The major-label music industry is doing its best to pretend the pandemic is over. Despite an accelerating death toll, high-profile artists and organizations have spent the last half of this long year bringing audiences into indoor venues for award shows (the AMAs), album-release parties (T.I.), and even full concerts (Trey Songz, Chase Rice, Great White).
Muse had previously coordinated the Love & Nappyness Hair Care Drive during the 2019 holiday season, an effort he repeated this fall. But as he told the Reader this summer, working for the Grab-N-Go helped him realize that “Chicago has a huge resource problem.”
Nnamdï Ogbonnaya, who performs as Nnamdï, released the album Brat in April, but because he couldn’t hit the road to promote it, he just kept recording in his home studio. In June, after protests began in Chicago in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he began releasing the results as Bandcamp exclusives.
Ohmme have also used livestreams and merch sales to raise funds for Chicago Community Jail Support, Brave Space Alliance, the Montessori School of Englewood, voting-access groups, and Kooyrigs, an organization that supports Armenian women and refugees from the recent armed conflict in Artsakh (Cunningham has Armenian heritage). The duo estimate they’ve raised between $5,000 and $6,000 in 2020, as individuals and together. “It’s been an intense year to say the least,” they say. “We focused primarily on young Chicago-based organizations that are building up a team to do really impactful work in communities we think are important and deserve more resources.”
Regardless of their approach, Chicago’s activist-musicians had to improvise in 2020—even old hands were forced to adapt to the evolving pandemic. The Scholars Slide By learned as they did the work, coordinating volunteers for purchases and deliveries while raising funds for their wholly donation-based program. “It was kind of made on the fly, so all logistical adjustments had to be made on the fly as well,” Adigun says. Meanwhile, Ohmme faced challenges unique to fundraising livestreams: they had to find work-arounds to link to organizations that aren’t 501(c)(3) certified, due to limitations built into Instagram.
situationchicago by Quiet Pterodactyl
