This weekend, tens of thousands are expected to flock to Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn, New York, for the 8th annual Afro-Punk Festival. Entertainers including Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, and Gym Class Heroes will be hitting the stages, and there will be skateboarding, food trucks, and, presumably, lots of black folk with mohawks.
The festival was birthed in 2004 from the Afro-Punk movement, which prides itself as “the other black experience†and began with a 2003 documentary of the same name. In the film, producer Matthew Morgan and director James Spooner gave audiences a glimpse of black punks in America as Afro-Punk was shown everywhere from living rooms to college campuses (“One particular professor used it to show that black kids were not only to R&B and hip-hop,†Morgan says).
Today, Morgan is expanding the goals of Afro-Punk: “Initially, it was just about addressing the imbalance in music. … Now it’s the imbalance that is media, in terms of how we’re viewed in the media and how we’re portrayed. It’s not 360 degrees of what we are; it seems to just always be a monolith.†Here he speaks with BlackEnterprise.com about the Afro-Punk festival and the future of this culture movement.
BlackEnterprise.com: Explain your decision to make the festival free.
Morgan: That decision is really based on the belief, or the understanding, that we don’t pay for things that we do not understand. And if you’re a young black kid, and you don’t know really what a festival is and don’t know what you’re going to get from it, you’re not going to pay 150 bucks for it. If you give something so people understand what is, they’ll then feel good about buying a ticket to another festival or a black festival somewhere else.
We’ve got to help teach the audience and bring new things to them, open their minds to skateboarding–which we’ve done–to BMX, to art, to all these things that if you don’t have peer, or you don’t see somebody else that looks like you doing it, it’s not often the first thing that you do. So it was very important for us [for] New York… to be like our tent pole event, but Chicago and Atlanta are going to have to pay.
When you first introduced this idea, how were you able to attract sponsors?
Sponsors are very difficult, because most brands don’t [care] about black people.
There are obvious candidates that always seem to support the African-American market, and those same dollars have to be distributed across many mouths, and if it’s anything out of the box, it’s very difficult to get our hands on. We have been extremely fortunate because we’ve had individuals at certain corporations that are kind of vanguards at that corporation, and being people of color–particularly one at Pepsi that supported us and the old head of marketing at Nike–they’re people that have young kids, or teenage kids, that when we walk into the office, they understand exactly what we’re talking about because their kids are those kids. And those are the times that we’ve been supported by brands. We have been supported and we have had support, but we do not get the type of support, at the moment, because we are a little different, and we’re very hard to kind of get your heads around when you just got your head around hip-hop.
What about the artists? How were you able to get them to buy into the event?
The artists are the ones that really support it. They’re doing it because they get it;
they’re doing it because they didn’t have the opportunity to do it. There are a lot of alternative artists that play to a predominately white audience. When they hear they can perform to an audience that is probably the most diverse, the most multicultural, predominately black audience that they’ve probably ever preformed in front of, you can’t help but be excited about that if you’re a person of color. ‘Cause you’re so used to performing to white people. And people really, really dig it. Erykah’s a huge supporter; Janelle has been phenomenal. I mean, they’re all people just that really love it. Pharrell [Williams] is coming this weekend to hang out, he’s not performing, he just wants to come and hang out.What is a typical day like for you at the festival?
I don’t know what other people do, and I’ve never had a “job  but I assume people that produce festivals sit in an office and they deal with the problems that are ongoing. I can’t sit still, so I spend the whole day checking on every single element that is happening. And I like it, people ask me to get an assistant, they ask me to carry a radio; I don’t carry a radio, I don’t
have an assistant. I just like to walk around see people, listen to what they’re saying, look at their faces, see what they like, what they don’t like, and try and get a little bit of the experience that I felt when I first did my first show. If I can see that in other people, then I know that we’re continuing to do the right thing.
With the festival becoming bigger and bigger, are you worried that it might become too mainstream?
We know why we’re doing it and we know all the other elements that are so important. We have so much work to do. The festival is one component, but we produce commercials, we do marketing for brands, we’re making a new film, we’re trying to create content for a YouTube channel. We’re still not seeing the type of media that should be out there; we’re not seeing our stories told the way that we would like to tell them. There’s so much missing that we’re so far away from worrying about that. The playing field is so unequal, that at the point that it becomes equal, I’ll be on the beach somewhere.