Creatively Authentic: Sunny Singh is Amplifying Underrepresented Voices From Stages To The Streets
Interviewer: Jonali McFadden
Interviewee: Sunny Singh, creator of Hate5Six.com, a platform and community for live video performances primarily of the punk, metal, and hardcore genres
Date of Interview: 7/26/2020
Location of Interview: Zoom
Transcribed by: Jonali McFadden
List of Acronyms: JM = Jonali McFadden, SS: Sunny Singh
JM: Hey Sunny, thanks so much for joining me today and giving me a little bit of your time. I really appreciate that.
Today I want to chat about what it means to truly live a creatively authentic life. I found you through my love of the hardcore music scene, which is huge here in Boston. Searching for hardcore bands on YouTube, it’s impossible not to come across your videos. So I guess, I found you through natural means. Thanks so much for sharing your work! I appreciate your work ethic, consistency, and spreading awareness to this genre of music.
SS: Thanks! Yeah, humbled to be here.
JM: Can you introduce yourself and a brief description of what you do?
SS: My name is Sunny. I'm an archivist, videographer, and filmmaker in Philadelphia. I run a website called Hate5Six.com. I film bands live primarily and I post that footage online for people all over the world to watch and discover new bands. I built essentially a platform that enables people and bands to connect with one another through the medium of live video. And I'm constantly trying to innovate ways of reaching audiences in a different way through online video.
JM: What did you do before hate5six?
SS: My background is actually in math and computer science, so I have no background in media videography. Nothing like that. So I grew up as a math and tech nerd and that's a side of my life that will always be there. I was a math major as an undergrad and I went to grad school for computer science. So throughout high school and college, and basically ever since I was like 15, I was always interested in video and filming stuff, whether it was local bands at my high school or filming friends, riding BMX, I was really just into the camera. I always kept those two lives, separate, like my technical life and my creative life.
JM: It seems like those lives are integrated now.
SS: It took a long time for me to finally find a way to integrate them and to become a whole person because for the longest time I felt like I had my nine to five, which is working at a desk or writing code. And then I had like my life outside of that on nights and weekends filming people in bands and running a YouTube channel. I don't know, for a while it worked for me but it reached a point where I just felt like I needed to integrate myself. And that's when I decided to take a jump and try to do it all under one under one umbrella.
JM: Do you feel like taking that risk has like been rewarding for you so far?
SS: Yeah, I'd say so. It was really scary at first. So I've been doing it for six years officially. I first started filming bands like 2000, 2001, but I officially launched the site in 2008. So I was doing it as a hobby for about 10 years. And then, early 2018, I got laid off from my last tech job and that's when I was deciding, do I want to keep working in tech or do I want to just try, try doing this however I can full time. So I took the leap of faith two years ago and it was scary at first cause there was no guarantee that it would work or be sustainable. But what I told myself and my parents since they were also just, you know, naturally concerned, “I'd rather try this and fail than to live with regret, knowing that I had never tried doing it.”
So I took the leap and luckily within a few months, I had enough people sustaining me to do it and it's been stable since. So I don't regret it obviously cause nothing beats being your own boss and doing what you love for a living. But it was really scary. For me the nine to five job - I enjoyed it to some extent, but really what it was doing was it was enabling me to put resources and money into what I really wanted to do, which was film bands and traveling to film bands.
I was able to buy more camera gear. The one was supporting the other. And I feel like a lot of people reached out to me cause they see what I've done. And they asked me, “Hey, I'm trying to do that. I'm at Step A, I'm trying to get to Step Z. Like, how do I do that?” Really, it's a process, but the first step in the process, as corny as it sounds, is taking that first step. That’s the only thing that I tell people. You're going to meet resistance along the way. And the way that you break through to the next level is by finding where resistance points are and breaking through them.
JM: Yeah. Wow. What drives that? Is it a faith in yourself? Is it a faith in the music?
SS: I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I've always believed in what I'm doing because I grew up watching videos of bands recorded on VHS tapes even before YouTube. So I really always had an appreciation for live recordings and like finding a way to get a recording out to people. So I've always been driven by that. And so as hate5six has grown and I've been able to see things realized in terms of filming a band in a small basement and then hearing from someone in like some remote country saying, “Hey, that's my new favorite band!” because you filmed them. Even though there were 20 people at the show, that video allowed that band to reach some person so far away. That's the vision that I had when I was 15. I wanted to film my friends' bands in high school and find a way to get the footage out. Because maybe someone will discover their favorite band from a video. So for me, as I grow and I'm able to see the goal that I had when I was 15, that was kind of nebulous and ill-defined, it's sort of - it's arrived.
