Zine 43: Reign of Bluphoria
I’m a child of the coast; I grew up blasting surf rock and beachy psychadelic tunes. I’m not trying to claim all of a genre just because of where I was born, but there’s a certain twang of an electric guitar, or a roughly sang vocal range and almost always a song with a “la la la” or “la di da” portion that makes my heart feel at home. If we wanted to get fun, I’m sure we could tie some of it back to my dad being ~old~ or my middle school fantasy of an artsy skater boy. Regardless, like a cat on a windowsill, my ears suddenly perk up trying to hone in on the sound making the chemicals in my brain tingle. It’s a sound that’s been around - shaggy hair was the coolboi go to when the Strokes and the Kooks dominated the radio. I suppose it was also the coolboi go to when The Beach Boys and Creedence Clearwater Revival were international hits. It’s almost 2022, a shaggy mullet is still the go to - it’s just for the hot queer femmes and not the cis-bois now. And Bluphoria are here to carry that sound into the vacuum of saturated reinvention. Bluphoria has a small discography, but already you can feel different pulls and influences in each independent song. It isn’t just the reinvention of the reinvention of this kind of rock. It’s not just the regurgitation of the 2000’s brit-rock fascination seen as a regurgitation itself of the classic rock era. The modernity of the former while being more rooted in the nuances of the latter like Blues and Doo-wop. Frontman Reign LaFreniere truly swims in a pool of inspiration; absorbing like a sponge. What the band squeezes out is inspiration as pure as Laurel Canyon’s heyday. Long story short, my heart feels at home inside Bluphoria’s music.
Reign - vocals and guitar / Dakota - rhythm guitarist / Rex - bass / Dani - drums
Baby Ballou: What’s your first standout memory of either consuming or creating art?
Reign: oo that’s a hard one, probably listening to music my parents would play as a child like bob marley and CCR
BB: Oo yes, mine is when my dad showed me lost in the supermarket by the clash and my main character syndrome flared up and I was like “is this….about and for me?” Who else had an impact on your music taste as you grew up?
Reign: after that i started discovering a lot of music on my own once i got spotify and really fell in love with 60’s rock
BB: What about 60’s rock really spoke to you?
Reign: I just like how it originated as a counter culture to the conservative and rigid make up that the world started developing post WWII. It started (rock n roll) as a teenage marketing scheme to make money from and slowly as the art form matured it became a form of veiled protest that is now ingrained in the genre itself
BB: Yes! This also coincides with a topic close to my heart which is the dismissal of teenagers, especially teenage girls, as consumers of music. Critics belittle and companies (and sometimes band members 😬)just see easy targets. But in so much of the culture going on during the era of classic rock, art is fueled by young people. The Beatles wouldn’t exist without teenagers. Have you noticed anything similar?
Reign: ive noticed that a lot in the past but not so much now, rock as a genre no longer can easily play into those commercial tropes that it used to and has to adapt and evolve to find a new audience. rock now heavily relies on those consumers as it starts picking itself back up from the underground and i don’t think can dismiss them any longer, at least from my perspective/position
BB: You have a really clear sense of genre and what your sonic aesthetic is, how is your experience creating and connecting in an industry that’s currently in a state of blending genres and consuming through different lenses?
Reign: it’s been interesting trying to balance what is marketable and what i creatively want to make, especially in the genre im in right now but it is also exciting to see pop music change a bunch now and genres are sort of redefining and i feel as though i’m in a position where i can redefine my genre through a poc lens
BB: by that, do you mean bringing more poc perspectives and creations into the forefront of the genre since most genres and trends are created by POC artists?
Reign: yeah, most genres created by poc individuals are then drowned out by their white counterparts and I think it’s a really good thing to see rock in particular being taken back by black artists for example, Willow who writes and performs punk music now
BB: Yeah I feel like more and more we’re (as a society) forgetting the reality of sister Rosetta Thorpe or Chuck Berry and the real life Black pioneers of the genre. Most of us acknowledge that Black people are founders of pop culture as a general concept/rule yet continue to subconsciously associate Black musicians with hip hop and rap. Who are your biggest inspirations in rock, not just sonically but in your journey to finding yourself as a musician and who did you see yourself in?
Reign: yea i’ve noticed that, and even in the industry now it is assumed that i am trying to artistically go towards hip hop etc. but thats never been my form of expression. The most inspirational black musicians in my book are bob marley, who despite civil war and politics + the everyday struggle with people trying to remove him from his mantle kept creating art of peace, and jimi hendrix who again managed to revolutionize the way we listen to rock music
BB: What’re the first handful of songs that you think describe you, your mentality, your life, your story anything but the sings that make you feel seen as an individual
Reign: probably “so much things to say” by bob marley
“no woman” by whitney
and “someday” by the strokes
i feel like they all are good representations of what my like is like at the moment
BB: Mine are closer to the borderline by Billy Joel, last night I dreamt by the wombats and panic attacks in paradise by ashnikko. I love that you said that because when I think of Bluphoria’s sound, it’s a really beautiful mesh of classic rock and the oughtie’s/early teens Brit indie rock revival. The latter was already a slight homage to classics but your sound is a new step forward. What’s your creative process like?
Reign: I try not to overthink our music and by that I mean not to force it, a lot of our songs just come to fruition one day and I feel like our best ones just write themselves and after we all sit back and say “that’s a good one” I have a personal rule that if I can’t write out a song in the first day that I came up with it that it isn’t meant to be and if it is i’ll remember it and it’ll come back to me haha
Bb: Do you consider yourself better at relaying your emotions or communicating via lyrics or actual dialogue with people?
