Funny Business

The comedian Dina Hashem discusses joke writing, Jersey comedy clubs, and building a career in the age of Netflix

by

Max Ogryzko

Season Categories Published
MP504 Q&A

Mar 29, 2022


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I’ve tried stand-up comedy six times at this point. I’ve begun every set with renewed excitement that this will be the crowd that laughs at my personal favorite joke: “I used to dislike the taste of vegetables, and now I eat ass.” 

Still no luck. I have no idea how I can make that not funny, I mean it is funny, right? Is it my delivery? I guess it’s all about delivery.

Dina Hashem is a master of delivery. Her shy, reserved presence animates her withering lines. Hashem, in the 2017 RoastMasters Tournament, to some “big loud guy” (Dave Kinney): “Dave, it’s impressive you can be so large, and yet so unnoticeable.” Hashem on Mike Recine, who, she reports, has “sent a dick pic to every female comic in the city”: “His pick-up line is ‘can you help me finish this joke?’”

Hashem first tried stand-up at the 2010 New Jersey Comedy Festival. She won first place. Now she’s a regular at the Comedy Cellar and the Stand, clubs which have launched the careers of Aziz Ansari, Jon Stewart, Sarah Silverman, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, and Bill Burr, among many many others. 

I was curious about the nitty-gritty details of how a professional writes jokes and builds a comedy career. In our interview, which is edited for clarity and concision, we discussed grimy Jersey comedy clubs, the power of Netflix and social media, and what it’s like to watch a crowd laugh at something you’ve said so many times that you don’t even think it’s funny anymore. 


I have stand-up ambitions myself, so I’m curious about the arc of your career. I read that you got started on a whim in college and you entered a competition while at Rutgers. Is comedy something that you secretly always wanted to do? 

I did not ever want to be a stand-up comedian. It was never on my mind. It really just happened to be that I had a friend in my philosophy program who wanted to do it. I still don’t really remember why I decided I would do it, too. I think about it often. I guess it just sounded fun and I liked this particular person, so I thought it would be fun to do together. So I wrote five minutes of jokes, which I’d never really done before, and we helped each other figure out our sets, and then I did the first round and I did really well, and then I ended up winning. 

I guess what really attracted me to it and kept me doing it was the fact that I could speak to strangers and crowds of people for the first time, which I had never been able to do. I’ve had really bad social anxiety my entire life, and was not used to speaking vulnerably about myself, or anything really. So when I found this vehicle of being able to do that, I got addicted. The real function of it at the beginning was not just to be funny. It was a form of therapy, which I hate saying because I hate when comedians say comedy is therapy. But it really was for me. 

I read that the money you made from that competition was the most money you made in comedy for the next seven years? 

Yeah, for sure. I won a thousand dollars. 

Oh, wow. 

Yeah. I definitely didn’t see any money like that for years after that. 

In the early years after graduating, how did you fit comedy into your life? 

It became my full focus. I mean, I had other jobs. But it was the main thing I was interested in. The Stress Factory is still the main club in New Jersey, and luckily that was right in the middle of Rutgers campus, so that’s where I spent a lot of time. There is an open mic every week that I would go to. And then I made friends with other Jersey comedians and so we would drive around to whatever mics were in other parts of the state. Some of the worst mics I’ve ever done, pretty much. 

How come? 

The environments were so insane. First of all, there were not a lot of women comedians. I distinctly remember being one of the only ones, so I was just constantly around guys who think they’re funny and are not, and also just screaming, and lots of creeps. I always stuck out, which is a good thing, but also—there was a sports bar where we would perform and people would just want us to shut up because they were trying to watch sports.

Do you remember how often you would try and mix in new material at that time? 

I was constantly coming up with new things. In the beginning you’re just flooded with ideas because you’re not really sure yet what your voice is, or what’s funny, or what’s already been done, so you’re throwing everything out there. I definitely had one joke that has survived throughout the beginning until now: that Beatles joke that I told in my first Conan set

The “Help” one?