I look back and I see those mile markers that I passed and that keeps me going. That makers want to continue doing more. And then I see the impact the videos have with people. Music for a lot of people is the great unifier. It brings people together. It transports you to another time and place. It makes you think about happier times. It helps you cope with difficult times.
IG @hate5six
SS: Music brings people together in a way that few other mediums can. And for me, when I hear feedback from people saying, “Oh, I'll never get to see that band.” or “This was my best friend's favorite band, but he passed away and that watching that video reminded me of the time we saw them” that's powerful, you know? And that keeps me going because when I was working in tech, like I enjoyed it. I loved building algorithms, and things like that, but I never saw how that work was actually impacting people. And it got to a point where it was like, what's the point of all of it. What's the point of writing this code if I'm never going to get to see it actually in use. And even if it is used, I'm one small piece in this thing. I feel like when you're able to create something or do something that impacts people and you're able to see like your contribution, that powers you to keep doing more of what that is and keeps you motivated.
For me, it was a little selfish because I wanted to see something that my hands were on, and actually make an impact on people. And I feel like doing hate5six afforded that in a way that working for tech companies didn't so it's a combination of both things, seeing how my work impacts people and then knowing that there's always a purpose to it. Lately I've been filming a lot of protests cause there's no shows happening. So it’s also about how I can weaponize this platform that I've built to amplify other voices in other communities that are not necessarily music related, but again, at the end of the day for me, what hate5six is. I'm documenting something that’s happening, whether it's a band or political speech and I'm signal boosting it so that other people can hear about it, learn about it and get integrated with it.
So at the end of the day, I see how that's all coalescing under one single thing. And that keeps me motivated to keep pushing it further and further.
JM: Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome. What about those resistance points? What have been your biggest challenges in working in the music industry?
SS: Yeah. I mean, there's quite a bit. There's definitely times where I'm burning out. I'm constantly on the road filming bands and then coming home and editing band footage for days, weeks on end and that can burn out if you're not careful. Now that I'm doing what I love full time, the lines are blurred. Before I could separate things, the nine to five, I'd be working at a tech company and then I'd come home and work on video stuff. And the next morning the cycle would repeat. The boundaries were much more defined, but right now filming a show is technically work. Even though that used to be what I did for fun, if that makes sense.
So I get into these habits or these patterns where I’m constantly grinding and working. And I don't take time off for myself. I went to the beach yesterday. That was like the first time in a long time where I was disconnected from a computer, no camera in hand. And just trying to relax a little bit in a way that I am not able to when I'm at a show. So that's a big thing that I was facing for a while. But also just the fear, like I said earlier, the fear, was a big hurdle for me because I always felt like here's the thing that I love, if I have to rely on it for sustenance and to live, I don’t want to grow to hate it. I don't want to lose that. So that was a big fear of mine. If I try doing this full time and it fails, I may never pick up a camera again because I'm going to be so hurt by it that I don't want to be reminded of that failure.
That was a big roadblock for me. In terms of needing to get past that fear, it really just took me inching closer and closer to that line and then just trying it out and then telling myself if this fails, it's not the end of the world. I can always go back to working in tech. So I was, I guess, fortunate enough to have that backup plan. I know not everyone has that. If they're trying to like do something that, you know, go towards a goal that they have in mind, they don't always have the fallback plan. But luckily I did. So for me, I had to convince myself that I'm going to take this leap and it might not work, but there is a cushion for me to land on if I fail.
Just convincing myself was a big thing. But there's also creative hurdles too. Like I never thought I would live stream bands cause I always wanted the video to be presented in a way that this happened at a certain time in place. I never wanted my work to replace people going to shows because if there's no audience, then there's no show. But now we're in a time where we’re not allowed to have shows, so really we need to have live streams. So I'm now coming up against some of the technical challenges with live streaming that I never thought I would have to cross because I didn’t originally want to go down that route.
Now that we're in this position where it needs to be done, I'm spending a lot of time teaching myself a lot of new tech and things like that to make live streaming more efficient and higher quality. I didn't think I could pull off live streaming. I also don't do music videos for that reason. Because there are people who do music videos professionally and they are very, very good at it. And they've set the bar very high that I feel like if I enter that arena, I would not be at that level. And I would feel embarrassed in a way. I feel like I'm very good at a niche thing, which is live performances, live recordings.
