The Fly

Even ice-cold Syracuse University has a little sizzle and spice, and The Fly are just that. This misfit group of hip-hop/R&B specialists provide a much-needed blend of contrasting style for the SU music scene. It’s not folk and definitely not remixed–it’s straight soul, power and urban rhythm. Led by the sassy and highly talented Keith Smith and Farasha Baylock, The Fly are a must-hear-now kind of act. Watch this video and you’ll see what kind of attitude and savvy dance moves they bring to the stage. Also, stay tuned for this Thursday’s live sit-down with The Fly on 20 Watts Radio! - 20 Watts

Even ice-cold Syracuse University has a little sizzle and spice, and The Fly are just that. This misfit group of hip-hop/R&B specialists provide a much-needed blend of contrasting style for the SU music scene. It’s not folk and definitely not remixed–it’s straight soul, power and urban rhythm. Led by the sassy and highly talented Keith Smith and Farasha Baylock, The Fly are a must-hear-now kind of act. Watch this video and you’ll see what kind of attitude and savvy dance moves they bring to the stage. Also, stay tuned for this Thursday’s live sit-down with The Fly on 20 Watts Radio! - 20 Watts

Here is a bad ass band I stumbled upon through my funky travels. They're called The Fly and they mix it up nice! Rock, Hip hop, Jazz, Funk, and no labels attached. Keith and Farasha started this project in Syracuse, NY and now they're blowin' up here in the big apple. Check them out Oct. 6 at National Underground....

http://www.myspace.com/wearethefly
- Choice Records

First off, do you get the title? It’s a pun.

Good.

As the back-to-school time draws nearer, K & J Music Factory (Kyle and Jeanette in case you don’t understand letters) want to let you know about the amazing music ‘Cuse has to offer. Get ready.

The Fly

Keith Ramon “Sir Jove” Smith and Farasha Baylock have created a monster. Their funk, rock, soul, hip hop hybrid paired with their incredibly energetic live performances around campus made The Fly one of SU’s “must-see” bands. True story. They just recently released a concept EP and are now wrapping up their summer tour. That EP, Come Take Flyt, is available on Bandcamp, as well as iTunes. Dreamtopia Arts Allegiance, The Fly’s label, recently launched their website which includes music, videos and other projects. The Fly is in full force, and we expect to see a lot more of them this year.

-K & J
- WERW Radio

This was the first launch party that WERW has had and, you could ask anyone who was there, it was remarkable to say the least.

We kicked off the night at Spark Contemporary Art Space with Howdy, one of our very own WERW DJs. Just one man, one guitar, one iPod and a few effect pedals, Howdy (Andrew Nerviano of More Trucks. Sundays from 10pm-12am) welcomed the crowd with interesting and enchanting music. And, of course, anybody with a Catsnail on their amp is a sure shot.

After Howdy, devon.james played a brief DJ set to get everyone’s blood pumping before turning Spark over to The Fly. While introducing their set, they promised to get the crowd “higher than they’ve ever been before.” And while I can’t speak for everyone, I know most of the crowd that walked out of there was still high as a kite from The Fly’s first Syracuse performance since the Spring. As high-energy and theatrical as I’ve ever seen them, The Fly stunned the audience with their interactivity and funky music. They played many crowd favorites off of their Come Take Flyt EP, as well as a new song thrown into the mix. You can check out some of the videos of their performance here.

Returning to round out the night was devon.james. This time, he brought back a projector and his partner in crime DJ Dr. Teeth to debut Chemicals of Creation. And boy, did they keep it going right up until midnight. WERW was lucky enough to see this collaboration, and these guys are opening for Steve Aoki on October 11th! You can listen to their mix here.
- WERW Radio

Even ice-cold Syracuse University has a little sizzle and spice, and The Fly are just that. This misfit group of hip-hop/R&B specialists provide a much-needed blend of contrasting style for the SU music scene. It’s not folk and definitely not remixed–it’s straight soul, power and urban rhythm. Led by the sassy and highly talented Keith Smith and Farasha Baylock, The Fly are a must-hear-now kind of act. Watch this video and you’ll see what kind of attitude and savvy dance moves they bring to the stage. Also, stay tuned for this Thursday’s live sit-down with The Fly on 20 Watts Radio!