Yeah. [“What Beatles song would you make love to me to?” “Uh… ‘Help’?”] I definitely would use that. There are some jokes that were solid enough that I knew that I could get a laugh if I needed to. Those jokes are really important at the beginning. 

I haven’t done that many open mics, and I’m also based in Salt Lake. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Wise Guys, but it’s the main comedy club here. At the open mic night, there’s a bunch of weirdos yelling about Hillary Clinton and just randomly going off. But anyways, I have found that if you don’t start off well with a good joke, then you’re just kind of fucked. Or at least I am. 

Yeah, as you progress you’re more comfortable with digging yourself into a hole if you want to try something new because you do know that you have some things in your back pocket. 

I would assume that jokes at a certain point, since you’ve been doing them for years, are not even funny to you anymore. Is it weird to tell them and then hear the room laugh even when you personally don’t think they’re funny anymore? 

Oh yeah, absolutely. I don’t even know if some of my jokes are funny anymore. I just know that people laugh at them, even though I’m like, “I don’t think I would laugh at this.” There’s such a weird detachment from your material that happens after enough time passes, and the amount of time that passes between thinking one of your jokes is funny and then not being sure why it was funny in the first place becomes shorter and shorter the longer you do it.

Do you feel that it’s hard to try new stuff when you’re in New York? 

The main place I go up these days is the Comedy Cellar, which is not the place you want to be constantly trying new things. So whenever I get booked at any new place is where I try to pepper in new things. 

Do you remember how your “if there’s grass on the field, play ball” joke came about? [“I had to be like, ‘if the grass is too thick to move into, they cancel the game?’”]

That was one of those jokes that just came into my head all perfect and crisp, which happens less and less the longer I do this. I feel like some of my best jokes are often just completely inspired. They come from some sort of comedy muse and they appear in my head. And then the ones where I really need to think about it are generally not my favorite jokes. That was a lucky one. 

I tried out the Judd Apatow MasterClass and he suggested thinking of ideas and writing down maybe 20 jokes for each of them. Does your writing style resemble that in any way, or is there anything interesting that you have found works for you?

I still haven’t figured it out. That Judd thing you just said—that sounds like a pretty good idea. Maybe I’ll try that one out. I don’t know! I want to just rely on my brain delivering me gifts, but like I said, it happens less and less. 

These days, I dig into my past a lot. I think about things that have happened to me or people in my life, and things that were funny at the time about the situation, and I try to think about why they’re funny and then try to come up with a premise-punch format for it. 

For the most part, my jokes are pretty short. I don’t really know how to tell stories. It’s something I should probably work on. If I’m doing a headline set, if I’m doing 45 minutes, it’s basically just an organized-by-theme collection of my jokes where I’m trying to find a logical way that they lead into each other so that I can remember the order. 

What has it meant for you to become more professional in your comedy? 

It’s a lot less fun, mostly. I look back on those earlier years where really all you were concerned about was writing jokes and being with your friends and riding from show to show and just trying to impress each other and impress the best comic in the room. It was a lot more about stand-up in its purity, which is what I liked about it. Then as you try to make it your actual job, and it’s really about money and your career, everything that isn’t just being on stage gets involved. And none of that is fun, worrying about showbiz and marketing yourself and social media now. It becomes a job. 

What’s your next step? 

Everyone’s thinking about their special. The landscape right now is so fucked up… There’s a million different channels and it’s not clear what’s getting views and what isn’t. Right now it seems like Netflix and YouTube are the places that get the highest views. So you can either win the lottery and get paid a bunch to do some sort of Netflix thing, or you can put out your material for free on YouTube. Those seem to be the best options for getting the most amount of eyeballs on your work. And if you can’t get Netflix or you don’t want to put out your material for free, you can try to go to one of the other places, but it’s not clear who’s watching—is that going to help you sell tickets on the road? Because the idea is to put something out that a lot of people see, and then you can tour and make money. 

