Media Musings # 7 - Ben Pirani
The socialist soul singer goes galaxy brained on politics, religion, and honesty in isolation.
(Credit: Rosie Cohe)
Each week, I’ve been sharing a conversation about art, media and/or existence I’ve had with an artist I deeply admire. As the main newsletter moves to a biweekly publishing schedule, “Media Musings” may follow suit. But for now, we soldier on.
I first met Ben Pirani, a singer/songwriter on Loveland, OH label Colemine Records, thorough our mutual friend Seth Applebaum, whose Ghost Funk Orchestra project is also signed to Colemine. Ben’s debut LP, How Do I Talk to My Brother? is full of retro soul numbers that breeze along on the strength of Ben’s songwriting and the earnest yarning, sincerity of the performances.
After Ben and the band agreed to play the 2019 Limbsnapping, an annual treehouse arts festival that I put on with my friends at The Root Community upstate, we expected a chill set. What Ben brought, however, was much more lively, raw and passionately electrified than any of his recordings up to that point have suggested — a performance that didn’t play safe by trafficking in swooning, feel-good platitudes normally beaten into the ground by soul revival acts.
A few weeks later, I randomly discovered Ben behind the counter at a beloved record store in my neighborhood, Northern Lights, that has since closed.
I caught up with Ben last week in the midst of inflection, and he began the day micro-dosing on psilocybin mushrooms. Ben got real about the familial origins of his love for music, his belief in championing working people and progressive politics, his drug use, his perspective on being a white soul singer, and much more. What follows is a refreshingly transparent interview with an artist at a self-imposed crossroads, consciously trying to understand how to keep writing soul songs these days when he isn’t feeling all that soulful.
OK, we’re live.
I'm going to eat a gram of mushrooms right now. And this has been really influencing just my thoughts in general, but specifically my thoughts about socialism, communism, class consciousness.
I think a lot of us spend our time bogged down on the Internet outrage of the day, which does not give us a long view. It has its purposes, especially for musicians or writers. But one thing that's really dangerous is that it's made people choose their politics like they're choosing Adidas or Nike, especially on the left. So it's like, ‘Oh, you're a Trotsky this or you're a Maoist.’
Mainstream politics is really just there to mediate our misery, and we can't really look for anything else. So these are all dead ends in my mind, among a lot of dead ends that are entertained or battered about on the left.
I’ve been thinking about that in the context of human connection right now, which we’ve all been deprived of. Prior to the pandemic, you'd often be playing shows around at Union Pool and places like that. But on the other hand, you seem to be comfortable going inward into your own head right now. So how are you making sense of the heavy lean in one direction these days? How are you staying sane?
Physical proximity is a big deal to me. We all know the energy of going to a show when it's fucking packed, everybody's rippin’ and that's a communal experience, a ‘be here now’ sort of thing. When that little room at Union Pool is cooking and the barrier between audience and performer no longer exists.
I'm fucking highly extroverted person. And I'm not comfortable being in this situation just being away from my friends, my band, whatever. Dating is complicated. So I don't really have any other way to move except inward. To be fair, I think sometimes I can be social to the point where I'm not taking these moments to explore a philosophical approach to not just my politics but-
You're leaning in these days, it sounds like.
I'm leaning in. And now I'm just, I want to take a couple of hits one day and really go out there. It's frightening, but it's been a long time. And I do think that this is really helping me get somewhere.
It's most definitely been a road. And it's not always comfortable because I have these notions of myself that are not necessarily correct. We all do. Another thing that people sometimes say when they feel connected to everything in the world on psychedelics is that they feel very small. And that is a good feeling for anybody to have in the meantime.
That's also always seemed like a New York phenomenon to me, because the enormity of this place can make some people like they can conquer the world. But the flip side of it is feeling small compared to how much life and how many people are here, the enormity of it all. Then the question is, does that feeling very small make you feel good, or does it make you feel shitty?
It makes me feel a little bit of both. But it also makes me feel like a citizen of this world.
In light of recent public conversation around white privilege and systemic racism, you shared a lot of your own past with your audience and about your dad and your socialist, Marxist philosophical roots . I was hoping you could maybe just go deeper on that and give me a little background and unpack it for me.
I got to say, it made it into my bio when the album came out. I don't know if it's necessarily important for me to leverage that as a claim to authenticity, or my adjacency to church or Black people or whatever. I don't think I need to tell anybody what the fuck I'm doing or if it's sincere or not. I don't need to hit anybody over the head with it. Maybe it should stand on its own.
I'm not going to pat myself on the back, but, I've been following this shit since I was like 11 years old. And all of a sudden, there's this explosion. Obviously we're all disgusted by what happened, and what continues to happen. But I think you see now there was a lot of bad actors, bad-faith actors, and disingenuous social media whatever…. the fucking black squares [on Instagram]. It was a psy-op to remove visibility.