–Jett Wells + Irina Dvalidze - 20 Watts Magazine

Between the South Street Seaport’s hosting of the River to River Festival and the Sidewalk Cafe’s penchant for hosting tight, energetic, up-and-comers, free music was covered Friday July 23, with a night of lo-fi silliness, stridently popping youth-rock and R&B showmanship. 20 Watts was able to check out shows from two venues and four bands on Friday: Loose Limbs, Best Coast, Free Energy and Syracuse natives The Fly.

THE FLY

The best part about The Fly is that they are an ever-changing, evolving entity — one that’s gone from playing shows in tiny Syracuse holes to respected New York City venues like the famous Sidewalk Cafe.

The Fly’s shtick hasn’t really changed, despite their new instrumentalists. Keith Smith and Farasha Baylock still rock out, rap at the crowd, slow it down and finally zonk out. With their latest performance though, whether it was the NYC air or just growing as artists, they haven’t so much dialed it down as fuzzed it out.

There’s more of a determined theatricality to their raw energy. Where some of their songs were amped-up chargers, now they might be R&B crooners. Where before they might have worn jeans and workout tights, now Smith and Baylock sport slacks and a dress. Even so, their cut “Middle Fingers & Hate Mail” has been altered to have them explicitly say “fuck you” instead of “eff you,” before it progresses into a metal-scream jam song.

I don’t think we’ll ever say the energy isn’t there. The Fly closed the night off with Smith wildly hurtling around the room, spitting lines from “Define Us” at the top of his lungs and urging the audience to fist-pump. There’s a certain rawness that The Fly will hopefully never lose. However, they would do much better if they knew when to dial it down and when to kick into overdrive. While the vast majority of their set (in spite and because of their evolution) was flawless, their final song “Define Us” lost momentum before it should have. That said, this won’t cripple a good band, and I’m fairly certain The Fly are good enough to know that they’re good, and to know that they shouldn’t ever stop innovating onstage and in their songwriting.

– Eric Vilas-Boas
- 20 Watts

First off, do you get the title? It’s a pun.

Good.

As the back-to-school time draws nearer, K & J Music Factory (Kyle and Jeanette in case you don’t understand letters) want to let you know about the amazing music ‘Cuse has to offer. Get ready.

The Fly

Keith Ramon “Sir Jove” Smith and Farasha Baylock have created a monster. Their funk, rock, soul, hip hop hybrid paired with their incredibly energetic live performances around campus made The Fly one of SU’s “must-see” bands. True story. They just recently released a concept EP and are now wrapping up their summer tour. That EP, Come Take Flyt, is available on Bandcamp, as well as iTunes. Dreamtopia Arts Allegiance, The Fly’s label, recently launched their website which includes music, videos and other projects. The Fly is in full force, and we expect to see a lot more of them this year.

-K & J
- WERW Radio

So let’s get this out of the way from the start. I really dig these guys. I’ve seen them live multiple times and I think they’re both really energetic and more creative than a lot of mainstream groups out there. That said, when Keith Smith mentioned to me that The Fly would be putting out their first EP on May 30, I thought that it would be five songs and no longer than 20 minutes. Shame on me.

Come Take Flyt clocks in at 12 tracks and 40 minutes. It’s produced by Keith Smith and showcases their best live tracks in a professional, definitive form. Above all, it could be an album in its own right, which is unbelievably refreshing. It might actually be too produced. The raw energy of their live tracks translates nicely through female vocalist Farasha Baylock’s crystal-clear vocals, but I found myself missing the rawness of Keith Smith’s vocals. On tracks like “Stars Might Fall” and “Love Fiend” his vocals are layered on top of each other and soft as opposed to passionate. This isn’t to say these songs are in any way worse off for it, though — they’re just different. Differences in performance vs. the record don’t by any means get in the way of enjoying the album, which, along with the Mouth’s Cradle full-length, comprises some of the best student songwriting and production we’ve heard this year.

It’s also unfair not to note The Fly’s less-visible members. Throughout the record, Samuel Taylor, guitarist for World Record Players charges through songs, filling out much of the music The Fly already owned without a guitarist. I’ve seen drummer Nate Hopper and bassist Harry Barron perform live with Baylock and Smith before and can testify to both their showmanship and their mastery over their instruments. When it shows up, Pete DePasquale’s saxophone only helps the record, as does the extra drumming by Brian Ludwig. The record is very much a combination of the different voices from the Syracuse University music scene.

That said, despite the fact that I was surprised at its length and its sheer quality, I found myself wanting more. It’s not really a surprise, and it’s probably a cliché, but The Fly just sound better live. This is by no means a bad thing. Good for them, in fact.

