This past Thursday, spoken word artist Frank Brady came to perform at Ruane’s Den as part of the College’s ongoing “Down at the Den” series. Brady performed original work for two hours and also invited students to speak. Hosted by Student Engagement & Leadership Education, “Down at the Den” has previously welcomed musicians Levi Stephens, Dan Mills & the Fairweather Band and Jen Lowe, as well as a trivia night.
It didn’t take long into his performance to realize why Brady was invited to Conn. His work is, almost to a fault, youth-centered. He introduced himself to his audience on a very human level, describing himself primarily as a youth advocate and brother. He described writing his first poem, “My Dreams Beam From my Mind to my Paper,” in an almost self-deprecating fashion to identify himself with his young audience. Before launching into his work, he proclaimed that he is still trying to find his identity as a writer and a person, and therefore still writes about surprisingly “young” topics such as cartoons and Power Rangers.
His poems did not contradict this caveat. He began with three lighter, fun poems. In “Facebook Poem,” Brady expressed his frustration at the digital age’s effects on communication. Integrating his text with song, Brady described the social media website as a “prison for people to hide who they are.” He then moved on to another youth-centered topic in a poem entitled “Financial Aid Mobsters,” in which he expressed his aggravation with the system at his college, and then finished the set with a relationship poem entitled “She’s Crazy.”
In this section, Brady clearly catered to his collegiate audience, but perhaps too much. Billed as the “lighter” or “more fun” portion, these poems did not serve to lighten the mood, but rather brought it down through Brady’s frustration and anger.
When moving on to deeper poems, Brady kept the overall tone of his prior work but engaged with more serious subject matter. He first challenged the audience to give him three unrelated words—“master,” “promise” and “tree”—from which he made a poem on the spot. It was impressive and interesting to see him make up a poem extemporaneously, but the end result was predictably scattered. The true meaning behind this poem (the broken relationship with his father) was revealed too late in his performance.
He finished the serious set with a poem directly inspired by the movie The Notebook, based on the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name. Again, it was clear that this choice was influenced by his youthful and female audience, but the poem itself suffered from adhering too closely to the story and not having a voice of its own.
Although Brady’s intentions were good, his poems were overall overshadowed by his presence. In “Facebook Poem” and many others, his vocals weren’t smoothly integrated into the rest of the verses, and it appeared as though he was singing just to switch things up, rather than for any specific effect. In addition, as he got more wrapped up in his performance, he often began to shout and repeat phrases. Instead of this having a moving quality, however, it overwhelmed his audience, causing his subject matter to play second fiddle to his personality.
Brady has performed at several other college events, including The Annual MLK Yale University Environmental & Social Justice Poetry Slam, but perhaps the reason his event wasn’t as successful as it could have been at Conn was because of the timing. Hosted at 9 p.m. on a Thursday, the event was predictably not heavily attended and also had not been sufficiently advertised. In addition, the student work that was performed wasn’t done so until closer to 10 p.m., and therefore wasn’t prominently featured. Perhaps if Brady had made arrangements through the English department, the event would have been attended and appreciated by the audience that he aimed to have, and would also give students a broader forum in which to respond to his work.
