Advocacy, Obstacles and Big Dreams: A Q&A with Upcoming Band Great Caesar
Great Caesar describes themselves as a “chamber rock band,” which may leave some people scratching their heads, but their talent as musicians makes categorizing feel unnecessary. The Brooklyn-based band has existed in a variety of forms since a few of the members met in high school 10 years or so ago. It took all of them graduating college and moving to New York to realize their dream as a group. Great Caesar is comprised of lead singer John-Michael Parker, bass guitarist Adam Glaser, saxophonist Stephen Chen, trumpet player Tom Sikes and guitarist Mike Farrell.
Now, their music video and song “Don’t Ask Me Why” have swept away social media users and music gurus alike, with the video gaining just under 200,000 views in the weeks after its release on YouTube. While the song follows two young people who are in love and have to overcome a physical obstacle (a flood), the music video tells the story of an interracial couple in the 1960s and two same-sex couples in the present day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcfmfaIYWRU
Dartbeat had the chance to talk with saxophonist Stephen Chen about Great Caesar’s success, the story behind “Don’t Ask Me Why” and what the future holds.
Dartbeat: Can you tell me a little bit about the band in general? How did you get started?
Stephen Chen: Many of the guys met in high school, so they played in high school. I joined when I was in college. I went to Yale and met the lead singer there. We were playing pretty casually and at the end of college, we decided that we had a special thing going, so we made plans to reconnect in New York after we all graduated. It’s tough to make ends meet so we’re trying to figure out how to make music and [make sure] everyone has a job. For the last two years we’ve been exploring what that’s like, and for the last eight months we’ve been working really hard on this project [for the music video]. We wanted to figure out how to make this band bigger than it had ever been, so we came up with this idea and pursued it and released [the video].
D: What’s the story behind the song “Don’t Ask Me Why”?
SC: When we first moved to New York, John was part of an education reform start-up called The Future Project. It sends young professionals into inner-city schools as mentors and it pushes the kids who sign up to find what they’re passionate about, dream big and go out and try to achieve that. We want to teach kids and inspire them to do something bigger with their lives and realize that their dreams are accomplishable. We ended up writing this song. It’s about dreaming big and marrying that with the courage to go out and do something and, in the face of danger, making the final leap of faith to achieve that. This whole project is almost a manifestation of the song. We wanted to make a big leap of faith, have a big dream and an extremely bold, ambitious idea and just go with it no matter what anybody said.
D: How did you come up with the idea for the music video?
SC: The song has been really important to us. We’ve all had a very personal connection to it, so we wanted to make a music video. We have a friend we’ve known for a while, Alex Colby, who’s a videographer, and we told him, “We want to make a music video that will change the world.” Then he came to us with a video idea that was about two young people falling in love, and we said, “Alex, this isn’t good enough. We’ve already seen this song inspire and move people. We want to use the music video to take the meaning and inspirational capacity to a whole new level.” He then called us up and described the video to us shot by shot, and we were literally moved to tears just by him telling these ideas, so we were like, “We’re gonna do this.” The actual plot was Alex’s idea, and as we got more into it, we did more research into the issues: what comparisons we should be careful about, who we should talk to. They’re sensitive topics, both civil rights and LGBT advocacy. There’s a lot to be said, so we delved deeper into those worlds. We’re all invested in the idea of civil rights and human rights, and as we got more involved, our personal involvement grew.
D: You used a Kickstarter campaign to fund this music video, and you ended up getting $15,000 more than your $35,000 goal. How did that feel?
SC: The Kickstarter platform was really good, but if you don’t get all of the money, then you don’t get any of it. We had already solicited and gotten some good donations from people initially. We thought we weren’t going to need Kickstarter, but then we lost a little momentum. We started shooting the video before the Kickstarter campaign was even done, so we were banking on it being a success. That campaign was about two and half or three weeks long. There were some big donations at the end. About two minutes before the expiration of the Kickstarter, we broke $50,000 and it was unbelievable. We were all gathered at this party on a rooftop, and it was crazy, almost surreal.
