like, “What did that sound like?” I came across Bad Brains and Adolescents and all these other bands, and I figured out that, “Oh! That’s the same stuff I was listening to in the game.” Camille: I didn’t even know that, pretty much the same as Kyle, that the mainstream stuff that we would play, like the Clash and the Cure--I didn’t even know it was a type of punk music, for real. I've always been open to all different type of genres, so that was already a given. When I started playing with Kyle, it was a lot I didn’t know that I was already kind of attracted to. One thing that really got me into punk music, you know, for some of the songs, was the tenacity and the fastness of it; I like playing fast. And [the movie] Scott Pilgrim, I’ll be honest, that’s what really opened me up to really wanting to go full force into the punk world and understanding it. TS: You have a lot of socio-political messages in your music and in your videos like “The KKK took my baby away” and “Friends”. How does your identity as Black people influence the music you make? Kyle: I mean, for the band to come from Alabama to Chicago, is basically going back to how the blues came up here from the South, that’s number one. And we all started at an HBCU, so even beyond that, all of us have been listening to Black music since we were children, and we've all been taught by Black musicians from grade school bands to high school bands. We've always been around that kind of music, and it’s been a part of our lives consistently. So that, coming along with the climate of today.…I mean, I've always had a lot of things I wanted to say, and Camille has always had a lot of things that she wanted to say; we've all had a lot of things that we've wanted to say, and now we have a platform and a new way of doing stuff other than hip-hop. TS: Why do you think some people still have the impression that punk rock is a white boy thing?
Camille: Because that’s all the industry pushes. If you go on YouTube, and even Wikipedia, and you put in the names of certain artists and who they were influenced by, and you keep searching, you’ll see a long list of a lot of different indie bands that are out there that are coming up, especially in this generation. Me and Kyle have these conversations all the time: people look to be entertained. So, of course, they’re only gonna look at the surface level of what’s already out there. Just being out here in Chicago alone, I've seen a lot of different mixtures of bands; I've seen all women bands. I've seen all POC bands, us being one of them. So it’s like, we’re out there. Really…you just have to look…you gotta really want to find it. It’s a misconception. A lot of people…either just don’t know or don’t care to find out that a lot of the music has roots into deeper things. Like punk rock, even hip hop, all derived from blues, a lot of different deeply rooted jazz and blues transitions. Punk is definitely bigger than what you see. In every different genre of punk, you will find different POC people. Next: Being misunderstood, the future of punk in the Black community, and the legacy of the Breathing Light…
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ATS MagAgainst the Stream Magazine is an urban platform. We edify our readers by finding noble, pure, and true talent and giving it a stage to flourish. While we love bragging about the folks around us, we also tackle urban issues by giving real world solutions. Archives
September 2015
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