New York city guideCMJ 2015As the CMJ Music Marathon kicks off, genre-defying band Show Me The Body offer their guide to the city they grew up in and have seen change drastically
This week, New York City becomes a playground for music industry tourists seeking to discover bands about to ‘break through’. This is the CMJ Music Marathon, a 35-year-old autumn tradition where college radio kids and business people flock to the city for a week of showcases and networking available to those with a $549 badge. In advance of the festival, we asked one of the city’s most compelling new groups, Show Me The Body, to show us what’s really happening in New York right now.
Show Me The Body’s creaking, loud-quiet-loud noise-punk is laced with traces of the city, in its wiry, dissonant banjo plucks and rapid-fire hip-hop vocal delivery. On a Friday morning, the band’s 21-year-old frontman, Julian Cashwan Pratt, is picking apart the way the city has manifested itself in their sound. “In one sense, the pure architecture of the city informs the sound,” he offers quickly. “The train, shit breaking, construction happening. All of that municipal state-ordered machinery is something we see a lot and is something I think is scary.”
On record, Pratt’s words twist and turn from bluesy mid-tempo singing to aggressive shrieks and straight-up hardcore shouts. Show Me The Body are young, but they are NYC lifers. Born and raised in the city, they make music that grapples with watching New York change and trying to find a place within it all, to push back and not just roll with the punches of everyday life. It is simultaneously weary and wired, the sound of spaces being filled and emptied, of feeling suffocated and gasping for air.
“The city is dying,” Pratt says. “I can’t really write love songs currently because the city is changing so hard and it’s happening in ways that are really sad. It’s displacing a lot of people. Friends and family are threatened with eviction every week … The punches the city throws at you are not human punches, they’re corporate punches. Shutting down stations people use, cops going hard on certain days to fill their quotas.”
The visceral feel of their recordings is actualized that afternoon as they tear through a set at the courtyard of City-As-School, a forward-thinking West Village public high school that encourages a sense of autonomy in it students through out-of-classroom work experience. It’s fitting that a band like Show Me The Body is playing the school’s first courtyard gig. The scene is like one from Rock ’n’ Roll High School: kids opening a mosh pit on the concrete, surrounded on three sides by five stories of brown-brick school building. Two songs in, when the rain starts to pour, the band throw a sweatshirt over their pedals and keep pushing as a more intense thunderstorm looms; by the end, Pratt is hitting himself over the head with the mic, falling to the ground, screeching amid thrashing teenagers.
“It’s not music I typically listen to but at the same time, it’s good, and providing a safe environment for kids to express themselves,” Alan Cheng, the school’s principal, tells me after the show, as the rain clears up.
Adds Max Rosencrans, the student who suggested booking the band: “It’s nice to see a bunch of angry high school kids in a mosh pit at the back of an alternative high school. It brings shit back to what New York used to be, like before Giuliani.”
Here’s the band’s guide to the New York they love and that people won’t necessarily see during CMJ.
Court Square Diner
Earlier in the day, Show Me The Body have me meet them in Long Island City, the Queens neighborhood where bassist Harlan Steed, also 21, grew up. (The trio is rounded out by 20-year-old drummer Noah Cohen-Corbett.) I meet up with Pratt first at Court Square diner. The diner’s stoop makes a quick appearance in their video for Vernon, which features a verse by Wiki of Ratking, a band they grew up with. Both bands are part of the Letter Racer collective. The video channels the kinetic frustration woven into their interrogation of everyday lifescapes – a conversation that gets pried open even more over breakfast. “In my book, if you’re not being subversive and you’re not doing it 100%, it’s bullshit,” Pratt says over eggs and toast. “If you’re living here and you’re not looking around thinking, ‘This is insane and scary and fucked up and how can we work together to solve this problem and make sure everyone still has a home?’ If you’re not thinking about that with what you’re creating, there’s no reason for you to be in this city.”
5 Pointz
Next, wandering around Long Island City, we pass what used to be 5 Pointz, a historic street art location at 45 Davis Street. For years, the massive building was covered in murals by artists from all over the world, but it was destroyed last fall to make room for condos. “I always sort of felt like 5 Pointz was this tucked away thing that could never be touched, and that there were certain things about the city that would never change,” Pratt says. “For me, it was this waking up moment that you’ve gotta fight for shit, otherwise it’ll go away. And motherfuckers with money are gonna make it go away.” Pratt tells me about his father, who used to work as a community organizer in New York around housing, eviction and tenant rights. “In some ways, Show Me The Body is our way of community organizing, of getting people together … Even if there’s not one message shared, there’s at least a commonly felt veracity, a commonly felt aggression and feeling and spirit amongst people.”
The changing face of the city
“Are you down with hopping a fence?” Pratt asks as we approach what he simply refers to as “the construction site”, an empty lot down by the waterfront, a 10-minute walk away from the diner. It’s a spot where he and Steed would hang as kids. Over the years, the space was always more or less abandoned, but on this particular day, it appears that the construction has finally begun. “This is insane, dude,” Pratt says in disbelief. “I never thought I’d see it. You came on a sad day. Don’t they look like awful machines mining the Earth for its goodness?” Staring back at the yellow cranes and mountains of dirt, Pratt explains what a big open space like this meant to his friends growing up – how spaces like this are invaluable to kids in highly commodified cities with little public space. “They just built luxury condominiums across the street,” he explains. “They’re going to turn this one into condos too. It’s a little microcosm.”
Harlan’s Place
Across town, we stop by Show Me The Body’s de facto home as a band, in the basement of a building of apartments and artist studios half-owned by Steed’s family. “This is where the magic happens,” he tells me, pointing to a little corner room in the basement, their practice space. “We once threw a show in here. It was kind of the sickest show we ever played. We played right here, kids were right here, it was hilarious,” Pratt says, pointing out a narrow boiler room.
Steed adds: “We did another one, our first EP release show – it was us and Ratking. We tried to do the show in the alleyway outside, but there were a bunch of noise complaints so we moved everything inside.”
Deli D-day
“All of these delis you won’t see any more because of people like the ones who come to New York for things like CMJ and don’t support the local economy,” Pratt explains while we make our way towards the subway, en route to City-As-School. “A lot of local businesses are closing throughout the city. Whole immigrant groups are going to start leaving the city, dead ass, because there’s going to be no local economy.” Delis that are about to close might seem like strange spots for the band to point out as they show me their take on New York, but the sentiment is real. “The city’s always fucking changing; it’s supposed to, that’s how it always is,” Pratt says. “We just have to make sure it’s in a way that is positive for humans and not just positive for tourists and rich kids.”
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