– Eric Vilas-Boas - 20 Watts

Bandier meets drama, the musical marriage begets The Fly.


Spectators question whether to gleefully cheer on The Fly or to fear for their own safety as the duo performs. Keith Smith regularly wraps the mic chord around his neck, flailing his limbs, all while passionately singing, even shouting, the lyrics. Farasha Baylock spits rhymes furiously, dancing with athletic polish, as she displays her theatrical roots.

Smith loosens his collar and tightens his slender black tie around his forehead, a musical Rambo preparing his characteristic set-ending freakout. As the final tune reaches a climax, both performers enter a spastic ecstasy — Smith crashes the cymbals behind him with his hands and Baylock returns from a frenzied run through the crowd. Catching their breath, The Fly give a reserved, gracious bow.

“It was like his body was filled with fists that punched out in different directions, all at the same time,” said Matt Gasda, a Syracuse University junior and audience member that night at Funk ’n Waffles.
Sophomores Smith and Baylock constitute the musical enterprise they’ve branded The Fly. In a year and a half, a music industry student and an actress have melded into a intertwined duo that brings an unnamable fusion of hip-hop, spoken word, rock, soul, funk, and R&B to the music stage and a formidable delivery to the theater.

“We literally started from a primitive state of ‘oh, I play piano, and I speak,’” Baylock said. “And now I’m a lyricist.”

“And I’m a rockstar,” Smith chimed in.

Smith described himself as the future “black Bono,” in his aspirations to bolster social consciousness with his sharp lyrics. In the past, he’s drawn comparisons to John Legend and more recently, people have said he looks like R&B visionary Raphael Saadiq. Someone in the audience at a recent show commented that Baylock resembled Janelle Monáe, the neo-soul indie phenom, whom the duo met last summer. Smith paraphrased wisdom Monáe offered them: “Be great, and change the world.”

This evolution has produced a sound and performance style outside of traditional genres. Funk the Police, The Fly’s supporting band, complements a unique sound with a four-piece funk rock attack.
Smith writes most of the music in collaboration with Baylock, filling out chord progressions with piano playing he’s developed since the age of three.

Both members share in the song writing equally, either in frequent writing sessions or late-night phone calls and e-mails. Sam Taylor, guitarist for Funk the Police and The Fly’s co-producer, said he and Smith then meet to translate the piano parts to guitar and work out rock arrangements with the rest of the band.

Choreographed stage movement fits into The Fly’s writing process just as much as words and music. At a recent show, Smith hoisted Baylock into the air with athletic flourish developed from years of playing high school basketball. She landed straddling him with her legs wrapped behind his tall, slender frame. The plan was for Smith to lift Baylock up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but he felt weak and couldn’t complete the maneuver. To cover the mistake, the duo seamlessly slid into a faux sex scene on stage.

Last semester, the two put on a theatrical production, “Mad Mad World.” They wrote and produced the whole show in two weeks, after a 2 a.m. epiphany led Baylock to call Smith with the idea. They performed the show in a small auditorium in Shaffer Art building — the only space available in such a short notice — and filled it to the brim for a two-night run. The play combined projected video art with snappy dialogue and social critiques in a series of vignettes where Smith and Baylock took on a variety of characters, from a Steve Urkel-type nerd to a homeless prophet.

“Before ‘Mad Mad World’, we had never worked this close to each other for this long on something this big — and this was a monster. At the end of it all, it was like an answer of ‘yes, we can work together as a duo,’” Baylock said of the production.

The artists grew up in geographically disparate circumstances, but both managed to develop an artistic hustle that gels well on the Hill.

“My analogy is that I was born in Brooklyn and my parents were there on vacation and robbed me from my natural environment,” Smith explained about his childhood in Kansas.

He was always a “weird kid” and creativity provided his only refuge, spending hours at the piano until his mother forced him to stop so she could sleep. Smith’s parents didn’t allow him to listen to secular music, but he’d sneak over to the used CD store with his weekly $25 allowance and grab whatever albums looked the best, building an eclectic love for classic rock and R&B greats.

Baylock was raised in Queens, N.Y., attending LaGuardia Arts High School in the Upper West Side and eventually stumbled into acting.

“It was my ticket out of going to a bad high school with the risk of becoming pregnant, dropping out of school, and all of the other stuff that happens to young, black girls growing up in low-income environments,” she said.

