Review | Nordoff Robins (@NordoffRobbins1 ) ‘Get Loud’ With 67 (@Official6ix7)

Getloud

Last week a music event was hos­ted by the Music Ther­apy Char­ity, Nor­doff Robins. It was centred around their nation­al aware­ness day, ‘Get Loud’. The aim was to spread a mes­sage about the import­ance of using music to over­come dif­fi­culties in life. As a char­ity, Nor­doff Robins focuses on provid­ing music ther­apy for people who are vul­ner­able and isol­ated. There­fore the cli­ents can be from a wide vari­ety of back­grounds. For example, some of the pre­vi­ous work by Nor­doff Rob­bins has assisted in help­ing people with Aut­ism to find peace and well­being. Their oth­er work has assisted in those going through phys­ic­al rehab­il­it­a­tion or trauma.

How­ever, almost iron­ic­ally, the head­line act for the night was the south Lon­don group, ‘67’. For those who are not aware, ‘67’ are known to talk about money, drugs and viol­ence. Because of this, I found it quite dif­fi­cult to under­stand how the mes­sages of the Char­ity and the group coin­cided. How would a listen­er be emo­tion­ally bet­ter off after listen­ing to the music? Not to dis­cred­it ‘67’ music­ally or con­cep­tu­ally of course, but I found it con­fus­ing that they would be chosen for the event. Almost to prove my point, a fight broke out between the fans dur­ing the set. This ended bloodily and the two fans were taken out of the club.
But could the organ­iser have been mak­ing a subtler link to the under­ly­ing mes­sage? Maybe the point was not simply to provide people with music that made the listen­er feel good. Instead, maybe it was to show­case acts that truly expressed them­selves through their art. I make this assump­tion because I know that a key ele­ment to much of music ther­apy is the actu­al inter­ac­tion between the cli­ent and their cre­ation of music. For example, a cli­ent might learn to play an instru­ment or learn to sing in order to express them­selves in a way they weren’t able to.

So it’s cer­tainly pos­sible that the organ­iser real­ised the con­nec­tion between the dark­er side of rap and the artist’s per­son­al relief through express­ing lyr­ics that may not be pos­it­ive but are hon­est non­ethe­less. In a way, it would be sim­il­ar to the gen­er­al ther­ap­ists’ request that the cli­ent not brush over the neg­at­ive aspects of a story.

So when ‘67’ hit the stage and were wor­shipped by their fans, maybe the hope was that they would be recog­nised for their vivid depic­tions of life. That des­pite the fact that their music has the poten­tial to glor­i­fy the life of gang­sters, we should look at it from a dif­fer­ent angle alto­geth­er. It is just expres­sion. Think, for example, if the mem­bers were unable to have found music as an out­let. Maybe their situ­ation would be con­sid­er­ably worse.

It is very pos­sible that this was the over­arch­ing philo­sophy of the night. As the mem­bers of 67 incited the fans to mosh and the teen­age fans pushed against each oth­er excitedly, maybe the point was not to think but to feel. To take the time to express one­self and to let it all out. Music­al expres­sion is ther­apy even if the res­ult­ing music may not be so pos­it­ive.

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Nicholas Milverton
A writer with an interest in Philo­sophy, Soci­ology, Anthro­po­logy and all things intro­spect­ive. Someone who is equally at home in under­ground house raves as he is in café’s. He is con­tinu­ally ques­tion­ing the sys­tem and his own lines of reas­on­ing. There­fore, he is always rein­vent­ing him­self.

About Nicholas Milverton

Nicholas Milverton
A writer with an interest in Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology and all things introspective. Someone who is equally at home in underground house raves as he is in cafe's. He is continually questioning the system and his own lines of reasoning. Therefore, he is always reinventing himself.