Independent reggae band Fortunate Youth, as part of their Don’t Think Twice Fall Tour, graced The Depot last Thursday with a positively soul-stirring performance. While most bands have a couple of songs that utterly delight and ignite the crowd, Fortunate Youth’s entire rhythmic repertoire evoked uproarious enthusiasm among the flocks of fans packed around the stage. It was impossible to resist the energized pulsations of the crowd, choreographed as they were by a uniquely harmonious cacophony of reverberating reggae tones. The energy of the crowd wasn’t the only intoxicating element in the atmosphere. A diverse array of colorful, randomly rotating beams of light intermittently illuminated clusters of concertgoers, revealing the copious clouds of smoke blanketing the dimly-lit venue. Songs such as “Pass the Herb” were met with deafening cheers, flickering lighters and fresh waves of thick, funky smoke. During one of my favorite songs, “So Rebel,” lead singer and charismatic crowd-pleaser Dan Kelly ceremoniously sparked up on stage.
It might be tempting to try and define Fortunate Youth by their unabashedly anti-authority, homegrown style, but doing so would ignore the band’s remarkable richness and depth — a depth I had the great pleasure of exploring in a pre-performance interview with four of the six members of Fortunate Youth. During our conversation it became apparent that the band is completely redefining what it means to be “so rebel.”
It may come as a surprise that the first and most notable way in which Fortunate Youth is redefining rebellion is through their extensive charity work. Although everyone is different in terms of learning preferences, thought processes and talents, our education system is becoming increasingly focused on cultivating a narrow range of “employable” skill sets. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of those deemed less profitable, but debatably richer fields of study, such as music and art. We can witness this disturbing trend as it manifests itself in spending cuts to music programs in public schools across the country. Fortunate Youth is going against this grain in a number of creatively unorthodox ways.
First, they teamed up with an organization called “Music Unites,” as well as some smaller artists in LA, to create compilation CDs for students whose school music programs have been cut due to underfunding. The band went on to produce a second CD in conjunction with the non-profit “Unify to Thrive,” for the purpose of spreading cancer awareness and raising money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Fortunate Youth has also created their own mechanism for challenging the trend towards defunding music programs: a non-profit called Better Generation Foundation. Jordan Rosenthal, the band’s drummer and promoter, has been the driving force behind founding the BGF, and he has inspired unshakable support among the other members.
“This is a really long-term project to get going and give back to those kids,” Kelly said.
Bass and keys player Jered Draskovich said, “Kids need an outlet, especially because we are all rebellious at that age. Taking music away from them is never a good option. You have to give them a way [to rebel creatively].”
Another slightly more subtle way in which Fortunate Youth is challenging established conventions can be found in the fact that its multi-talented members don’t strictly adhere to any single instrument or position.
Travi Bongo, a self-declared “utility player” who is equally capable of rocking out on the guitar, bass, percussions and vocals, said, “We play what we feel, what we like. That’s how we express ourselves.”
Kelly added, “No one limits you … If you wanna play bass in our band, as you’ll find out tonight, you can play bass. There might be three or four people on bass.”
I witnessed this instrumental dynamism during their performance, and it affected a distinct sound in each song, prohibiting the kind of monotony that can sometimes afflict mainstream reggae music.
Underlying Fortunate Youth’s unconventional, charitable work and their nonconformist performance style is the philosophy that there are no necessarily “right” paths in life. This inclusive perspective is expressed on the cover of “Don’t Think Twice,” the band’s latest album. The cover art for the album depicts a road that forks into two, one leading to a shiny, skyscraper-clustered city, and the other toward a densely canopied forest. When I first saw the image, I interpreted it to be a reference to the future sustainability of our environment and to the choices we must make to preserve our natural resources. However, Rosenthal pointed out that, at the very top of the cover art, the roads reconnect before disappearing into the sunset horizon line. The point is, you can go right or you can go left, but all roads eventually lead to the same place, and they all exist on the same map of human experience.
So many of us rely on society’s definition of success as the basis for our life choices and yet, under that definition, so many potentially beautiful roads are closed to us. Kids are told to study math, science, technology, English and the like. They are told to go to college so they can secure steady jobs with big companies. They are told music and art are a waste of time or are only worthwhile as hobbies. Fortunate Youth is a living testament to the fact that this narrow definition of success is a fallacy and that music really can offer a viable path to the good life.
Though the act of celebrating musical and artistic talent and of challenging our culture’s predominant perception of what it is to be successful isn’t unique to the band, I found the extent to which Fortunate Youth applies their philosophy to be exceptional. One of my favorite parts of the interview came when Bongo told this illuminating and rather funny story:
“I was smoking a joint with this dude, and he goes, ‘I can’t believe I’m smoking a J with Travi Bongo!’ I asked what he did for a living, and he said, ‘I’m a vet, I run my own practice and I take care of animals.’ I couldn’t imagine doing that job … and I told him that I was stoked to be smoking a joint with Randy the Vet!” Bongo went on to explain: “Everyone has a spot in this life, and we’re just fortunate that we get to play music.”
The name of the band, Fortunate Youth, is meant to acknowledge and appreciate the good fortune of its members, but also to convey this idea that we are all fortunate. Each and every one of us is capable of choosing for ourselves what paths we explore in this life and how we define success; whether that means making awesome music with good friends, taking care of sick animals or writing articles for the school paper. So long as you allow peace, love and unity — the key tenets of Fortunate Youth’s philosophy — to serve as your guides, then there are no wrong roads to be traveled. If that isn’t a radical definition of rebellion in our society, obsessed as it is with the singular, typical aim of materialism, then I don’t know what is.