Baylock described herself as the role model in her family. One of her poems includes a line about her father, “I found out he got shot when I turned on the news” and that experience fits into the urban struggle of “becoming a warrior at age 12.” Baylock, in turn, has an appetite for success that matches Smith’s.

David Rezak, director of the Bandier music industry program at Syracuse University attested to Smith’s fire. He remembers when Smith called almost on a daily basis in the week leading up to the acceptance deadline, reminding Rezak how well Bandier fit into his plan. The sales pitch worked, pointing out the tenacity and personability that Rezak looks for in students.

Last year, Rezak invited Smith to speak at an event for potential Bandier freshmen. He deliberately asked him to come with only 10 minutes left in the talk, knowing that once Smith started talking, no one else would get in a word.

“He’s going to be a kind of triple threat, because he is a good businessman, he has this great stage persona, and he’s going to charm their socks off backstage,” Rezak warned. “I suspect that Keith could gain celebrity beyond the region before he ever leaves Syracuse.”

Both Smith and Baylock have committed to a lifestyle of art, and acknowledge that making that choice requires a degree of insanity. They stress that The Fly is their life — not just a college pastime.

They hope to release a five-track EP in the spring. Smith is also in the process of writing a play entitled “God Hates Fags: A Love Story” for production in the spring. A summer tour might cap off a busy year.

“I want to be the greatest duo in the music industry,” Smith said without hesitation. “I want to leave a mark. I feel like what we have is so different — I hate saying it’s different, but it just feels different. We definitely represent that new sound, that new thing that’s being developed in the industry.” - Jerk Magazine

I begin my soliloquy: what I learned from my journey of self-exploration during the college sophomore slump:

*See The Fly perform at least once.

-- Angela Hu - Daily Orange

The Fly live interview on local Syracuse television network, CitrusTV - CitrusTV

Up Close And Personal With The Fly
Friday July 23rd 2010 @ 3:00 pm by Madeline Smith


I might as well start by saying that you’ve never heard a group like The Fly before. If you want to bet, I’d be willing to put money on it (listen to their Myspace page and see for yourself). Maybe it’s because one-half of the duo is a spunky NYC female rapper named Farasha Baylock whose rhymes flow like a poet’s (she is trained in poetry and the performing arts) and cut like acid. Maybe it’s because the other half is Keith Smith, who is a singer with some serious soul and who was basically playing the piano from his mother’s womb. Whatever the reason, these two form an electric combination, and with their ability to fuse musical genres like soul, hip hop, rock and rap, well, the result is intense.

The Fly is unsigned as of now, but the duo has created its own label to distribute the EP Come Take Flyt (you can purchase it on iTunes)! Not to mention, Keith and Farasha are students at Syracuse University (ah, the travails of a broke college student! We’ve all been there). Here, I was able to chat with them about how they make it work as unsigned artists, their unique performance styles, how they got together, their creative process… Basically, how they got to be so, well, “fly.”

GSL: I know you play a lot of shows at Syracuse, but do you ever go to other schools to do shows?

Keith: This school year we want to. I told Farasha every weekend we want to be at different colleges. I don’t care if I’m in dorm hall lounges. I think right now the biggest thing we want is exposure. And I want to cut out the middle man, the corporation, and go straight to the people. If the stages start off just as a dorm-room lounge, well me and Farasha have done everything from attics to NYC clubs. We’ve just been exposed to every type of world possible and it’s because we just want to reach the people.

GSL: That’s so important.

Keith: Our live shows are… well we put a lot into it.

GSL: I know I’ve heard!

Keith: Yeah, for me it’s like a spiritual experience, an out of body experience.

GSL: And you guys have a bunch of shows coming up, don’t you?

Keith: Yeah, we just got a big one in New Orleans. It’s called The Cutting Edge Music Business Conference. Someone heard about us, we got it through word of mouth.

GSL: I guess that’s how it starts right?

Keith: Yeah, yeah.

GSL: Tell me a little bit about how you guys began. You met at a Syracuse admitted student’s program right? How did you get to know each other and first collaborate?

Farasha: Well, all of us were around every day and there were about maybe 100 of us, but the major thing that always brought the two of us together and which is why we’re together now is our passion for the arts.

Keith: Yeah we did a show, like our first two weeks of knowing each other.

GSL: Really?

Farasha: Yeah, we got that together in four days.

GSL: So you two just sort-of clicked automatically?

Farasha: Yeah, it was always the arts.

GSL: So to get that show together in four days, did you guys work day and night?

