Red Bull Music Academy Offers High-Octane Information And Music

It was a grey Tuesday morning in Seattle (is there any other kind?) when I attempted to locate the Red Bull Music Academy.

The school for aspiring DJs, producers and musicians takes place over one month near the end of the year and is split into two semesters. It's held in a different city every year, and the birthplace of grunge was chosen for 2005. The address I've been given is for a hair salon next to a used bookstore.

After standing on the sidewalk looking clueless for about five minutes, a woman walks out of the salon.

"Are you looking for Red Bull?" she correctly inquires. "It's in the bookstore."

The bookstore is a front. Used books are piled high in the front window so you can't see what's really inside — a giant lounge where 30 of this year's 60 or so successful applicants are talking about their craft and drinking highly caffeinated beverages on giant leather couches. On the right side of the room is a makeshift studio, where the students and some of this week's famous guest lecturers are all getting a chance to DJ for the Academy's internet radio station.

The students have come from as far as Japan and Australia, and as close as the city we're in. Two of this semester's participants are Toronto DJ Allan Lam and Burlington, Ont. bedroom musician Matt Howatt (another Toronto DJ, Adam Pavao, was a first semester participant). All of them were chosen from thousands of applicants.

You might be asking yourself why thousands of aspiring musicians are trying to get into a music school sponsored by an energy drink. But upon further inspection, the excitement for this project is warranted.

The academy has been around since 2000. The first one was in Dublin and, since then, there have been stops in New York, Cape Town and Rome. Red Bull employs a team of people to find a space, gut it, put in about 10 working studios, a radio station and a lecture hall every year.

They get local artists to curate the building and bring in electronic, hip-hop and label heavyweights to do the lectures. Past speakers include Canada's Caribou and A-Trak.

On top of that, Red Bull foots the entire bill for the students. On top of covering accommodations and food, it organizes a month's worth of shows at local clubs every night of the Academy. Students are awarded opening slots at many of these shows (which, this semester, included DJ appearances by lecturers such as ?uestlove from The Roots and Rapture producer Ewan Pearson).

On Tuesday afternoon, the lecturer was Seattle hip-hop legend Anthony Ray (a.k.a. Sir Mix-A-Lot), who later told me that he "felt like a secret agent" walking into the fake front of the building. The former "Baby Got Back" pimp daddy was unassuming in a red T-shirt and jeans, but all eyes in the packed lecture hall were fixed on him when the presentation began.

Because of this, they were also fixated on one of the few prominent Red Bull logos, located directly behind the lecture couches, in the building. Red Bull logos also appear on all turntable slips, and one rep for the company later said that they make an effort to associate the brand with the most important parts of the academy rather than splashing it on every door, window and chair.

Sir Mix-A-Lot recounted his storied rap career and doled out this gem of an anecdote: "After 'Baby Got Back,' dudes would come up to me on the street, point to their girlfriends and go, 'Yo, she got ass?' I was like, 'I don't know. I'm not the ass doctor.'"

But the main point of Ray's presentation was to tell the academy's participants to hold on to their publishing rights. For those of you who don't know what publishing is, when songwriters' music gets played anywhere, they're entitled to be paid for that. You can sell your publishing to a company that will collect that money for you and take their own cut, or you can hold on to it and do the legwork yourself.

DJ/producer Ewan Pearson talked about remix fees and Ubiquity Records co-founder Andrew Jervis discussed the finances of a small record company and the impact of iTunes on labels like his.

While Jervis talked upstairs, ?uestlove was DJing a set at the internet radio station and Nirvana's Krist Novoselic dropped by to check out the space, talk with some of the students and show off his shiny white Mac laptop (a favourite among many of the students at the academy).

If it all sounds pretty hard to believe, it is — even to the twenty-somethings who were lucky enough to be there.

"There's a 13-page application to get in," Howatt recalls. "It was fun to do because it was questions like, 'What are the five tracks you'd play if you were on a beach at sunrise?' 'How would you describe your music to your grandparents?' Draw a diagram of you in the music universe.' I just tried to be honest, because if I lied then it wouldn't be genuine.

"I knew I would hear, yes or no, around the end of July. Sure enough, July 29, woke up one morning and got an email. It started off saying, 'We get thousands of applications, it's a really difficult process,' so I thought I wasn't getting in. Then at the bottom of the paragraph it said, 'That's why we're pleased and honoured to invite you to Seattle.' I stopped and my heart started beating. I read it 25 more times, printed it out, highlighted the part. I was very shocked."

As excited as Howatt was about the trip, friends and family members wondered about the Red Bull sponsorship. But those fears quickly evaporated when he arrived in Seattle and the academy began.

"It came up a lot when I was telling friends and family about it," says Howatt. "'When you get there, are they going to chain you to a synthesizer and make you write the next jingle for Red Bull?' Definitely Red Bull is visible, but, for me, I tend to get the idea that it's an arm's length relationship.

"I don't really know who owns Red Bull or their philosophy. I get the idea that they're using their money and putting it towards artistic innovation. I don't see the difference if this was sponsored by Universal or Sony or IKEA or Coca-Cola or Red Bull.

"I know it sounds corny, but I think Red Bull might be a corporation who cares and might be interested in giving people something more than a high-energy drink. I understand that when I go back home I'm going to mention the Red Bull Music Academy, and that spreads their name, but that's a fair tradeoff. It's not like I'm going home to buy all my friends rounds of vodka and Red Bull."

Whether it sounds corny or not, you get a sincere feeling from the participants that this is a life-changing experience. The way that Lam describes it, it's as if they've found a perfect balance between an educational experience and a not-so-educational one.

"I wake up around 11 or 12 if I'm lucky," he says. "There's a shuttle that takes us to the academy and we get some food.

"There's some studio time, then some lectures, then some more studio time, then some more lectures, then there's the party — parties and after-parties. Then it all starts again."

The application process for the 2006 Red Bull Music Academy, which will take place in Australia, opens in May. For information on the organization and to check out past lectures, go to their website.

Find out more at these Red Bull Music Academy Canadian information sessions:

May 1 Winnipeg @ Section 8, 7 p.m.
May 2 Calgary @ HiFi Club, 7 p.m.
May 3 Vancouver @ Media Club, 7 p.m.
May 8 Toronto @ Revival, 8 p.m.
May 9 Montreal @ La Maison Lyall (The Mansion), 7 p.m.
May 10 Halifax @ The Attic, 8 p.m.