Date: Wednesday, March 03, 2010, 4:24 am
By: Tonya Pendleton, BlackAmericaWeb.com
Philadelphia’s own Kindred The Family Soul have their own version of family business as their family really is their business. The parents of six children, including their second son, Deen, born last week, they say the baby-making is coming to an end, but not the love that inspired it in the first place.
Throughout their decade-long career, Aja and Fatin Dantzler have included love, marriage, children and home into the music they make as in their case, life assuredly imitates art. Their three albums – “Surrender to Love” (2003), “In This Life Together” (2005) and “The Arrival” (2008) – are all about their life together as artists, lovers, parents and friends.
Their latest media production is a web series about their life called “Six Is It,” starring the true talent of the Dantzer family – their six adorable, engaging children. Aquil, 10; Diya, 7; Nina, 5; twins Lanaa and Ain, 2; and newborn son Deen should be fun to watch for years to come, though right now only, two seasons are planned. But if you love the show, don’t be too sure – they said that about having more kids, too!
Check out “Six Is It” right here, then read on:
Six Is It Episode I (FC) from Sixisit Episodes on Vimeo.
BlackAmericaWeb.com: So what made you guys decide to do a reality show? Aren’t you busy enough?
AJA: We had been offered a show before, and we didn’t want to do it. We have friends in television, and they kind of hipped us to the reality show reality and how things can be skewed, how people don’t have control over what happens – and it can be chaotic. When we found out we were going to have a sixth child, Fatin went to my son’s football practice to tell him, and we taped it. My son’s reaction was so hilarious and so priceless – and it kind of opened up a can of worms in Fatin’s head.
FATIN: It was the thought of capturing an genuine moment on tape that felt touching, and I thought that I wanted to share it with other people, not really knowing how he was going to react, and it turned out real genuine. That was the piece that we ended up putting together to start off the idea of the show. We want to take those genuine moments for entertainment purposes and for entertainment value. It speaks for why we wanted to do the show in the first place because people keep asking us how we do it, how do we maintain this lifestyle.
Well, how DO you do it?
FATIN: Watch “Six is It!” (Laughs)
AJA: I think it’s really important for people to see that we function not very differently from how most people function in terms of their family. The president of our label [Steve McKeever of Hidden Beach] was like ‘You guys have all those kids, and you don’t have a nanny?’ Nope. I don’t know too many people that have a nanny. Our life is so much closer to that of our fans, and that seems to be the thread that makes them feel so much more endeared to us as a group because they can relate to what we’re saying. This is taking our relationship with them to the next level.
Will “Six Is It” remain on the Internet or do you think it will ultimately end up on TV?
AJA: We like the Internet. The Internet is such a free and edgy kind of way to express yourself, and it focuses less on the polish of how things are produced and look and more about the content. We like the kind of grittiness that comes along with the Internet, and this is where we’ll probably stay. That’s where the future is. The future is on the ‘Net, it’s not on TV.
FATIN: Because of the 35-44 kind of demo that we attract, the adult contemporary market is not a big strong presence on the Internet, so you’ve got to get your digital domain poppin.’ You see the artists with their own Facebook pages, their own Twitter pages, their own LinkedIn pages, and they’re going to have to interact with their audience much more than they ever did before. There’s no IT person or record label person who’s going to do that anymore. That’s something that we kind of always had our finger on the pulse of. It’s important and necessary, and this is a way for us to interact with those people who are constantly surfing for something new and something fresh. It’s a much better look than being on a television show. Being on the Internet, you log in and you get various topics of the day. We want to be the next Facebook, the next Twitter and have people interact on our site.
How long do you think you will do this, and how much of your life will we be able to see?
AJA: We shot a lot of footage, so we’ll probably end up doing two seasons of it. There will be the first introductory season leading up to the birth of our sixth child, and then they’ll be the more intense kind of things as he’s born and we get back to recording a new album and navigating the new landscape of the record business. From there, I guess we’ll see where the wind takes us. Fatin and I don’t believe in the concept of train wrecks. We’re not trying to sensationalize anything, but we do want people to understand we are a real family with real issues and things that are facing a lot of American families right now – not just black people, not just married people. There are some things that may be a little tough and some things that people may be surprised that we allow to be filmed. But we want people to know that just because we’re in music doesn’t mean our life is much different than theirs. We won’t turn the cameras off on certain issues, but those won’t be the focus. The focus is how you persevere through certain things and how you feel about the person after that. We want people to understand that my husband, that’s my ace. We do not allow anything to come between us. We’re tight. Nothing’s going to come between us.
Okay, but Kindred doesn’t just do reality shows. What’s up with some new music?
FATIN: We are trying to use the show as a platform to get people excited about the album that we are going to put out. I don’t even think people realize that we put out “The Arrival [in 2008].” That is a problem, and we have to catch people up to the fact that we’ve been making music since “Far Away” and “Stars” in 2003. We’ve had two other albums since then.
AJA: Art is something that people have to be touched by. Part of what connects people to us is our story. There are some people out there that see the novelty of what we do and may not see the real message. The show will hopefully help people understand the sentiment behind what we do and kind of reconnect to us and what we’re about. It will hopefully touch people when it comes to the art format and the music.