Right now, I really want to put something out, but I have to decide if I should wait and hope if something like Netflix works out. I haven’t put out anything very long—like you said, just a few minutes here and there—but I have all this stuff I need to dump, you know? Because the longer I hold on to it, the more I’m afraid of dumping it, because then I’ll have to start over again, but in order to continue writing and coming up with things, I think part of that is getting rid of material. It’s at a juncture now, where I’m deciding what to record and where and how to put it out, and when. 

I’ve been reading some of the YouTube comments on your videos, and it seems like everyone just wants more. 

Oh that’s good to hear, I don’t read the comments anymore. 

They mostly just say “wow, she killed it.” And I’m not just saying that, there’s that video of you in the roast where you destroy that guy and people on other videos are like, “oh, is this the person that destroyed that dude?”

Anyways, I think part of what made that roast so awesome is your strong delivery, with a low-key presence on stage. Is that a persona that you are putting on? Or do you feel like that’s basically you? What is the difference between the Dina Hashem we see on stage and the person who just exists in the world? 

The general vibe on stage is definitely a part of me and part of my general way of going about life. But the part that’s not there is me being goofy and more animated, like I am with my friends or my boyfriend. 

That aspect I haven’t brought to the stage. I’m not sure if it makes sense to, or if I want to, because my stage delivery evolved from a real place of being anxious and afraid and shy. Then it gradually became more loose and more me, but still not completely like every facet of how I behave in my life: a dilution of the darker and drier part of me. 

There’s the stereotype that comedians are jealous or mad at other people’s success. Did you have a phase where you related to other comedians in a way that you look back on as misguided?

I think in the years of trying to get to a place of like, “OK, now I feel like a comedian, now I feel like I have enough evidence that I am good and I can continue to do this”—up until then you view it as a contest. You see who’s getting ahead and if you feel like you’re better than them. Then you get sad. 

Nate Bargatze has my favorite line about that on the Pete Holmes podcast, where he would say to his agent “just please don’t make me hate my friends.” You don’t want to get jealous of your friends for getting further—not because you begrudge them their success but because you start looking at yourself like, “Oh my god, what am I doing wrong? I’m going to fall behind. Am I going to be somebody or not?”

I think those feelings are unavoidable. The more comfortable you get with what you’re doing and what work you’re getting, some of that goes away. It’s just fun also to get mad at other comedians. But mostly I think that anger gets transferred to the proper place, which is the people in power, the people making the decisions. Being mad at executives’ decisions—I don’t think that ever goes away. 

What is your view on using social media to promote yourself? It seems like you don’t really like it very much. 

Well, I think it’s poison. If you’re a regular human being, there’s no need to have it. And if I wasn’t doing comedy, then I wouldn’t have it. But it’s become this integral part of trying to reach people. It’s tied up with how it’s easy to complain about the industry, but now there’s this whole other way to promote yourself and find your own audience and make your own living, so you can’t really complain. I mean, you can, but it is this other outlet and way to do it. 

It’s hard to figure out. These algorithms are basically their own sort of executive power. You don’t really know how they work. It’s a mystery. You don’t want to think that you have to keep putting out your work for free either, but that apparently has become a model of building a career. You don’t want to think of yourself as just helping these social media apps profit margins with your own work you’ve put out for free, but it is exposure.

I don’t know. I know I have to do it. There’s comics who do it really well, like my friend Sam Morril has really cracked it and he’s a machine, so it’s hard to copy what he does because he puts out so much material. It’s insane. So you have to do it unless you’re one of these people who just gets chosen by the industry to be a star, and then you don’t have to. But that’s obviously not many people. ▩


Such Swedish Thunder: Dirty Loops’ “Loopified”

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Music

Aug 20, 2014


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loopification (n) | \lü-pə-fə-ˈkā-shən, lyü-\

Origin: Middle English loupe; portmanteau coined by Swedish band Dirty Loops.

