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Music

Educated Little Monsters Teaches Brooklyn's Marginalized Kids to Speak Out and Make Noise

Amidst creeping gentrification, ELM encourages Brooklyn-native children to create art and fight back against oppression.

All photos courtesy of ELM

The J Train rumbles above Myrtle-Broadway. Hovering over historic buildings adorned with brightly colored murals, the train passes a seemingly desolate building occupied by the Silent Barn, a recently reopened music space. The venue itself is a new facet of the community, frequented by hordes of hip Brooklyn and New York City transplants and decorated with a mural that reads, in all caps: “END MA$$ INCARCERATION.”

“Our block is full of new condos. Once, a white woman called the cops on my child and his friends because she ‘didn’t pay that much money to live here and hear kids play,” Yazmin Colon, Brooklyn native and founder of Educated Little Monsters (ELM), a youth-focused arts education program and community, tells me. “As a mother, I started a youth program to give back to the children from the community who were losing spaces to create, to hang out and to play—to be kids.”

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Colon finds that many of the new businesses and music venues in Bushwick are not reflective of the communities they’ve set up shop within. “I’m surrounded by these galleries and cafes, and that’s not our art and that’s not our people. They can claim to be inclusive but, the moment you walk in, your body will tell you, especially as a person of color, you are not welcome,” she explains. “When people say “your area is beautiful now” they really mean, ‘when white people like me move in, suddenly you care about the community more.’ Actually, before you came in, the government didn’t give a shit about urban communities. As natives and people of color, we have to take those spaces back.”

ELM has created a space where Brooklyn-native children feel welcome, empowered, and encouraged to create. Colon says that she wants “the kids to dominate the space. As we are seeing less and less of our culture in our neighborhoods in the spaces that are forming, we see less of ourselves. With programs like ELM, we are demanding our space back. We come for everything they said we couldn’t have. We’re taking back all that they have taken from us. My kids have been displaced, exploited and made to feel like shit in spaces because of oppression. It is about treating people with respect and kindness.”

Music is a central facet of the ELM program. As Colon explains, it’s “a way for these kids to tell a story, a story that is most often narrated for them. These kids go through so much, and the only ways we can collectively heal are through music and art. Music and culture, especially black and brown culture, has been diluted. Our music isn’t supposed to be pretty, it’s supposed to tell a story and shed a light into our lives and our cultures.” Most importantly, she says “music can do wonders to fight oppression. We’re using the forms of music that belong to us to tell our own stories.”

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Sitting on the edge of the circle, she watches 18-year-old Ashley lead a group of attentive middle-school aged girls in brainstorming ideas for future workshops. Ashley has been working with ELM for almost three years. She is planning to organize a weekly workshop on self-empowerment called Gempire, “a peer-to-peer workshop about confidence and empowerment.. Ashley explains, “When I first joined ELM, I was interested in the poetry workshops. Through my writing, I was able to express myself. After that, I started dancing. Now, I would like to build something even bigger with ELM.”

Although it has been difficult to fund the program, Colon has worked with others in the community (specifically the organization We Make Noise and the Silent Barn) for solidarity and support. She says that fostering the program has not been easy, and that they have subsisted “on a dollar and a dream, which is why partnerships with organizations like We Make Noise and the Silent Barn are important. We are going to get resources, even if we have to get them on our own or, ideally, through a system of support and unity.”

We Make Noise is partnered with ELM through a weekend and after-school program called Bushwick School For Music, which meets weekly on Sundays at The Silent Barn. The program teaches ELM students how to play instruments, how to record, how to make beats, and how to mix music. Lizzie Conner, an organizer and music instructor with We Make Noise, notes the importance of child-controlled music-making. She describes how ELM fosters a space where the kids hold the majority of creative control, saying, “They have so much creative energy and they take care of each other.”

According to Conner, the program “started as a kind of hang out space and evolved from that. The kids said that they wanted to perform and record. So we booked showcases every seven weeks. We have already done one, and it was super well attended for matinee show on a Sunday afternoon. Most importantly we want these events to be places where people bring their kids, and that are inclusive of everyone in the community.”

When I visited the program, We Make Noise was sponsoring a beat-making workshop with ELM. Colon led me to the back of the Silent Barn, weaving through the multicolored muraled walls of the building. In a recording area lined with potted plants and Christmas lights, a group of high-school aged boys are listening to bass-heavy beats laid over a James Brown sample that floats through the room. One boy sits cross-legged on a couch, sharing snacks with a friend. Another boy sits at a computer, receiving feedback from an ELM mentor on his newly minted James Brown-inspired beat. I introduce myself and say that I am working on a piece about ELM for Noisey. Immediately, his eyes widen and he lets out a laugh. “Oh, my gosh. Dang! I love that website.”

He says that he just turned seventeen, and that he has done the program since he was fourteen. In addition to technical and musical production skills, he says, ELM has helped him realize his goal of becoming a musician and producer. I ask him what has been the most significant facet of the program; he smiles and replies, “ELM has been like a home for me.” Emma May is making noise on Twitter.