Written by Samuel Jones
Edited by Julian Shen-Berro and Parth Chhabra
Photos by Natalie Tischler
Photos Edited by Amelia Milne
Layout by Cecilia Orduña
Developed by Matthew Vanegas and Kevin Li
Gabrielle Smith: Big name, small campus
Updated Oct 31 at 10 p.m.
As we sit down to chat at Absolute Bagels, Gabrielle Smith, a first-year in General Studies, claims that these bagels are, in fact, the best in New York. She also confesses that the guitar is her worst instrument.
Yet, for a musician whose main instrument is her worst, Smith’s music is not exactly unpopular.
The project creator of Gabby’s World and lead singer of the indie band Ó—which includes her romantic partner and two other bandmates—Smith is an indie-pop sensation. Last year she toured the U.K. with Ó (formerly known as Eskimeaux), her dreamy melodies and allegorical lyrics resonating across Bristol, Manchester, London, and, more recently, into Baby’s All Right, a live music bar in Brooklyn.
But while her tours have been successful, school never took. Smith dropped out of first high school at 17 and then The University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2008. Still, Smith has decided to put touring on hold for a Columbia education, spurred in part by a desire to re-enter political conversation in the U.S.
Without the appropriate knowledge or training, the songwriter felt unable to partake in discussions about the exciting, uncertain state of America. At Columbia, though, Smith feels more confident articulating her stance on current affairs, thanks in part to one of her classes focused on law, gender, and sexuality.
But as an indie celebrity, slipping into University life is a surreal change. Recently, a girl in one of Smith’s classes approached her nervously, eyes wide: “Are you Gabby’s World?”
As flattering an experience as this was, the college transition has certain oddities. This switch mirrors the pressures she has found in balancing her public and private spheres.
Smith’s new record, Beast on Beast—set to be released on November 2 and performed at Elsewhere on November 15—elaborates on the emotional effects of this publicity. And with a romantic partner in her band, the spotlight is always on.
In her current relationship, trying to balance the public and private persona is forcing Smith to reconsider how transparent a musician can be. Is it wise to involve PDA onstage? How much should her lyrics reveal about their romantic experiences?
Struggling between being as emotionally honest to her fans as possible while also keeping a level of privacy has been intense. Smith wants to be honest in her lyrics, but connections made with fans are fleeting, and her personal sphere needs to be protected. She tells me that the indie genre has an especially cutthroat attitude towards digging into the personal sphere. It is devoid of community interest.
“What am I allowed to keep for myself?” she asks.
Alyssa Gengos: Getting rid of the Weinsteins of this world
"I was laying in bed—my house faces the fraternity house Delta Sig—and I heard the guys in their backyard,” Alyssa Gengos, a junior in Columbia College, says.
The fraternity brothers are all singing along to a pop song, but she can’t quite put her finger on what it is.
“I I follow, I follow you.”
All of a sudden, she recognises the song: Lykke Li’s single, “I Follow Rivers.” Kept awake by the strange sounds of fraternity brothers harmonising to a female pop song, Gengos, also known by her musician alias, Kythira, begins to write a new song—which will be on her upcoming album—on the male voice.
“You can hear the male voice, but you cannot see it,” she says.
A tension arises between a voice that both demands superiority and is invisible. Listening to the Kavanaugh hearings as she walks back from a class trip to the Met, she hears a man lashing out in desperation, grasping for control. But all she sees is how the afternoon light sifts through the trees of Central Park, no male voice.
On January 17 of this year, Gengos released her first EP, titled “Soon, I Promise.” While Gengos places her work within the indie genre, she uses electronic elements of new wave music in her tracks. Gengos uses her music to confront the toxic masculinity and steep shortage of accountability around her.
As an intern for Harvey Weinstein’s ex-wife and babysitter for his kids, Gengos had a personal connection to the Weinstein scandal. She had met him a couple times, completely oblivious to anything that had happened. A couple of months later, the story broke in the New York Times.
One of her songs—“Phone’s Dead”—directly narrates her experience of the #MeToo movement. Gengos recounts to me a period of being glued to her phone, watching as scandal after scandal broke out until the battery died.