1: the transformation of a smash pop single by way of slick jazzy chord progressions, crisp arrangement, and tasteful solo.

Formed in 2008 at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Dirty Loops rose to YouTube prominence on the merits of their loopification of songs like Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ and Britney Spears’s ‘Circus.’ It is the preternatural musical ability of vocalist/pianist Jonah Nilsson, bassist Henrik Linder, and drummer Aron Mellergardh that makes their covers possible. Watching them retool pop songs is like watching a wizard mechanic retool a 1992 Geo Prizm to make it look and run like a 2021 Lamborghini Aventador. Dirty Loops covers boggle the mind, but the loopification formula is in fact simple. I wrote about it two years ago:

In modal jazz, there is one chord rather than a series of chords. Modal jazz is stripped down such that it provides a base over which an improviser can superimpose an unlimited amount of harmonic substitutions. The one chord doesn’t change, so there is incentive for one to expand beyond its basic prescriptions and create a sense of forward harmonic movement as a series of chords might. It is open-ended music. What Dirty Loops realized is that superimposing new chords over the simple melodies and lyrics of songs like Baby is relatively easy. Most of the melodic phrases in ‘Baby’ use three or less notes. But it’s not like they are moralizing kitschy pop songs by making it high art —- they synthesize jazz, funk, pop, and rock in equal parts, so that ‘Baby’ retains its fundamental catchiness while being elevated to new levels of sophistication.

Dirty Loops released their debut album Loopified in the United States on August 19th. Loopified presents a different sort of challenge from covering pop songs: writing all-original material. As adversity reveals character, Loopified demonstrates Dirty Loops’ musical principles. To what extent do they want to be perceived “just” as a pop band? To what extent do they merely play with pop to disclose and embellish the band’s deeper and more serious jazz proclivities?

Jazz is a distinct idiom with its own mythology and vocabulary that also informs and relates to nearly every form of music that came about in the 20th century. Its elements can be easily fused with funk, R&B, rock, hip-hop, and electronic music. In 2014, jazz is probably furthest away FROM – and maybe even diametrically opposed TO – pop. Thus jazz, when blended with pop, poses a quandary. Because jazz always emerges from that commitment to the “idea” of jazz, both the integrity of its history and its impulse to experiment and evolve. When it comes to Dirty Loops — does the pop component cheapen the jazz component? Does the jazz component redeem the pop component? Can the two components coexist?

Stevie Wonder, Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper, George Benson, J Dilla. For decades musicians have sought to crossover and uphold the jazz tradition in more popular forms of music. And vice versa; for example, the avant-garde jazz trio The Bad Plus covered ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on their 2003 album These Are the Vistas. But even then The Bad Plus reach back in time through a somewhat nostalgic mist to reinvent the greatest rock song of its era, whereas Dirty Loops tends to spring for freshly released pop songs, the more banal the better.

There has never been a band quite like Dirty Loops, whose impulse is to simultaneously reach for both extremes of the musical spectrum, to couch bald-faced pop music in obscure jazz harmonies. It is reductive to talk about Dirty Loops in terms of jazz and pop, because they draw on other genres as well, but playing jazz and pop off one other is at the core of what loopification is about. While Dirty Loops subverts the pop nature of the songs they cover on YouTube, it is the very banality of those songs that accounts for both Dirty Loops’ internet success and the perceived quality of their covers – the distance accrued between original and end product.

 —–

Dirty Loops’ approach to writing original material for Loopified is similar to their approach to YouTube covers. Linder describes the songwriting process in an interview: “We want to write simple pop songs from the beginning and then mess with them our way afterward. We want to write a melody that’s catchy… we don’t start with the fancy chords, we put those in last.” Basically, they are loopifying themselves. They are both the original and end product.