JM: So you have some inventions. Can you talk about your tech innovations?
SS: I've built a lot of robotic camera gear. I'm building this remote control motorized camera drone type of thing. It runs on a cable. It’s all controlled by a remote that I've programmed that will allow me to get different kinds of shots that I can't get from just holding it handheld or putting it on a tripod. So I'm still experimenting with inventing or repurposing all the tech for certain purposes.
And then on my actual website, I have band recommendation search engines that I've built using coding and algorithm development. So all of that work now is not for another tech company. It's all for me to power hate5six in a new way. The band recommendation algorithms allow people to find out about new music. I do a lot of coding to streamline how I distribute my content. A new video gets uploaded every day and it's through a democratized process. All of my viewers are able to log onto my website and vote for what video they want to see uploaded every day.
So I technically don't know what's coming out today or tomorrow I get an email from a notification system that I built. It emails me a couple of hours beforehand saying what video is going to go up. It's all controlled by viewers and the actual content distribution is all powered through apps that I built. At noon every day, the top video gets scheduled for release. It gets automatically uploaded to my website and to YouTube, notifications are automatically sent out to Twitter, Facebook, and anyone who's like signed up for the mailing list gets a notification. For the longest time I was sitting here and manually uploading the video, clicking posts, making the Twitter post. A lot of time was spent uploading and announcing a video release. And so I got to the point where, in order for me to have more time filming and more time editing, I needed to build tools to handle the content distribution. So that for me, was streamlining the process. A lot of what I do, whether it's like building a robot to operate the camera from the other side of the room or building the content distribution pipeline, it's to make my life easier.
JM: That’s really awesome that you have used your background in tech to develop the tools that you need to do more of what you love.
SS: Yeah. And it was a slow thing. Over the last 10 years I would slowly add a new function and it really was just building blocks. I think a lot of people think building something is an overnight thing, but it's not. I constantly take a step back to see what I have so far. Here's what I've currently built. How can I make this better or make it more efficient for people to get the video sooner? I don't always have like a five year plan, but here's where I'm currently at. What's one small thing that I could add to it that would make it a little better?
I'm very good at making incremental changes, improving my craft incrementally and doing it consistently. Over longer periods of time it does add up to larger improvements in hindsight.
JM: What does your creative habit look like?
SS: It's tough because the boundaries blur together. When shows are a thing, typically I'll start editing at 9 or 10 AM. I'll prepare for video releases. Although the release is automatic, there are a couple of manual things I still have to do, like write a thoughtful description. In the morning I'll typically work on whatever posts I'm going to have and then spend a couple of hours editing from maybe around like lunchtime till mid to late afternoon. Then in the evenings I'll go out and film a show. I'll be at the show from around 5 til 11 or midnight just filming. And then I come home and dump the memory cards to my computer. Then the morning is when i’ll start editing. So that's usually the cycle and how I structure things when shows are happening. Now, my schedule is much different. I'm not editing as much during the day. I still have a backlog of videos that I can be working on but I'm not grinding through them as fast as I was before.
I'm able to actually spend more time perfecting each video that comes out, I'm able to spend more time working on it. So that Vein set I published yesterday, I knew that it was going to reach a lot of people. It has four or five camera angles and a soundboard feed. For those videos, I spent multiple weeks on it. I have the time now to really give each one focus attention. Whereas before, there were times where I would film like three or four shows a week. And so I would only be able to spend just a little bit of time editing just to get it added to the release queue. So I think now one of the silver linings on what's happening is I'm able to give a lot more attention to detail with the videos that I do put out. I'm definitely thankful for that because I think people are relying on the videos right now, especially to get their fix on live music.
I’m also spending more of my creative focus on protest coverage and putting that stuff together in a compelling way that's going to reach a large audience. With anything on social media, you're trying to get people to watch it. And the way that you do that is by making things shareable and viral and get people to engage with it. So there is a level of how do I make this video as engaging as possible so that someone's going to watch it all the way through or they're going to want to reshare it. So there is a creative process with covering protests in terms of how do I make this compelling? I don't want to focus on protesters getting beat up because that's not the point of it. The point is to get the message out. But there is a balance between showing the tension that was in the air and delivering the actual message that was at the event.
