| It’s one of the coldest nights so far this year and a huge crowd gathers on a sidewalk, waiting to enter the warmth of the cavernous Toronto venue, simply called The Boat. Ninja High School is playing, and doors were supposed to open an hour ago. People are getting restless when Matt Collins, brainchild of Ninja High School, arrives at the front door and passes a backpack to a friend.
"Where are you going?" someone asks Collins. "I’ve got to go play MANHUNT," he says, before turning and sprinting around the corner.
On top of fronting one of Toronto’s most dynamic bands, Collins organizes MANHUNT each Thursday. It is an urban late-night variant on a popular video game in which one person, the manhunter, seeks a bunch of fugitives, who when found are brainwashed and must join the side of the manhunter. Yes, he’s playing hide-and-go-seek. This 28-year-old not only knows how to have fun – he knows how to make fun.
Collins started Ninja High School by himself almost three years ago, while studying fine arts at the University of Guelph – he dropped out just before tuition was due, saying the program was vastly inferior to his previous school, the Ontario College of Art and Design.
"One of my problems with Guelph was that people were allowed to make art" – Collins pauses to find the right word – "willy nilly, yeah. Free from criticism in a big way. You have to have reasons for doing things, which I’ve, sort of, always agreed with."
Ninja High School – Matt Collins, Gregory Collins, Star DT, Steve Kado and Wolfgang Nessel – released their debut full-length, Young Adults Against Suicide, on Blocks Recording Club in Canada. It was picked up for wider distribution by Tomlab, a German experimental music label.
"I started it in my parents’ basement," says Collins. "I downloaded a drum machine program called Hammerhead and I realized you could put samples in it. At the same time I was writing a lot of quasi-positive hardcore lyrics sort of using a rap format."
Collins has described both the DIY esthetic and sound of Ninja High School – party raps consisting of positive hardcore punk sounding lyrics, often screamed into microphones, overtop crunchy drums and meticulously selected samples.
Their album has done well critically so far but it’s fair to say Ninja High School belongs on a stage rather than in your stereo. The CDs, says Collins, ultimately act as flyers for their shows.
With their catchy, sing-along choruses, plenty of handclaps and complete lack of instruments, the band draws audiences in to the performance so much that the division between band and crowd disappears.
They start each show with stretches in the middle of the floor and by the time their set begins people are dancing onstage and the band members are bouncing around in the crowd with mics in hand.
"It takes a lot more courage too because you’re not hiding behind instruments and there isn’t really a divide between you and the audience," says Collins. "It forces you to engage with the audience."
This is actually how Steve Kado, the man behind Blocks Recording Club, the first Canadian independent record label to be incorporated as worker co-operative, joined the band and helped put out their first EP, We Win!
"He saw me perform a couple of times and decided he liked it," says Collins. "So at one show he just sort of grabbed a microphone and started yelling the choruses."
Kado is now a driving force behind Ninja High School.
"Steve helps more in an ideological sense," says Collins. "Conversations I have with Steve lead to a lot of decisions about what samples I’ll use and what the lyrical content becomes."
At first listen, Collins’s lyrics may seem more like nonsensical wordplay than a focused positing of ideas. As in the chorus to the song "Positive Laser" – we built a big gun so we could realize our goals / The ammunition’s you / A hundred minds, a hundred souls / Positive laser / Set it off). But behind the quirkiness is always some sort of message.
Ninja High School is mostly fighting the arms-crossed, insular, smug mentality that has pervaded the Toronto music scene for the last few years. Collins also says audiences often miss the message when there is too much freedom for interpretation.
"Given the level of stagnancy people seem to accept both politically and artistically right now, it doesn’t make sense to rejoice to music that’s letting you make up your own mind as to what the thing is about," he explains.
Ninja High School can be seen as an example of Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement that medium and message are inseparable; if you like their medium, you’ll probably get their message. And when you’ve got a roomful of people screaming, "Catharsis is cheap, don’t settle for that/The formula becomes a steel metal trap/If you still don’t get what I’m saying / It’s by purpose not by plan" – the message is loud and clear. |
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