TV on the Radio Talk Brooklyn

TV on the Radio threw our dream festival — food, art, no overlapping sets and Hannibal Buress as emcee. There Goes The Neighborhood saw the band honor the borough that bore them with an all-Black lineup featuring majority female performers including Sudan Archives, Moor Mother and Spelling. Beneath Brooklyn’s K Bridge, the celebration of community, music and culture coalesced around fierce and glorious joy last Saturday. The eve before, the band led the Lobby at Ace Brooklyn into the weekend with an iridescent set from behind the decks.

We caught up with TVOTR member Kyp Malone ahead of the festival to talk about the band’s first show together, change being the only constant and the urgency of getting together when things are falling apart.

What’s it like to be back in the borough where so much started for the band? Does it still feel like a certain kind of home, or is it a new city every time you land here?
Truly different this time as I was priced out of my apartment of 14 years before I left for our last UK shows this summer. So I guess yes, it feels like a certain kind of home… lessness. I could be more salty about it but change is the only constant (praise be Octavia Butler!) and so much of what made North Brooklyn home to me and my community faded into history years ago.

What’s one corner, record shop, bar or street that still feels like the Brooklyn you came up in? Do you remember your first show here as a band?
South 3rd and Havemeyer. Still has the same wildness for better or for worse. Property is Theft still has the vibe and fortunately not in a nostalgic way. Mostly kids running the show there. I think the first show I played with Tunde and Sitek was at a long gone “free” pizza bar on Metropolitan. It was with Female Jesus, three-quarters of what would eventually be Grizzly Bear and my first NYC band Fall in Love, which was myself, Kevin Shea and our dearly departed Marc Orleans.

Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes turned 20 last year. When you think about the album today, does it feel like an early aughts time capsule or a prophecy about where we are now?
I want to reject the premise but I’ll try to go with it. Things feel like they are rapidly falling apart in an accelerated fashion right now but we were on course for all of this 20 years ago. So it’s not any more prophetic than say climate scientists from say 40 years ago. It was def inspired by the moment it was written and recorded in.

“There Goes The Neighborhood,” the name of the one-day festival, nods to change and impermanence. What does that phrase mean to you?
It’s what people used to say when communities were undergoing racial integration. It’s flipped in the way that it can be applied to the appearance of fixed gears, cortados and fashionably bred dogs into neighborhoods that were “affordable.” It addresses a socioeconomic phenomenon that we have all been on either side and in between of.

The festival seeks to celebrate this sense of community “now more than ever.” What’s making that feel especially urgent or important at this moment?
The rise of Fascism. The toxicity of online “life.” In-person gatherings are not to be taken for granted. Outright white supremacist policies are being implemented in an effort to roll us back to a pre-Civil Rights way of being. We were already living in a supposedly free country with a world-leading prison population. Now migrant warehouses and concentration camps? It’s fucking dark out. The indulging in joyful moments is not to be taken for granted. The threat of ICE and the militarization of our cities is proof that the powers that be do not view the general populace here with any more care or respect than the Palestinians being starved and slaughtered in our name and with our money. We have to get together. And we have to make it a sexy idea to join us. Music can be a part of that.

Header Photo Credit: Sumner Dilworth

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