JM: Yeah, definitely. Can you talk a little bit more about how music helps drive awareness to these political issues?
SS: Yeah, I think in especially hardcore punk, like the political aspect is integral to it. A lot of people who come into it through other genres and they don't have the exposure to the punk roots. They don't think that politics should mix with hardcore, but really they're inseparable. If you think about what bands talk about, they talk about like a lot of things that at the core are really social issues. And social issues are the result of a lot of political issues. So for me, they're inseparable. And like I said earlier, music is the great unifier. It brings all kinds of people together under one roof to see a band and sing along. That in itself is a political thing as well, because especially now we're living in a time where there are so many lines of division. When you're able to breathe and the music is able to bring people together, that's the first step of building a bridge in a way. That's always been the case with any type of music, because really that’s what music is. It's a way of conveying a message to people and whatever that message is, is up to the band. But you as a musician or musicians have this ability to capture people's attention. They have people's eyes and ears on them. They are in that position to deliver a message. And that is a political statement at its core.
So, for me, and I mean I grew up listening to punk, listening to hardcore, especially bands that had a political message and whose mission was to deliver a political message through music. So I was heavily influenced by how bands were using their platform to create music that was like entertaining and fun, but also to really use it as a way to raise awareness and put the spotlight on certain issues. My approach to hate5six is very similar in the sense I’m also in the position to throw something political at them as like a wrench in their gear of daily consumption of content.
So I don't know. I think that it's tough. Whenever people are coming out and saying, “Keep the politics separate.” I'm like, well, what does that look like? Because as a Brown person, my existence is political.
JM: Yeah, that's so important. Who's been your biggest influence in your career?
SS: Anyone who follows my work knows that I'm a big Rage Against The Machine fan because that's how I became political in terms of how they were using their platform to talk about indigenous issues, issues with immigration and things of that sort. So the way that they were delivering their message through their music was something that interested me as a 12 year old. I've always tried to follow that model that they've set. So a lot of what I do comes from or builds upon the foundation that they set in terms of like culture jamming, like going on stage and playing like an hour long set, but half way through the set giving a really long speech about a political issue.
Obviously I'm not the first person to film shows. I'm not the last. So I also draw inspiration from people who’ve filmed shows before me. Especially people who were doing it before internet video was viable because they were purely doing it for love. They would film shows on a VHS tape and back then you would only be able to show it to a couple of people. Maybe you can make a couple of copies of that tape and that was about it. So really not to say that me or anyone else is doing it now don't are not doing it out of love, but back then was a completely different ball game because you were just filming it. And there was no expectation that what you were filming would ever be seen by a wide audience. So I really respect a lot of people who were pushing the medium back then, or even in the early days of online video, because it just wasn't viable to stream a full set that you recorded, but they still did it anyway. I have a high reverence for all of those people who laid the groundwork for everyone today.
JM: That's cool. And you started out by trading tapes, right? Do you collect tapes now?
SS: Yeah, so I grew up collecting tapes. Like that's how I fell in love with live recordings. I would collect multiple tapes of the same band, whether it was across different shows or even the same show because one angle might just be from the back of the room one night and one might be next to the guitars and you can actually see a guitar solo. So I became very obsessed with live recordings, whether it's a bunch of different angles from the same show or one angle from every show on the tour. All of it fascinated me. So I always collected it. And even now, now that I've built this platform, people who used to film shows are seeing my work and it's reminding them that they used to film shows. And they're digging out old tapes that they filmed and sending it to me to digitize and restore and get it out to a larger audience.
That's been another benefit of doing this platform. It's really motivated people who used to film a lot of shows back in like the early days. It's motivating them to get the tapes dusted off and sent to me and have them digitize and cleaned up before those tapes fall apart. With these old tapes, there's a lifespan to them and they're going to fall apart at some point. So it's really imperative for them to get digitized sooner than later, because the way I look at it, each recording is an important document of a time and place. It could be the band's first show. It could be the band's last show or the first time they played this song. It could be that the person in the front row watching it could be the last time they were seen alive. There are so many factors involved that make a recording important. That's why I hold them in such high regard. There's always going to be someone somewhere that holds that recording with such a high significance. Especially now. I don't think we're going to have shows for a long time. So a lot of my energy is going to be focused on collecting old tapes from people and cleaning them up and getting them out there.
JM: That's amazing. You're a rock historian.
