Following on from their spoken word track and music video, ‘Frank And The Rat Pack‘, we took time to talk to Staunch Moderates about their music, their mission, and their community.
What inspired you to write a song about Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack? Have you always been a Sinatra fan?
Frank and the Rat Pack is a great story that was the center of US pop culture music history for thirty years, mid 1930 through the mid 1960s. It’s part of our history and culture, which deserved to be told in a rap song, so unfamiliar people can become familiar and more well cultured. With this and many of our tracks, we are all about learning through entertainment.
Yes, I’ve always been a Sinatra fan to some degree. My favorite Sinatra story is my Mom and her high school girlfriends use to get together and play a Sinatra album and then each would hold and dance around the room with a Frank album cover.
What motivated you to step away from the political sphere to write a homage to these artists?
It’s actually business as usual for us, as we have written and produced many tribute tracks to both music and non music icons: Lou Ferrigno, Bill Maher, Barry Goldwater, Maggie Connor, Eva Lester (Bali Girl), Damar Hamlin, Ramsey Lewis, Rolling Stone Magazine, and most recently Fank & the Rat Pack.
How would you describe your unique musical style?
Mostly as low-down, jazz & R&B hip hop, where we merge into rock n roll with a few of our tracks as is evidenced by our tracks Journey and Rolling Stone. We actually use eight genres of music, hence we call ourselves a multi-genre hip hop band. Frank and the Rat Pack is more of a popping jazzy track. It along with most of our tracks are historically or philosophically significant.
Who was essential to making the “Frank and the Rat Pack” music video happen? Talk to us a little bit about the production process.
Meshach Lewis (Shaq) is our editor and social media director. He and I collaborate as a team with him editing and my giving notes using both our originally shot and licensed content to fit our stories.
Talk to us about the visual imagery chosen for the music video—what feelings are you hoping to evoke in viewers?
The visual imagery is shot, chosen and produced to fit the story we are telling in the Music Video. The feelings we hope to provoke are, “Wow, this is cool, entertaining and I just learned something. Got to tell my friends!
What has it been like building up your audience since first making music?
It’s been fun. From the YouTube comments, my favorites are, “My fiancé and I love your track “Baseball.” Can we hire you to play at our wedding?” And, “Your track Socrates Café is my recent favorite. I’ve been playing it over and over all day jamming out to it.” We’ve gotten plays many times on Sirius XM Meg Griffin Show, Disorder. It’s been nice being recognized by the Recording Academy and their balloting us many times over the last four years including for: “Rolling Stone Magazine,”Frank & the Rat Pack” & “Mediterranne” each for Song of the Year. It’s been rewarding that many film festivals have granted us many awards for our music in their music categories allowing our movement to make the claim “award winning music and films!”
Our “DJ Staunch and the Bigfoots” Staunch Moderates Community and invitation is easily accessible via our “Staunch Moderates News” YouTube Channel, Spotify, SoundCloud our Staunch Moderates.org robust website. Please see our biz card with socials.
What would you tell young, aspiring musical artists looking for advice?
I haven’t thought about this before & thinking about it now, I don’t know. Our success & strategy was certainly derived non-conventionally through our not following any industry trends nor listening to advice of whatever significant execs we could get to. We did what we did the way that we wanted and that sounded & felt good to us with the resources we had. We had a mission at hand besides just making good music, and that was to spread the message from our movement and effect society in a positive way. In fact, an exec with an incredible bio told us to dump our rapper, Casanova Ace, find a younger hipper sound and follow the trends to achieve success. Cas & I had been doing gigs together for fifteen or twenty years, so I stuck with him. Everyone in show biz seems to like working with who they are use to working with, so biz as usual. From producing albums with Caz, an awesome poet, we learned he had a Biggie Smalls sound and really sounded good and wrote that great poetry for our band & Movement. I don’t know that this is good advice to give to someone ambitious in the industry, but this is my experience. When it comes to teachings and advice, I’d point people more towards our Philosophy, Inspirations and other jargon tracks to our movement which is intended to inspire fans to become good citizens, become effective members society and strive for peace.
Following the release of this song, what projects are up & coming for you?
It appears we will be doing a concert series at Universities across the country. We are also working on editing together our third film with a working title of Mission Peace 2, that we will be competing in the film fest circuit similar to how our past films have done quite well: “Mission Peace” is available on Amazon & Apple & “Staunch Moderates Experience,” having won sixteen awards is our visual album we are currently seeking distribution for. BTW Mission Peace 2, the other film we’re working on picks up from where Mission Peace 1 left off taking the audience on the journey from the beginning of 2021 through to today, where we moved from just: philosophy, forums, polls & podcasts into Music and Films and our band dropping three hip hop albums.
We also intend for our Staunch Moderates Experience Film/Concert Series/Course to also become a theatrical production that plays Broadway, Las Vegas, etc … Our highest goal or dream is to play the Sphere Las Vegas.
You can check out the music video for ‘Frank & The Rat Pack’ below, and find out more about Staunch Moderates online on their official website, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
