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MIA is spreading
« on: Nov 21st, 2005, 12:11am » |
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http://theedge.bostonherald.com/teenNews/view.bg?articleid=113136&fo rmat=&page=1
Music, lessons: Innovative program brings message of empowerment to teens
By Tenley Woodman
Monday, November 21, 2005
The Music is Art High School Awareness tour makes schoolhouses rock.
“I think my high school self would probably go ‘Whoa. How did they pull this off?’ It’s a rock concert,” said Robby Takac, program creator and bassist for rock band the Goo Goo Dolls.
Takac, 40, started Music is Art four years ago as a Buffalo-based festival to raise awareness for his label, Good Charamel Records, and to collect instruments for school music programs in need.
The festival has evolved into a traveling program teaching teens about empowerment featuring alternative rock bands from Takac’s label.
“It’s turned into a pretty serious way to get to those kids who are ungettable. In our organization we know how to get those kids because we were those kids,” he said during a phone interview from Los Angeles.
Erin Roberts, the lead singer of Juliet Dagger, performed at the Clarence R. Edwards Middle School in Charlestown earlier this month as part of the program.
“People think that being in a rock band is fun and you party all the time, but it’s not. You have to be educated and sober,” she said.
Music was what kept Roberts in school.
“I got in trouble really early on when I was doing high school shows (for MIA). I made this fatal mistake by saying that high school sucks,” said the singer-songwriter. “I hated it. I hated waking up for it and the kids who picked on me. The one bright part of my day was my chorus class. It was really my saving grace in high school. It was like, ‘OK, I’m good at something.’ It gave me a purpose. It gave me direction.”
Even though the students at Edwards Middle School, a public school with a focus on the arts, are an informed target audience, what Music is Art was able to accomplish was no small feat - it kept 450 adolescents entertained.
“The middle school age child is probably the hardest population to work with because the children are growing physically and emotionally and are trying to figure out who they are,” said Karyn Stranberg, assistant principal at Edwards Middle School.
After the performance, students were able to mingle with the musicians and received goody bags.
“The thing that gets missed sometimes in the sphere of trying to educate someone is that the message literally takes one minute to deliver. You have to spend 29 minutes to gain their trust,” Takac said.
More than anything Music is Art’s message is hope.
“I don’t want to go Bono on you, but there’s a chance that T.J. or Erin (The Juliet Dagger band members), by intermingling afterward, give these kids a shred of hope in a fairly dismal situtation at this point; it’s cool,” Takac said.
To learn more about Music is Art, go to www.musicisart.org
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