SS: Yeah. I think of myself as an archivist. Whether it's bands or political moments, I'm archiving things in the format of video. Before, I was definitely living a fractured life and for a while that was sustainable. But now that it's all under one roof, I feel like I finally feel like my potential is limitless. Like there's so much more I can do now, now that I'm not afraid to own who I am and really present myself as this person who's doing these things that I love. I feel like it's giving me the confidence and ability to dive into something and be like, you know what, I'm going to try doing a live stream, that 10,000 people are going to watch. But a couple of years ago I'd probably shit my pants thinking about the possibility. But now I feel like I've already done all this other stuff that I didn't think I could do. Let me try doing this next thing. And again, that touches on the whole breaking through the resistance and trying to overcome the fear of what's beyond what you're comfortable with.
JM: Amazing. What accomplishment are you most proud of?
SS: Oh, that's so hard. That's so hard. I mean, 2020 has been a shit year, but I've hit a lot of personal goals. I hit 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is a milestone I never thought I'd hit. One of my videos finally hit a million views. Doing that Code Orange live stream was a big milestone. Because that was the first time.
JM: Oh, yeah, that definitely made my quarantine during that first crazy month. It was awesome.
SS: Yeah. The Twitch stream. That was at the beginning of COVID. We basically had 48 hours to put that together. So for me that was a big milestone. The pressure was on me to do this and Code Orange turned to me, which meant that they really trusted me to do it. Being able to put that with 13,000 people was like okay, you know what? I cleared that fear. So I can probably try to do this again.
Another big milestone was that one of my protest videos was featured in the New York times last month. Getting featured by the New York times is not really something that I ever envisioned. But that was a milestone was one that I feel like my parents were very proud of. They don't understand the hardcore thing at all. They see that it's my job. And they're kind of ambivalent about it. But when they saw that something that I documented was actually featured in the New York times, for them that was a moment of pride. It’s something that they could tell their friends and relatives about. So I'm glad I was able to at least make them somewhat proud of the work that I do.
JM: What’s your definition of success?
SS: I don't know, I have been asked this question recently and struggled with the answer because for a lot of people it's like, “Oh, once you hit 100,000 subs you've made it.” but you're not making money to sustain on YouTube at all. So for some people it's hitting something like that, for other people, it's working with a certain band and yeah, there are certain dream bands that I love to work with. But for me, I think that it's the fact that I'm able to do this now full time with viewer support. The only reason I'm able to do this full time, is because a percentage of viewers support me to do it. They see the value in the work that I'm doing. So the fact that I'm able to do it full time and also that I'm able to do it as a holistic integrated person, for me that's success because I feel like, in hindsight, I've become the person I was always meant to be.
As a kid, I was always tinkering with stuff, taking things apart, wanting to build shit. I was also really interested in live bands and just music in general and wanting people to discover bands through different ways. So looking back, I feel like who I am now is the person I always wanted to be deep down. And for me, that is the ultimate success. Nothing can take that away. Even if all of this falls apart tomorrow, I will know that for at least two years of my life, I made it and it worked. I feel like I could die knowing that I did take that risk and I did not fail at it, for at least two years. You can't deny that. I feel like I'm happy now. And for me, success is how happy are you? I'm happy with this version of myself.
JM: Beautifully said. What do you want to be remembered for?
SS: Wow. That's a tough question. I want to be remembered for being someone who amplified other voices. I've built this platform that's amplifying bands to reach a larger audience and I’m amplifying marginalized voices at protests. I want to be remembered for creating content that amplified voices and brought people together. Whether it's 13,000 people watching a Code Orange live stream or bringing people together under some common understanding of how this world works and how we can make it better. I just want to be remembered as someone who was driven by those things and pursuing those things at 110% all the time, uncompromising and willing to take risks to do it right.
The only reason hate5six exists is because there are bands that are creating stuff, you know? And so a lot of people think that since I filmed the band, that band is going to blow up. That's not the case. A lot of bands don't blow up. At the end of the day, it's incumbent on the band to write compelling music that's authentic, that resonates with people and engages people. So all I'm doing is taking what they've done and blasting it out to a large audience. But at the end of the day, it’s really on the band, they are the creative force. What I do is creative, there are artistic elements to how I edit and produce ideas. But for me, I see it as a mutual thing. I think that there needs to be a way that people work together creatively that allows something bigger to emerge from it.
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