It's hard to know who's sincere and who isn't. Although it can't hurt that this is more in the mainstream. Some people thought the revolution was here, but here we are, nine months later, and we're just being pandered to by mainstream politics to make sure we don't expect too much.
Yeah, it felt like those black Instagram squares were just a total release for people, a gestural hologram or a gestural facade intended and instigated to replace meaningful action, engagement with policy, and act as a substitute for the work that goes into a long term strategy.
Right, yeah. And that's what happened. And that's why ultimately, we didn't see much — because there's no plan.
I do think there are plans among real nonprofits and real activists and real lobbyists. But I don't think there's a plan among… ‘slacktivist’ is a term that's been kicked around to describe Instagram activists, and people who re-aggregate names from front-facing policy accounts.
I belong to my own segment of that.
I do, too. But I don't delude myself into thinking that that's a substitution for real action.
I'm just off of social media entirely. I had new music out and I just put it out there. But there's no cohesive plan. What's encouraging is, when you look at these right-wing maniacs, they don't have a plan either.
However, they do have one cohesive plan in that they want a white nationalist state. That is dangerous. There is no real left. There is no cohesive left. The closest we have is DSA [Democratic Socialist Association] . And I'm not saying they're bad. That's definitely good. I want to hear the word socialism.
But we know who goes to DSA meetings, you know what I mean? It's the socially conscious urban professional, maybe professional is maybe too much to say. College-educated people.
I didn't go to college. I don't even go to high school.
I wanted to talk about your origins a bit to the extent that it's helpful for reframing or for contextualizing your engagement with all these things. Your musical upbringing, where this sense of purpose stems from. I know that there's a there's activist roots in soul music because I'm a music writer and I know about Sam Cooke story and all these guys who are really actionable and often sacrifice their own legacies or their own reputations and longevity for their values.
But in most of the ‘soul revival’ we hear today, it's people playing it safe, especially white dudes, frankly. So I'm curious as to just where your marxist chakra first woke up. Can you take me back there?
Well, I'm not fucking dancing around to show everybody else fucking woke up I am. Soul music has been colonized. It's been colonized, and it's a reflection of what politicizing culture has to offer people now, which is nothing. Easy distraction from your fucking miserable life.
It's you want something that's like sure, safe. And I'm not saying that it's bad to have that. I think it's the reason why people sit down in front of their TV, just watch The Office over and over again. You know what I mean? You want something that's comforting and safe.
But it is disingenuous. I think it's clear that a lot of people don't know the difference. What is soulful anymore in our world devoid of soul, of connection? What is soul? Soul is your inside. Soul is your person. Soul is your essence in relation to the rest of the world. That's what soul is. That's where the music comes from.
I'm trying to understand how your dad's soul session work influenced your perspective on life and music. I hear that you’re not trying to claim and false authenticity, and that you want to be really mindful of that. But I do think his life and work seem to be part of you and part of your story.
My dad [was around during] the time when you could have a job being a musician. He was an arranger, a composer, a player, whatever, he took the fucking job. And then later in life, he went back to being a machinist like he was in fucking high school because Ronald Reagan.
It's just not a happy story. Both my parents were musicians, it was very hard. I don't think that's really what my parents wanted for me, but I did it anyway just because. And that's really that. My dad, he had drug problems and stuff, so he didn't talk too much about the old days.
He was also a pretty modest person, but later I would hear stories from my family, after he was gone and stuff, which are pretty wild. He was a well-known guy. Toast of the town at a certain point. Before he died, this guy Sonny Seals told me told me that, in the late ‘60s, the two hotshot players in Chicago were my dad and Ramsey Lewis. And Ramsey Lewis was the one who got the recording contract at Chess [Records].
I've never heard much explicitly left stuff in the house. My dad comes from anarchists, so that it couldn't help but weasel its way just as an ethic as a moral compass. If I have any of this sense of justice or a higher morality that I'm walking around with, it's because of that.
It was a very hard life, I saw it with my own eyes. And the downwardly mobile people of the 1980s, and that struck the arts really hard.
I’m wondering how being an anarchist, or being raised around an anarchist value system, parses with that bit in your bio about your folks playing music in a church. Was there ever any conflict there?
I think that sometimes there's something that socialism on paper cannot get at. And that's what I'm trying to get at with psychedelics. The ecstatic experience is exactly a perfect way to put it. I'm guilty of this too. I love all this 1920s and ‘30s, very Soviet art style aesthetics that are associated with socialism or communism. They're very serious. There's a lot of industrial or agrarian themes. But we don't live in that society anymore.
