Friday, April 15, 2016

The Dirty Mikveh Band

The song isn't so interesting to me, but the band name is perspired, I mean, inspired.

New Song in honor of Yud Aleph Nissan, the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s birthday

Sunday, April 03, 2016

Cross-Currents Joins the Bandwagon....

....ranting about loud music at simchos in Hear Me Out.

As is typical with these kinds of articles, they blend together unproven assertions, irrelevant or even downright incorrect "statistics", silly suggestions and unworkable solutions that do almost nothing towards addressing the problem, but do serve as a "heter" for some sanctimonious , self-righteous fools to disrespect musicians.

I don't have the patience to address the distortions/misrepresentations/irrelevancies in this piece, and given the author's history of misleading statements, I don't think he deserves the benefit of the doubt on this either.

I do want to address one point, though. There is a simple solution to this issue. It is to hire bands that play softer. We exist. As one of the bandleaders who does just that, I can say that the "professional volume complainers" in the frum world do not practice what they preach. I more often get requests to turn up than turn down, and yet, my business from the professional complainer demographic is negligible, despite them hearing me at events and my booking many jobs on that basis from others in the community. When videos of the professional complainer's children's weddings are posted on line, they inevitably feature bands on the louder end of the spectrum.

I played an event for one of the "activists" behind a campaign about this in the frum community. She didn't hire me herself, though. She didn't talk to me before the event about volume either. The caterer hired me. So, someone who claims to be so concerned about this as a "signature issue", wasn't involved in making sure they had a volume-conscious musician at their own event. At the event, of course, she made sure to "virtue-signal" about volume, when it was absolutely not an issue.

To be clear. There are some in the from community who view these articles as a license to be verbally abusive towards musicians. This is irrespective of whether the musicians are playing too loud or not, and often happens before we've even played a note.

The solution is simple. Hire bands who are volume-conscious. Thus far, I've seen no evidence of that from the people who tend to respond to articles like this. Just nastiness.

(There are some other relevant factors as well, like the venue, layout of the room, etc. But, in large part, these could all be resolved by hiring bands that play softer. Yet, when the activists published a list of "approved bands", the list featured many bands that are clearly a part of the problem, and notably did not include some of those known for softer volume.)