D: The music video for “Don’t Ask Me Why” has started to go viral. When I looked it was at just under 150,000 views since you uploaded it on January 15. What were your expectations for its reception? Note: This interview was conducted on January 31, and the video has now received almost 200,000 views.
SC: I don’t know if we had expectations, but we had hopes. We felt that if we had responded so powerfully to our videographer speaking the plot that others would find a deep connection. This song and video have multiple layers of meaning too, and we were hoping that people would listen to the song, watch the video and be inspired to share it. We hoped that we were going to do some big things, and when Upworthy picked up the video that was amazing, because that was a great way to distribute the video. But [Upworthy] caters to a pretty liberal audience, so the next question is how are we going to get this video in front of people who don’t agree, and challenge them to be moved and compare their views about segregation [to their views about marriage and same-sex relationships].
D: You’ve also started a website, dontaskmewhy.org. Can you tell me a little about that? Why did you decide to follow up the song and music video with a website?
SC: It feels necessary because it is necessary. We got more and more invested in what these issues were really about while trying to navigate the landscape of where do [the struggles of civil rights and the LGBT community] intersect and where are they different. We wanted to be really careful about making a video that potentially got a lot of views based on a depiction of these struggles, and then offer nothing from that. We didn’t just want to profiteer off that, so we were trying to figure out the best way for us to make an impact. During the process of us making this video and figuring out how to release it, we went through a lot of ideas, some pretty outlandish and some easier. We realized, given that we are a band, the best way for us to make an impact is to use the music video to direct people to something that can direct them to a way of impact. We’ve had a bunch of conversations with Brian Ellner, [the co-creator of] Principle 6, an organization that is lobbying the Olympic Commission to force Russia to respond and change its laws regarding the LGBT community, [and we decided to use our website to direct people to Principle 6 and inspire them to get more involved in these issues].
D: What do you hope those who watch the music video walk away with?
SC: An amazing thing that can happen with our video is somebody who doesn’t really agree with marriage equality watches it and sees this story about segregation and says, “I don’t agree with segregation,” and then the narrative switches and draws parallels with same-sex relationships, and that can be really powerful. Another interesting part of the video is what we’ve been calling the meta-argument; people are looking at artists who are making music about minorities when they aren’t a part of that minority and we want to show the idea that you don’t need to justify with your own identity why you want to step up for human rights and equality. We don’t want to make a big deal out of what our identities are because this is an issue that is so much bigger than us. The discussion shouldn’t focus on who is this band, but what these issues are and how do we move toward equality. We as a band would also like to address the idea of identity itself. We want people to think about what sexual or racial identity means to them, and push toward a world where identity as summed up in a single word is no longer viewed as sufficient as a way to describe someone. We’d like to heighten everybody’s understanding of that and lead people to question “When I say I’m straight what does that mean?” or “When I say I’m gay what does that mean?” We want people to focus less on the label and more on the character of the person.
We’re a couple years out of college, starting to settle our feet in professional careers, being outside of college and a structured environment like that. We have to figure out what we’re supposed to do with our lives. I had full-time job that I didn’t like but I felt like it was what I was supposed to do. We wanted to examine what our goals were, what this band would be – do we care about it enough to really commit to this and make something huge? Luckily for us the answer was yes. It was very scary but also very life-affirming to say, “This is what I’m going to do, and I know that it’s difficult, but I’m going to do it because I believe in it.” It was really incredible to see how many people were like, “Wow, you are chasing your dream, I want to support you.” I would love this video project to convince people to pursue their own dreams in a risky way. When people see someone pursuing what they want to do, they want to help. You also need to know how to ask for help, but that’s been a really powerful part of this project. People believed in the project, people believed in the cause and we demonstrated that we were really serious about doing this crazy thing, and people wanted to support that.
“Don’t Ask Me Why” is available for purchase on Great Caesar’s Bandcamp page and iTunes, and look out for the release of their new EP and album.