{"id":103,"date":"2008-09-09T10:43:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T17:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/blog\/?p=103"},"modified":"2009-04-06T13:51:25","modified_gmt":"2009-04-06T20:51:25","slug":"bubbles-the-stallionaires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/bubbles-the-stallionaires\/","title":{"rendered":"Bubbles &#038; Stallionaires"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Anyone who knows me knows I love reality tv. I am SO not ashamed to admit that. Just like I wasn&#8217;t ashamed to admit I LOVED the internet in 1991 when everyone around me thought it was dorky and useless. I like reality. I&#8217;ve dedicated my life to trying to live the best one I can.<\/p>\n<p>I love reality shows about creative process like Project Runway and Top Chef. But bottom feeders like &#8220;I Love New York&#8221; seriously steal my heart. I loved loved LOVED that show and its star. And I loved loved LOVED two contestants on it even more, Chance and Real, the two brothers who came in 2nd and 3rd on Season 1.<\/p>\n<p>Soft spoken Real and firecracker Chance were fascinating because even as as they were vying for the heart of a lunatic the love and respect between them was always apparent. And they were hysterical. But trust me, any time one of them brought up their band, Stallionaires, there wasn&#8217;t a brain cell in my head that thought it would be anything more than ok.<\/p>\n<p>I live for combining hi and lo culture. I have no interest in the middle, the safe zone where mediocre talent whose of-the-moment work clogs pop culture like sludge from the Exxon Valdese. I love to take the very top levels of art, music, technology and design where style and innovation live and jam them together with what&#8217;s happening at the bottom, where passion, guts and a bizarre take on art rule. Many people think reality tv falls into the lo category. Maybe that&#8217;s why I love it. And maybe that&#8217;s why I jumped at the chance to meet Chance and Real when my friend, Steve Lindsay, who I met in 1985 when he asked me to co-write the Dance Fever theme, told me he was managing them.<\/p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_29781.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-117\" title=\"img_29781\" src=\"https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_29781.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" srcset=\"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_29781.jpg 3072w, https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_29781-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a>\n<p>I would have written with Stallionaires if they were the worst band in the world just to meet them. But guess what, they&#8217;re FANTASTIC! As is brother #3, Love, who joins them on their spin-off &#8216;Real Chance At Love&#8217; that debuts on VH-1 in November.<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t been this happy with collaborators in a long time. Not only are they just as rough and tumble, spontaneous and untrained &#8211; i.e. fearless &#8211; as I am, they are incredibly musical, hooky and full of spirit to boot. And interested in news ways of doing everything &#8211; from the music itself to the mediums it will live on. And they&#8217;re very, very fast. No nudging notes around on a grid until everything snaps into place as stiff as a corpse. It&#8217;s not about precision; it&#8217;s all feel all the time, just the way I like it.&nbsp; And we&#8217;re all indie, which means no pansy ass decisions by producers or entertainment conglomerates to dictate our fate. We live or die by our own sword.<\/p>\n<p>And then there&#8217;s this. When Love, Chance and Real were 11, 12 and 13 they were discovered by Paulino DeCosta, the percussion maestro of Earth Wind &amp; Fire, the band that discovered <em>me<\/em> when I wasn&#8217;t much older than Stallionaires are now. My obsession with percussion came from watching Paulino. They&#8217;re equally obsessed with percussion because of him.<\/p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_31474.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-119\" title=\"img_31474\" src=\"https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_31474.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" srcset=\"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_31474.jpg 3072w, https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_31474-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a>\n<p>I wish I could leak the record we just finished, &#8220;Does She Love Me?&#8221;, but it&#8217;s the first single and theme song to their VH-1 series so I have to play by the rules and wait til the show airs. It&#8217;s an eternally happy song like &#8220;September&#8221;, my first Earth Wind &amp; Fire hit. You&#8217;re in a good mood from the downbeat and you can feel the writers&#8217; joy in every beat.<\/p>\n<p>I know some people won&#8217;t understand how I went from <em>The Color Purple<\/em> to this reality universe. But for Bubbles &amp; Stallionaires it&#8217;s all about people being all they can be and experiencing genuine joy as they do it. It&#8217;s the same basic story.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not the type who stays on a ship that sails the same course every time it sets out to sea. I get bored, I fall asleep and I&#8217;m outta there. Thank you, Stallionaires, for slipping me a big, fat happy pill because I&#8217;m way onboard.<\/p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_30191.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-121\" title=\"img_30191\" src=\"https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_30191.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" srcset=\"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_30191.jpg 3072w, https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/img_30191-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/music\/stallionaires\/index.html\">https:\/\/www.alleewillis.com\/music\/stallionaires\/index.html<br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anyone who knows me knows I love reality tv. I am SO not ashamed to admit that. Just like I wasn&#8217;t ashamed to admit I LOVED the internet in 1991 when everyone around me thought it was dorky and useless. I like reality. I&#8217;ve dedicated my life to trying to live the best one I &hellip; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/bubbles-the-stallionaires\/\">read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[171,27,53,131,23,13,59,37,21],"tags":[61,211,209],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afro","category-bubbles-the-artist","category-creative-process","category-creativity","category-discography","category-music","category-reality-tv","category-self-expression","category-technology","tag-allee-willis","tag-chance-and-real","tag-stallionaires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alleewillis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}