Everybody has a small yearning at the center of them and I think religion can really fill that role. As a matter of fact, the story is that my dad was listening to Handel's “Messiah” on acid. Isn't that crazy? And then he went down to the Elder Moody's church and in Rogers Park and sat down behind the piano, and that was that. He was just there.
For what you haven't had maybe growing up and for the hardship that the hard road you've inherited as continuation of the family, you have these incredible stories of your dad. These amazing anecdotes must remind you that he's embedded in the fabric of Chicago but the larger influence of jazz, in general.
Yeah, and psychedelics. They never talked to me about drugs or psychedelics. I think this was a time in his life he wasn't too happy about. But there is that yearning at the center of life and now it's tempered by silly online politics or consumption.
The Gods are dead. Even the evangelical God doesn't really have much to offer you. That's always been the story that was sold and I think that's why church was so appealing to the people who are downtrodden. It's in the book. Obviously, the interpretation of Christianity nowadays it's just I don't know if they're reading the same book I read.
I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about Colemine Records, and your cover of a song by Seth Applebaum of Ghost Funk Orchestra [“Modern Scene”. I played violin on the cover of yours that he did.
I saw you in there.
It was fun. So I know you covered one of his songs, and he covered one of yours. Can you talk a bit about Colemine, where your head’s at with making music and what you’re working on these days?
Colemine's been great. Just right from the start, they were giving me all I really needed, a little bit of help to get this going. Just like a little bit of attention there, a little helping hand, and we're not talking about much here. They just made it so that I could do this.
So they're hands on. They work with somebody who they can tell is serious about what they want to do and who has the talent and the job-
Right. I didn't deliver a finished album to them. I had a lot of the tracks, but they didn't give me any... they give me a complete freedom.
Nowadays, I'm doing more production work while I think about what I want to do next, because I don't want to make another album like that. My head is not in the same place. I'm not the same person. It's not the same world.
Are you still interested in exploring the genre just maybe from a different angle?
I don't want to work within the confines of any genre. And having thought about that a lot lately, that's how I came to this thing that I did for Seth. I'm just like, wait a minute. There are no rules. These roles are self-imposed.
He's a great example of that too because he's taken a lot of disparate genres. And I think in press, they've lumped it under ‘exotica.’ But he's fused a lot of sounds that he loved into something of his own. He's very surgical and deliberate about that. But there's many paths to the same God or whatever.
I'm not there yet. While I think about what I'm going to do, I have two singles on deck. And I think those will be the last of this material. I'm not going to say what's going to happen. I'm not going to take a super sharp left turn. I just need to meditate on what this is, what I'm doing, what can be created. And also, now I have a solid band that I've been playing with for a bunch of years.
We started out playing these songs, and some of those songs are six, seven years old. This is what happens in music, as you well know, travel, travel, travel, we're together, together, together. Our friendship bonds are so strong. There's just nothing that we can do right now. And we've started to explore things. You've seen us live. It gets pretty fucking noisy at times.
A great fucking show and a great fucking party. I'm wondering too just trajectory-wise, you have all this your creative intake right now. You're reading, you're absorbing, you're meditating. But you're in this limbo right now. As you’re taking in ideas and inspiration, are you planning to bring them to the band and have a musical conversation, to see what shakes out?
I think that it's just has to happen naturally. And in order to buy time to do that, I am producing some music for other people and writing for other people. Don’t get me wrong — I like my sweet love songs, and I don't think that they're the same as everybody else's or anything like that. But I want to keep that going.
That's more in the traditional vein until I can really get my hands on the reins of what's going on. It's good that we got this time out to sit and for me to think about to meditate on what I want to do, but also it's impeded our progress. So it's a blessing and a curse situation.
I think once we're ready to get out of here, once we're ready to start playing again, it's going to be I'll have a clearer idea of what's going on, and stuff we've been working on during this time is more just stuff that I arranged all myself at home.
The line for my last album, the selling point was that it's so positive, it might spark a revolution. Well, I don't feel that positive anymore and I don't want to write any more songs like that. That's just not where my head is at.
So I'm thinking about what I want to do. I could do just write another ten songs, catchy, fun, soul songs. But I can't do that. I read an interview or I listened to an interview a couple years ago. I know you're running out of time. With James Mtume of Juicy Fruit fame, and long career spanning avant-garde and funk and all kinds of stuff. And he says he sat down one day at the piano and he looked at the keys, and he began to cry. And he said, I've been lying to the music.
I've been lying to it — this is how I'm feeling. Not to negate the things that I've done up to this point. But at this moment in time, for me to do that would be to lie to the music.
Who wants soul music that doesn't have any fucking soul behind it? There's 100 records out there that you can go listen to right now. I think I expect more of myself. And I think people should expect more from their art and from their music.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.