Self-loopification is most apparent on Loopified in the lyrics, which the band co-wrote with former N’Sync and Backstreet Boys producer Andreas Carlsson. The lyrics are astonishingly generic, with nearly every song an impersonal tale of love, lust, and heartbreak. The most memorable lyrical moment occurs at the outset of ‘Sexy Girls.’ Nilsson belts: “Sexy girls in the club / I’ll be whatever you want me to be. Sexy girls in the club / the night is young and the party’s on me.According to Nilsson, those particular lyrics are meant to be ironic. The weird thing is, the song would be worse off if its lyrics were reflective, profound, honest — anything but ironic. The lyrics serve as a trope – the original – to contrast with the other components of the music – the end product. In short: better lyrics would compromise the self-loopification process.

Loopified is at its worst on the ballads: ‘Crash and Burn Delight,’ ‘It Hurts,’ and to a lesser extent, ‘Take on the World.’ These songs suffer from lazy arranging. Where are the solos, the infectious groove, the weird chords?? Linder and Mellergardh all but disappear, and Nilsson is forced to carry more weight than he can bear. He is an awesome vocalist with great presence and pitch control, a threat to break off a two-octave run at any moment. But for all his admirable qualities he doesn’t have the emotional range to pull off these ballads all by his lonesome. Dirty Loops is most enjoyable when Nilsson’s voice recedes to the middleground so that it’s just another instrument – vocals, keys, bass, drums in a row, harmonizing and gesticulating like a barbershop quartet.

Good things happen when Dirty Loops picks up the pace. This is most true on ‘Hit Me,’ ‘Lost in You,’ ‘The Way She Walks,’ ‘Roller Coaster,’ and ‘Accidentally in Love.’ Their obscure jazz harmonies have life once more – they are most effective when played in rapid succession, like a combo breaker in a video game. They just need a bit of air under them to fly. Also – there are now horns! The inclusion of horns forces Dirty Loops to pay the arrangement more attention. They are maximalists at heart. The more action, the better. Mellergardh grows less passive, more keen to engage with his bandmates and indulge himself in rhythmic hits rather than simply keep time. When Dirty Loops picks up the pace, the pall that beleaguered the ballads evaporates. Suddenly there is more space in every dimension – more space to carve out a wider dynamic range, more space for Nilsson to sneak in a dapper keyboard solo, more space for the head to duck and weave to the beat.

But the greatest gift that Loopified gives is the gift of Henrik Linder. Sensei. Nilsson often doubles the bass in his left hand, freeing Linder to roam away from the pocket and unleash his always imaginative bag of tricks – slap bass fills, arpeggios, chord hits. He is not unlike Philip Lahm, star fullback for Bayern Munich. Lahm is solid as a rock in the back, but he likes to ventures forward, where he can more creatively employ his ample footballing brain. A technical master, Lahm outperforms his teammates at their respective positions more often than not, ultimately shaming not only his opponent but his teammates as well.

—–

Dirty Loops went all-in on Loopified with a self-loopification strategy. Banal, shallow lyrics became the transgressive means to illuminate their finest musical qualities. And for the most part those qualities shone through. But unlike loopification, self-loopification is not failsafe. The listener cannot compare the original to the end product. They are the same thing, and they must be consumed at the same time. The dopamine still hits, but there is no rebirth, no redemption. Is it better for the phoenix to die and rise from the ashes, or never die in the first place?

Snarky Puppy, Hybrid Theory

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Music

Oct 09, 2013


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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apxBAqgSrSw

It all started one evening in 2011, on a recommendation from Jonny Mo the stoned bassist in the back of jazz ensemble rehearsal. Snarky Puppy, he said sagely. Check em out. So later that night I googled Snarky Puppy and clicked on the first hit, a song called ‘Flood’. It started simply enough, in a recording studio with a dorkish-looking fellow standing at a keyboard, bopping his head to the beat as he plunked out the melody in some obscure time signature. The drums and bass entered the fray, and then the horns, then the keyboards, then the guitars, then the strings. And then, as someone let off a pressure valve, the groove dissolved and one of the guitarists embarked on a hypnotic new melody in some other obscure time signature. It was an unexpected but appetizing change of pace. The guitarist’s spiderlike fingers, the latent energy of a nine-minute video with seven minutes to go.