Reign: I think i used to only be good at communicating my emotions through lyrics but nowadays i have gotten better at having an actual dialogue but to a certain extent the deeper things i am too afraid to say are articulated in my lyrics
Bb: I can definitely see why, but I’m just curious to hear your musings on it. Why do you think it’s easier for you to write lyrics than express deeper things? It’s such an interesting place to be in because logistically speaking, it’s just you, putting together words, aiming for a message in both. But one is easier. Do you think there’s an element of being able to hide behind poetic lines over bluntness? And/or a fear of direct rejection in a way?
Reign: i feel like there’s a sense of ambiguity when i write lyrics, i can write something that to me seems pretty direct and clear to me but somebody could still have their own interpretation. And, i feel like most of my lyrics are about the people around me and relate to my life but people perceive as more of a separated thing rather than my voice which makes me feel as though it’s safer to express my thoughtS
Bb: Do people ever expect or ask your music to be political just because you’re from a marginalized community? I know some queer artists are (weirdly) held to this standard of ALWAYS discussing that aspect of their lives instead of feeling/be free to just write
Reign: There was a time i feel like that was a concern but I came to terms with the fact that that’s not my message to give atm and I do have political stances I would like to take with my music but I’m not at that point in my art where I can properly deliver that message. So now it’s not necessarily something expected of me but something I have to remind myself not to pressure myself to do it
Bb: I was honestly trying to think of like a transition sentence but everything I thought of, while meant wholly earnestly, sounded tone deaf coming from a yt girl like me lolol so let’s pretend I’m articulate enough. I love how you speak about it so ambiguously. It’s only recently but for so long, I feel like when artists made sonic changes (outside of the Beatles), they were often thought of as inauthentic or selling out. I worked on the marketing team for Tegan & Sara when they did a sound shift and went pop and they lost many fans purely because the fans got mad they changed, not even because they didn’t like the new sound - they just didn’t like that there WAS a new sound. Meanwhile Tegan and Sara were just genuinely vibing and living their best lives in the new genre. Or discrediting musicians who established themselves with fun, dance songs coming out with poignant vulnerable messages being told to stay in their lane. I’ll admit I definitely have gatekept within music during my hipster phases when I was younger. Have you ever caught yourself thinking a gate-keepy or toxic mentality and had to unlearn something? Within music or not
Reign: i definitely was like that when i was younger, i thought that all music had to have some kind of meaning or political message and the idea of “fun” music just baffled me and i hated it. but growing up in the world we live in now and how generally hopeless it always tends to be made me appreciate the music that is meant to just enjoy the moment and not always have this deeper meaning and mostly be abt the emotion rather than anything else. i found myself doing that a lot with bands like mumford and sons and the lumineers or leon bridges but at the end of the day thats the art they are meant to create in that moment and there is a way to truly appreciate that
Bb: Yea!! As a society, we’re really not good at processing things made for the moment. We’re only justtttt past the collective thought that pop (and rap for other reasons) music is inherently bad or vapid, we’ve accepted the in the moment or silliness in art and movies but even then still classify a lot of them as b-list or not as legit because they don’t deal with intensity or any other number of reasons given. Why do you think there’s a societal tendency to look down on certain art?
Reign: I think that it’s been pervasive in our society for a while and arguably a way to gatekeep certain art and I think that tool was, for a while, in the 20th century to devalue black art specifically in music. for a while black art wasn’t considered serious and looked down upon and when it crossed over to pop because of white appropriation it was considered “mindless” pop music and this has been used for every new genre that’s come out from funk to disco and even punk music all of which started off within the black community and was sought to be invalidated. I think now it has left that mentality and there is a sense of disdain towards corporate influence within art that causes such a divide and i don’t think that society has gotten better at looking down on this kind of art i think that we have just gotten worse at detecting it
Bb: Wow consider me knocked out. Your response totally put words to what I’ve noticed. I don’t think we (white people) are aware of that as an after shock. For me and others I’m sure, I think there was a dissonance and it was like BC and AC, there was the era where the thing would be rejected/underground because it was led by the Black community and then separately. That thing then has an integrated era and society dismisses it as mindless “teenage” chaos almost. I don’t think I’d fully put together that even after it’s integrated, it’s a carried over desire to STILL make it seem unimportant but now that white guys are doing it, they change their wording to rebellious and white girls are doing it, it’s vapid but both still stem from before. Sorry, just listening to that reverberate in my mind and consuming it. Do you feel like your music is in a genre that’s in a limbo now- indie rock has been established in the mainstream and new genres like hyperpop have become the thing to dismiss?
Reign: I honestly can’t tell, I feel like we are coming into a time period where there is so much being released and so many new artists that it’s almost impossible to gate keep and have that same reaction, like while hyper pop is growing right now it doesn’t necessarily have the same attention in terms of being able to be heavily dismissed as rebellious or mind numbing which makes our genre of rock even weirder bc we are moving up the ladder like it normally would, in a rebellious sense in an underground scene devoid of regulation and particularly unsafe but once u break out of that then rock is a steadily respected genre by most people so i’m not too sure. I’d like to think that hyper pop is filling that mantle of “the thing to dismiss” but i haven’t noticed it happening too much
Bb: So in this reckoning of saturation, rise of independent artists, genre blending and overall capitalism’s impact on music - what is your dream end place? If you could choose how this period of chaos and change plays out, how would it?
Reign: In any way where i can b financially stable and be able to make music for the rest of my life and in turn be able to participate in altruistic pursuits along with it, taking it one step at a time haha
Bb: And what do you want music creation/industry to be/look like overall for everyone?
Reign: hopefully it becomes an industry that is less manipulative and focuses more on the artists rather than the companies and i think it’s trending that way with a lot of laws barring record labels and such from preying on their artists as much