Mighty Mic’s Battle of the Bands to raise awareness for Somalia
courtesy of Bella Gibbs
Second-year English student Maria Tuadi, fourth from the left, is the lead singer of The Bricks. The band will be performing at Mighty Mic’s Battle of the Bands, which begins at 7:00 p.m. tonight in Kerckhoff Grand Salon.
Today, 7:00 p.m.
Kerckhoff Grand Salon, FREE
By Andrea Seikaly
Nov. 16, 2011 12:14 a.m.
Musical competition and social awareness will be brought together tonight during Mighty Mic’s Battle of the Bands 2012.
Mighty Mic, a nonprofit human rights organization run by students on campus for the past six years, is putting together tonight’s Battle of the Bands for the second year in a row.
Tonight’s event will feature five bands who will compete against each other during 12-minute sets. The winning band is chosen by the students who attend the show, and will serve as the opening act for Mighty Mic’s spring concert.
Mighty Mic co-director Kelly Rosenfeld, a fourth-year English student, said that she hopes this second presentation of Battle of the Bands will be as successful as last year’s in providing entertainment as well as promoting human rights awareness. This year’s event will feature music by The Internship, The Ten Thousand, The Bricks, Free Food and Alto.
“This year we had 33 applications, and we take into consideration different factors like the flow of the show and the style of music,” Rosenfeld said.
Rosenfeld also said there will be different styles of rock music with some of the bigger bands, while Alto is more string-based and The Bricks have a more varied sound.
According to Karen Leon, a fourth-year political science and international development studies student and Mighty Mic co-director, a different human rights issue is chosen for this event each year, with this year’s event focusing on the food and drought crisis in Somalia.
“Somalia is something that we see in the news every day, and we also wanted to take a different approach to human rights,” Leon said. “It is not only a drought issue or an environmental issue; it is also a social and political issue that is exacerbating the situation.”
Rosenfeld said that this social theme will be brought up during short educational segments that will be presented in between the musical performances.
“We try not to interrupt the flow of the show too much. We put up these segments during set breaks as bands are getting on and off the stage and are able to get the message out there,” Rosenfeld said.
Oliver Brown, a third-year ethnomusicology student and member of Free Food, said that his group was approached by Mighty Mic at one of their shows and described the band’s style and sound as experimental hip-hop.
“We experiment with a lot of sound textures and straight hip-hop beats. We do a lot of mixed time signatures so it is kind of like jazz and soul and a lot of fusion with hip-hop,” Brown said.
Fidel Rodriguez, producer of The Bricks, said that this eight-person band, whose lead singer is a UCLA student, was formed from a group of over 300 hopefuls who auditioned and plays music that combines several genres.
“The music is a little bit of everything ““ it is hip-hop, rock, soul and funk, but it is all intertwined together. You could say that they are a hip-hop and rock fusion with a little bit of world music,” Rodriguez said.
According to Brown, his band is looking forward to being able to support a social cause.
“Everyone in the group is pretty politically driven, so to be able to play for free and support a cause like this is important for us. Hip-hop is very much about having a voice. We spent a lot of time in rehearsal talking about how to make the environment of the music match the cause,” Brown said.
Leon also said that tonight’s event will be an opportunity for students to learn more about Somalia’s situation during an entertaining evening of music.
“At the end of the day, we are a human rights awareness organization and we want to spread our message through music,” Leon said. “I think the bands that we picked can definitely do that.”
