"Play for Change" Livestream Scores Donations for Kaepernick's "Know Your Rights" Camp
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Local band lvl3rd donates $6,000+ to nonprofit dedicated to lifting up young people of color.
by Conor Kilbride
Something immediately clear with lvl3rd, a music group made up of front man Jermaine Kelly and lead singer and writer Lando Savage, is that their friendships are genuine. In between answering questions, the band would make inside jokes, mess with each other and didn’t have enough good things to say about their manager Tristan Smith, '18 (BA History) or their “everyman,” Big Cat, who is foundational to everything they do, Jermaine says, from recording sessions to shooting music videos. They all know each other from their days at Swampscott High School, with Lando starting there but eventually graduating from Lynn English High School. The name lvl3rd. comes from a time when Lando was freestyling a verse, and the name stuck from then on. As Tristan told me, lvl3rd’s history is important because they met “as people” and not “as a band.” So when it comes to events such as the “Play For Change,” a 30-hour Twitch livestream fundraiser, “the people” had as much to do with putting it together as “the band” did.
Over the past summer, the band felt, as many did, that something important was happening. They wanted to do something to help contribute to the Black Lives Matter movement, and a donation to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp became their goal. On its website, the Know Your Rights Camp's mission is stated “to advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.”
Lvl3rd set out with the goal of raising $5,000. The band had done Twitch streams before, with Tristan noting that pre-pandemic, the set up was 12 of them streaming from Tristan's basement. Post pandemic, the band has had to change a lot of how they do things. Instead of recording together, they now record separately from their own homes, and send the individual recordings to Big Cat, who puts them together. With that being the new reality, they created Play for Change with those challenges in mind.
Jermaine and Lando explained their song writing process as “doing what they want, then mixing things up bit by bit till they get what they like.” The set up for Play for Change was similar. Knowing they had to do something different than their past streams, they reached out to other streamers on Twitch who fit Tristan’s criteria of being “big enough to get viewers, small enough to see his email,” like one with the name KiwiOnTheSticks.
The other streams they had done were for promoting lvl3rd, but Jermaine, Lando, and Tristan made it clear during the interview that they wanted Play for Change to be about raising funds for Know Your Rights, not about lvl3rd.
And raise funds they did. Out of a goal of $3,000, the stream ended up raising over $6,000 in a scant day and a quarter. Lando, who served as the stream director for the event, spoke about how it never could have happened without the other band members and steamers.
Lando: We wanted at first to have a joint venture, a lvl3rd event, but we decided we’ll be a part of it, but not present it as a lvl3rd thing. It was something that needed to be done.
Jermaine: Perfect time, perfect place, perfect everything.
You had 14 gamers and music groups on the lineup. Was everyone who participated someone you already knew, or did you expand to people you didn't?
Tristan: Instead of looking at ways to get our circle together, because we couldn't, we went out of our way to look for people who are active on Twitch: gamers and musicians, but also particularly people who are interested in social justice, and one of the main things we were looking for were Black and of color streamers to help highlight the event. It was important to have those folks' blessings to go forward with this. It all kinda stemmed from this one streamer, KiwiOnTheSticks, who is Boston based, and she ended up engaging a ton of people who were super into it. It opened a lot of doors for us and got us resources we didn’t have, and I think that's why we raised over $6,000 with a $3,000 dollar goal.
Lando: It was real fun, I'm glad I had the opportunity to be part of something with such a great cause. It was like learning how to juggle, and then having to juggle for about 30 hours straight. With all the help I had though, I didn’t even feel like I did it. I was the Stream Director, but I’ll never claim it, because Tristan had my back, and our friend Liam had our back. I’m just glad Play for Change 2020 was successful.
Would you guys be interested in doing something like that again?
Lando: If we could get that push, I’d definitely do it again.
Tristan: Of course, now I watch them on a daily basis. I definitely would, but we’ll see. Of course, we picked this cause for a reason, but we don’t know what this country will look like after November 3rd. [Black Lives Matter] is obviously not going to go away.
The band misses playing in person. Lando says he didn’t know how much he'd miss live shows, noting it was becoming a regular part of the band's life before the pandemic. He says Play for Change 2020 was a big piece of them “getting out there while staying at home.”
Jermaine: We’re not gonna stop making music, but to [stream] it is a different feel in general.
Lvl3rd can be found streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, and Youtube. Find @lvl34d on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or on their website, lvl3rd.com.
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