It went like this for a while, tension and release. The stakes rose, slowly, until a moment came when the song indisputably arrived. The horns took their line up an octave and the organ screamed and the drummer unleashed his mighty wrath upon his kit. It truly seemed to be the musical manifestation of a flood, as if all this time the water had been brooding behind the dam, and then the dam burst and the water poured forth, emancipated, crashing onto the rocks below.

Impressed as I was, Snarky Puppy fell off my radar and didn’t reappear for a year or so, until they released a new album called groundUp. Each song on groundUp was tight, bound by lean arrangements and the rhythm section’s magnetic groove. Each song had a distinct narrative arc, conducting two or three main ideas across various textures and instrumentations, always culminating with the entire band playing something greater than its component parts. Each song was a thriller in the end by virtue of its humble beginnings.

groundUp runs deep but the highlight is without a doubt ‘Thing of Gold’. There was a time when I watched ‘Thing of Gold’ on a daily basis for six weeks, maybe longer, primarily because of the solo Shaun Martin delivers at the end on Moog synth. The chord progression essentially rises in whole steps, and his solo triggers a series of key changes that also rises in whole steps. So there is an austere, mathematical sort of beauty in place, and it is in this context that Shaun Martin, toothpick akimbo, takes flight in ineffable improvisation.

How to categorize Snarky Puppy? They borrow elements from all types of music, particularly jazz, rock, and funk. They tend to defy genre. I guess you’d call that amorphous style ‘fusion’, but fusion is a vague and boring term. One of the properties shared by most Snarky Puppy songs is the interplay of major and minor — it happens in ‘Flood’ and ‘Thing of Gold’ for example, and they even called a song on groundUp ‘Minjor’. The interplay of major and minor is one of the fundamental tenets of the blues, and I prefer to think of them as a sort of hypermodern blues band. It may be a vague term, but at least it’s more thought-provoking than fusion.

Here’s the weird thing though– as much as I listen to groundUp, I’ve never downloaded it. I don’t have any Snarky Puppy songs on my iTunes. I just go to YouTube and watch their videos. Of the eight songs on groundUp, seven are on YouTube, and unlike with ‘Flood’, their videos are gorgeous, shot in HD with soft turquoise light cast around the perimeter of the room onto brick walls painted white. A small headphone’d audience sits in the middle, surrounded by the band. The band is even bigger this time, 21 people. This is it — this is them recording the album. Several cameras shoot from various angles, which is disorienting, so you never really figure out how the band members are positioned in relation to each other — you just know they are there.

The visual component of Snarky Puppy’s music is crucial to their visibility and popularity. They are not signed to a big label. They are independent, doing it all by themselves. Look at Macklemore, another independent artist. He blew up for one big reason: his videos, which are creative, fun to watch, and beautifully shot and color edited thanks to the genius of Ryan Lewis. In 12 months, the ‘Thrift Shop’ video has garnered 400 million views on YouTube. In 18 months, the ‘Thing of Gold’ video has garnered 600,000 views, a number that pales in comparison to Macklemore but is nevertheless significant.

Live music experiences these days are often compressed into mega-festivals like Coachella and EDM raves like Electric Zoo. Throw in uTorrent, and it seems as though it is harder than ever for mid-level musicians like Snarky Puppy to thrive. But in fact, the opposite is true. Snarky Puppy has a powerful weapon: YouTube. YouTube has become one of the main channels through which people consume music. Search any song, it’s probably there. I would go so far as to say that YouTube has also become the best way to consume music, period, because it inherently provides that visual component that greatly enhances the quality of the music itself.