Keith: (Laughs) Alright this is the crazy thing about that, so I didn’t have a piano to play on, but I was going to play the piano for the show. And there was this kid who lived like, three floors down from me. I had to like, beg him, literally, to use his keyboard and I would hook his keyboard up to my computer and use computer speakers to practice … So we had to work around him.

And then, we’d use the music school. There’s like a bunch of piano practice rooms down there, and they lock the building at like 7:00. So what we would do is we’d stay in the building all day so that when it was locked one of us could let the other in. So we’d alternate times, like she would go to class, and I would stay in the building and work on stuff. Or she would stay there and I would go get us dinner, and bring the dinner to the practice room.

GSL: That’s dedication!

Keith: Yeah, we went in for like, 12 hours a day.

Farasha: So we did that, that was cool.

Keith: Yeah and then we got asked to do the New York State Fair, and we did that, um, and that was kind-of our confusion phase. (To Farasha) Remember? We were like, what are we doing? This is poetry, and…

Farasha: Because I was a poet initially, he was a singer and a piano player, so it was like ok what is this, what do you call this?

Keith: It was like an identity crisis!

Farasha: I didn’t even know I was a rapper, or lyricist! I was like, “No I’m just a poet.”

Keith: The turning point was when we got asked to do the Martin Luther King Dream Week.

GSL: Why?

Keith: By the time Christmas break came, we were known as “that Keith and Farasha duo.” And, they had this big thing called Dream Week at Syracuse, they do it the week of Martin Luther King’s birthday. They asked us to do something on one of the nights. And I was like “Well let’s bring a band in and do something big.” And so, we were already kind-of working with this group of musicians on campus, and we had this guitar player who’s just sick.

GSL: Does he play on some of the songs on your EP?

Keith: Every song. He plays on every song that you hear the guitar on.

GSL: Oh yeah, he’s good!

Keith: Yeah he’s the sickness. We wrote “The Dream” for Dream Week and he played on it. And um, when he started to introduce us to more of the possibilities of a guitar, that’s when it started to develop into what you hear. Because I always listened to rock music…

GSL: That’s where your inspiration comes from?

Keith: I wouldn’t say it’s my direct inspiration, I cultivate a bunch of genres of music. But that rock riff that you hear in that song was really the turning point for how our music has this fusion in it now.

GSL: And so you saw the different possibilities of what genres you could pull from.

Keith: Yeah, because like we said we already were listening to them. I mean Farasha is into very much like, pop…

Farasha: I’m a poptart slash M.I.A. slash Warrior girl. And I always say Kanye West is the reason why I rap. Hands down.

GSL: So what is your creative process for writing songs?

Keith: It’s different. Every song has its own story, has its own process. It usually kind-of starts off with when I’m like “Oh Farasha I just created this, what do you think?”

GSL: You mean like a beat or a tune or something?

Keith: Yeah like a beat. And then Farasha will say “Oh I wrote this verse.” So we’d just build off whatever was introduced.

Farasha: Or, how we started making music in general was him kind-of playing on the piano and me free-styling before we wrote.

Keith: That’s how “The Anthem” was made.

Farasha: Yeah.

GSL: Where did you get your inspiration for your EP, Come Take Flyt?

Keith: Well once we started doing shows and we started to get a buzz and a response from people, we realized we could do this as a career. That we could use this platform in college to help start jumpstart everything we needed to do. So once that realization hit, we just kind-of conceptualized what kind of journey we wanted our introduction piece to be for people. And that’s how Come Take Flyt was put together. But it was like, a year in the making.

Farasha: Oh yeah, like that’s a year of flying, going down, landing.

GSL: So do you bring other musicians in to play with you on the album and in your shows too?

Keith: Yeah, we have a live band.

GSL: What are your plans after graduation for The Fly?

Keith: I want to be touring.

GSL: Yeah?

Keith: Yeah, I think we’ll be pushing Come Take Flyt for a minute, just because I think it’s epic. That’s a very pretentious thing to say.

GSL: No, you should absolutely believe in it!

Keith: I think it’s epic. And I think that we just need to get the audience to hear it.

GSL: Definitely. How did you come up with your group name?

Keith: That was like, another process.

Farasha: We were searching library books…

Keith: Yeah we went through so many names. I don’t even know how The Fly came up. It was just kind-of like, “The Fly!”

Farasha: And it expressed our belief of having a dream, being in the sky, flying past any boxes that people try to put you in. Being free.

GSL: Right, it all comes together.

Farasha: Yeah.

- Green Shoelace