KPU hosts second annual Wake Up! Social Justice music festival

🔊 Listen to Post

The Wake Up! Social Justice music festival is returning to Kwantlen Polytechnic University on March 13 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm at the Surrey Cedar Conference Centre. 

The event will feature four artists performing songs that highlight different social justice issues. The music festival celebrates voices of people from the local BIPOC and queer community. 

To keep up with the undergoing rebrand in the music industry in Surrey and Langley, Cobb and Shelly Boyd, dean of the faculty of arts, reached out to the music community in the area. The festival came to be after Cobb got involved with the Surrey Music Strategy, a think tank and City of Surrey initiative composed of music artists, record labels, and companies, last year. 

Cobb says the reason behind organizing the festival is KPU needs more cultural events for international students and it’s a way to invite members of the Surrey Music Strategy into the university’s culture. 

After organizing the festival on his own last year and getting positive feedback from students, Cobb decided to develop a course, “MUSI 3500: Special Topics,” to get students involved in the planning process. The course will be a flagship for the new diploma being developed in the music department. 

Students enrolled in the course are doing different jobs like designing the website, infographics, working at the exit and entrance tables at the event, stage managing, creating the Eventbrite page, working with campus security, handling live equipment, and collaborating with Grassroots Café for food and beverages to host the festival.  

This year, the festival will also be broadcasted live in Grassroots Café with the help of a simulcast team.

“My job is essentially to manage all of the projects and to filter them through the lens of pedagogy, so that I can take these tasks and turn them into assignments,” Cobb says. 

“The course is a big experiment, and I love a big experiment. [As] artists, our job, most of the time, is to solve problems.”

Cobb says students are learning how to have active agency, present their interests and ideas in class, and collaborate with different people. 

Students in the course are also learning about digital content production and creating hype videos for each artist that will be played before they come out on stage. 

“It is sort of like the real world modeled in a classroom. That is the model and the brand of our new music diploma, [that] the music industry exists in the real world and here are the real-world jobs,” Cobb says. “The transformative potential in regard to the community at KPU is massive.” 

Cobb and Malcolm Aiken, a music instructor at KPU who helped develop the course, are familiar with artists dedicated to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the music community and thus reached out to them to perform at the festival.

Vancouver-based hip hop artist Ndidi Cascade will be headlining the event along with Ahsia, Zabrina Hay, and Xhalida. 

After performing at the festival last year, Cascade says she had a wonderful experience and was open to performing again. She has been involved in the hip-hop movement for almost 26 years and says her songs are inspired by the power of endurance in life. 

Cascade describes most of her music as “conscious hip hop” with messages that revolve around positive community building. She often likes to educate the crowd on the history of hip-hop and how it heals and empowers communities. Her songs usually focus on personal journeys, community empowerment, women’s rights, and human rights. 

“For me, my art is my life’s purpose. It really helps to set my direction so that I stay balanced, and I’m far happier when I’m creating art, and just feel really grateful that I can create [it],” Cascade says. 

Kai Barcellos Luna, a student enrolled in the course, is a part of the marketing team for the festival. They will be handling advertising, announcements, and the festival’s Instagram page. 

The marketing team is also in charge of designing the festival’s website to update artist bios and make all information about the event accessible. 

“​​I am doing a bunch of jobs that I had no idea how to do before this class and [you] learn as you go,” they say. 

Luna says students could pick a team to work on that best suited their interests. Being a creative writing student who wants to go into publishing, he was personally interested in marketing and thought it would be good to gain experience in the area. 

They say events like this are important for international students to get in touch with people and make friends since they may feel isolated at times. 

“Bringing the community together is one of the things that I love about [these] events,” he says, adding there is a lack of awareness about the 2SLGBTQ+ community and events like this help create awareness and bring them together. 

Cobb says he is thrilled about the lineup of artists who identify as women, this year, since the music industry is still dominated by cisgendered, straight men. 

“Women have been fighting to have an equal share of that industry, and a lot of that can be achieved just through representation,” he says. 

Cobb came up with the festival name after making sense of the anti-woke rhetoric that exists in conservative circles and thus decided to call it “Wake Up!” 

“To be woke … is when you are somebody who has been in possession of privilege that you are unaware of … and it’s like, you wake up and start to see the world from somebody else’s perspective,” he says. 

“Social justice is literally the world that I live in. It’s the only lens that I know because it’s how I’ve survived.” 

Organizing a music festival that aims to bring people together and share ideas through the universal language of music is a way of giving back to the community that has been “pretty good to [him] over the last 30 years,” Cobb says. 

For more information about the festival, visit wakeupmusicfestival.com/.