“And you said we’ll keep them in a line,” the song goes.
Gengos expresses here how she feels about the scarcity of liability for male figures in high positions. Despite being frustrated by how CEOs and other well-connected men continue to get away with abusive actions, she can act only as a spectator from behind her screen.
A few months after the #MeToo wave broke, one of Gengos’ former close friends was also accused of sexual assault. Although she has since cut ties with this person, that still took an emotional toll.
Tracks in Gengos’ upcoming album are heavily influenced by the culture of toxic masculinity and sexual assault she observes at Columbia. While public male figures in society need to be held accountable for their actions, the Indie songwriter is determined to vocalise the effects of toxic masculinity on campus.
“I heard three young men talking behind me about trying to get out of the sexual education training seminar,” Gengos says. “I wanted to turn around and just say, ‘the reason they created that is because of you guys!’"
Angelo Miguel Hernandez-Sias: Facing up to the walls around us
“My fellow citizens, last night I ordered U.S. military forces to Panama. No president takes such action lightly.”
These are the opening lyrics to Columbia College junior Angelo Miguel Hernandez-Sias’ song titled “20th December, 1989 (feat. Sein an & Colleen Schmidt)”. They are the words President George H. W. Bush spoke on the morning of December 20, the morning after the U.S. invasion of Panama. Hernandez-Sias lays this impactful announcement over pesante violin melodies and his own fast-paced lyrics.
Traces of his Panamanian heritage, Tupac, and salsa can be found in Hernandez-Sias’ music. When I ask him where he draws inspiration for his music, he immediately returns to his childhood.
As a boy, Hernandez-Sias would listen to his father tell stories about the U.S. invasion of Panama. In 1989, sitting at the kitchen table, his father felt the vibrations of bombs dropping around his home. In 2018, Hernandez-Sias listens to the kerplunking of Jenga blocks in a student lounge in Lerner.
All other tracks on his 2017 album Alon(E)So, are titled in a reverse chronological order, moving backwards from December 20, 1989: The album moves through history.
Hernandez-Sias uses Panamanian history as an gateway to express the difficulties he has faced moving to Columbia. Just as his father faced challenges when moving from Panama into the United States, transitional walls tower those moving to Ivy League Institutions and immigrating to the U.S..
In his soon-to-be-released album, which he hopes will launch early next year, the musician plays with President Donald Trump’s speech on “bad hombres.” Hernandez looks to combine Trump’s meaningful mispronunciation of “bad hombres” (as “bad hambres”) with the melodies of Chopin.
Chopin for Hernandez-Sias is emblematic of his cultural shift in moving to Columbia. Being part of the unfamiliar genre of classical music, the musician confesses he had never heard Chopin in his hometown of Muskegon County, Michigan. Now, however, he tells me he recognises Chopin in lobbies from John Jay to Furnald.
However, the musician is familiar with the struggles of adapting to cultural spheres. Going to a predominantly black high school and white community college concurrently, Hernandez-Sias had to shift gears between two racial spheres daily.
Coming to terms with a new cultural sphere can be a difficult, perhaps even impossible, task. But listening as Hernandez-Sias interweaves Chopin with Trump, it’s clear that music is one solution.
Rachel Roth, or someone else?
“Watergh0st,” “Rodeo McClain,” “Slick Lamonte,”: these are just some of the many masks that musician Rachel Roth, a senior in Columbia College, takes on in her work.
When I email Roth to clarify how to spell the names of the personas, she offers very specific instructions. In “Rodeo McClain,” the second ‘C’ can be capitalised, should I wish—as if Rodeo himself would not be offended by this particular capitalization. The “o” in ghost should be a “0”.
As Roth describes her many identities, I start to feel slightly uneasy in my chair. Mutually involving herself in all these characters appears to dissolve her base identity completely into her various artist personas—a discomforting but powerful effect.
Although her background is primarily in jazz, Roth’s 10 different characters produce music across all genres, through various music channels—apparently, only some have been judged worthy of Soundcloud accounts. Considering this unique method of performance, Roth could be described as a satirical musician but I doubt she would accept the simplicity of this statement.