My favorite college professor Michael J. Lewis always liked to say, “good writing happens when the emotional and the intellectual overlap, causing the words to vibrate.” To drive the point home he would place one hand on top of the other, like the awkward turtle sign, and give the turtle a few vigorous shakes. Professor Lewis’s words of wisdom closely mirror Snarky Puppy’s motto: “music for the booty and brain.” Snarky Puppy’s music is enjoyable from an intellectual perspective, but doesn’t truly vibrate until you watch their videos and see their actual, physical booties in motion. Watching the band play gives you a more intimate relationship with them, but just as importantly it gives you access to the intimacy within the band. You unlock their synergy. When a recording gets mixed, there is a vacuum effect, as if the mix sucks out all the air and leaves the finished product tighter. When Snarky Puppy introduces the visual component, they restore much of the energy lost in the mix via the physical energy of the band, spurred on in part by the presence of the small audience. Their videos are more than recordings — they are performances.

Two of my favorite DVDS are concert films. AC/DC, Live in Donington 1991, and Bruce Springsteen, Live in Barcelona 2002. The music itself is great. What’s even better is the shot of the fanatic horde jumping around and singing along. The shot of 5’2” Angus Young opening the show by playing the ‘Thunderstruck’ riff and duck-walking his way across the stage in his maroon suit and shorts. The shot of Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Van Zandt, belting ‘Dancing in the Dark’ into the same mic two hours into the show, their shirts drenched in sweat, their old man lips inches apart. It’s a pretty homoerotic image, but then again, it’s not homoerotic at all. It’s just music.

The image that sticks with me most from Snarky Puppy videos is Michael League, the frizzy-haired bassist. Snarky Puppy has world-class soloists — Shaun Martin, Cory Henry on organ, Sput Searight on drums — but League is the heart of the band. He is the mastermind, the producer, the author and arranger. Whenever the camera cuts in his direction, his face is either fixed in a warm, cherubic smile or convulsed in an unmistakable O-face. His ecstasy is even more apparent in the way he assumes awkward, unforeseeable postures with the rest of his gangly body. He looks silly, but that’s how you know he’s feeling it. His id gangsta leans with the best of them. There is no pretense with him, and his passion naturally bubbles to the surface so that he is more nimbus than flesh. Michael League is pure. Michael League is love.

***

In 4th grade, all I knew was Eiffel 65, Aaron Carter, and Lou Bega. Until I unwrapped Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park, popped it in the CD player, and learned the true meaning of rock. Hybrid Theory sucked me through a vortex. It opened up an entire universe I hadn’t known existed, or could exist. Its appeal was not unlike that of Pokemon Red or Redwall.

Those were the days. Since then it has become much harder for a piece of music, or anything, to come along and alter my perception of the limits of human possibility. That increasingly elusive sensation is only attainable via something radical. I suppose that’s the appeal of dubstep or Hannah Montana all of the sudden porning it up.

Consuming music these days lends itself more to eclecticism than devotion to a single group, and I am almost ashamed to say that I have found a favorite band, but I suppose Snarky Puppy fits the bill. They have taken me on journeys. They have taken me to the Lonely Mountain and back again. They expertly straddle the line between the intellectual and the emotional. The brain-bending and the booty-quaking. The awkward turtle-shaking.

Snarky Puppy recently released an album called Family Dinner, with each song featuring a different guest singer. The majority of the songs have been posted on YouTube as recording sessions filmed in HD, in the groundUp video style. As I watched these videos, I was blown away by the singers but found myself wanting them to go away. League arranged the songs with the intent of showcasing the singers and nothing more. If Family Dinner was an economic market, it would be riddled with inefficiencies. It was conceived in the spirit of collaboration, sure, but the end result, however unflawed, left a lot on the table. That is, Snarky Puppy’s remarkable imagination, the potential for innovation, to go further and change the definition of what music can be.