In adopting various identities and creating characters through which to publish her music, Roth comments on dishonest public presentations of individuals and ideologies. Instead of Roth parodying public presentations of renowned figures herself, the artist gives the microphone to an alternative identity.
"When I am talking about commentary on being an American or being inundated by this type of media, I find it more productive to remove myself," Roth says.
One of her characters, Slick Lamonte, reacts to the oddity of presenting Christian sermons through television broadcasts in live rhythmic spoken word performance.
In a post-apocalyptic world, Slick Lamonte perseveres with his Scientology broadcast. Desperate to relay his crucial ideology to the world, all the while covered in blood and gore, he is dedicated to his media presence even without an audience. On Slick’s shoulder rests a cockroach, blessed by the nuclear blast with the gift of human speech.
Roth also enjoys teasing how Christian broadcasts package their message. Through this parodic representation of media as indoctrination, she critiques how public figures as a whole present themselves.
In true Machiavellian fashion, the musician comments that performance is necessary to manipulate the masses. By adopting dissociated identities in her own music, Roth offers a meta-critique that is hard not to relate to our performative president.
“We have a president now who was on WWE,” Roth says. ”He's had a celebrity roast on Comedy Central for goodness sake. In all senses, he is well versed in the correct performance of the common people."
Jude Icarus: Gives you wings
With a ghastly pale visage, long black hair, and freshly dabbed-on eyeshadow, Jude Icarus took to the stage armed with the basic power chords. At the time, he was still only in middle school and covered songs by The Cure and The Smiths.
“I put on a bunch of black eye make-up and looked like Robert Smith’s mini-me,” Icarus says simply. This is how he begins his performative musical career.
Years later, and still rocking the hair of grease lighting and leather jacket of John Travolta, Icarus is known to most as Julian Leitner, a junior in Columbia College. He recently released a music video for his song “Riot” on October 10 and plans to release his new album, Cloud 9, within the year.
The title “Cloud 9” came to Icarus before he wrote any of the songs. For the eclectic hip-hop artist, the name represents his mission: to convince anyone that aspirations can become material.
"You will have to work for it, but you can do what you dream about,” Icarus says. “It's not easy, certainly."
Even before he began writing his own music, Icarus worked hard to help others achieve their dreams. He started the Archimedes Alliance at thirteen as a crowdfunding trust for charities where donors can vote on a cause to support. Donors give two-dollar donations to the Archimedes Alliance and in turn, receive a vote to put towards one of three charities.
In the first public voting cycle, Outreach International received $21,700. Currently in its second cycle of voting, total contributions to the trust sum to $45,000.
On its website, thirteen-year-old Icarus addressed newcomers with a quote attributed to Archimedes: “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the Earth.” Icarus replies with his own inspirational quote: “You are the lever. Together, we will move the Earth.”
Although it has been a long time since Icarus founded the nonprofit, he looks back on it as a surprisingly accurate reflection of what he wants his music to convey. He now realizes how much the Archimedes Alliance embodied his sense of the world, and 10 years later, his music carries forward its mission.
As we chat, Icarus raps some of his lyrics from one of his new tracks on Cloud 9.
"Listen close this next verse is for you,
You assume you're one of many so you worship the few,
Thinking trying to make a difference is a worthless pursuit
Because society's blinders are obscuring your view,
Every human being has capacity to do good,
So testify your truth with the veracity that you should,
And fight for your beliefs with tenacity that few could,
cause when the false fell and yielded mastery the true stood."
The artist’s new music will explicitly address the challenges of social mobility in the current political climate in the United States. Nevertheless, while addressing what he calls “political system-administration-regime whatever it is” is useful context for his new album, the central social thesis of his music consistently returns to fighting for your dreams.
"The central theme of what I do is based on self-realisation, self-actualisation, and a lack of self-censorship," Icarus says. "You don't change yourself and your aspirations to fit the world. You find a place for it and if there is not a place, you make a place for it."