Danielle Lehman: Three Chords and the Truth

Sophomore Danielle Lehman (Digital Media Arts) is a member of a new generation of “throwbacks,” a term usually assigned to those who came of age in the 1960s. Her love of music from the 1980s, including punk rock, and her ambition to become a producer of local artists in her native Orange County have found a place to grow at CSU Dominguez Hills. A founding member of her own band, The Black Dots, Lehman flexes her musical muscles as a DJ on the campus Internet radio station,
KDHR. Dateline chatted up the Presidential Scholar and Dean’s List student in the Loker Student Union for her spin on music and rebellion.

Dateline: What attracts you to the music industry?

Danielle Lehman: Music is in my blood. It’s what I do, it’s how I live. I like going to shows and seeing all these complete strangers in one place because they have this common love for a band or a genre of music. It’s a way of bringing people together that really gets me.

Dateline: What do you think young people have to rebel against today?

DL: I know that everyone’s not going to agree with what I believe, but this war is based on lies. The kids my age and a little older, we all see that. And we see our brothers and sisters and uncles going off to Iraq to fight and in some cases, losing their lives for an unwarranted cause.

Dateline: Why do you think punk rock endures as a form of musical rebellion?

DL: There’s so much history surrounding punk music, and how it started in Europe and the eastern United States. It gave kids another outlet to let out aggression. Even if you didn’t have very much talent, you could still create music that other kids could latch onto. There are a lot of talented players out there. But even if you could only play three chords, that can be your song. Then you just add the lyrics, which are sometimes more important than what the music is.

Dateline: What do The Black Dots sound like?

DL: It started off as my best friend and I, and now there are five of us. All of us had so many different musical tastes, so we mixed them all together. When people ask us what we sound like, it’s hard for us to pinpoint it. We’re not just rock or pop. The way we describe it is, if you took a blender, and put the Police, Weezer, the Vandals and Devo in it, that is our band.

Dateline: What are some of the things you learned as a DJ on KDHR?

DL: My show is called “And Now We Dance.” It’s named after one of my favorite Vandals songs. Unfortunately, I can’t play that one on the air. But, I’ve figured out how to manually censor foul language in songs. I just press a button to turn off the mikes really fast and bleep it out.

At first, it was hard, trying to work the CD player, the mikes, the phones, the email all at once. Now I can do it without even a thought.

Members of my band have come in to joke around. But I’ve been working on getting more bands in, like my friend who’s in a band called Raymond and Scum. They do comedy rock, a la Tenacious D. I’ve also experimented with having live music, basically acoustic guitar. We did some live music from our band on the air.

I also deejayed at the Health Fair on campus last semester. That was fun, doing a live event. Stephen (Janes, sophomore (Communications) was playing a lot of classic rock, we were working together playing George Michael, Aerosmith,
anything. One of the students came up, and wanted to hear something by the Police. I said, ‘I have all these CDs, which one do you want to hear?’ He asked, ‘What’s on that CD?’ I told him ‘Roxanne’ was on it. He had me go through
all the Police CDs I had for five minutes. At the end, he said, ‘Uh, just play ‘Roxanne.’

He had me go through all the CDs. (laughs) But it paid off, because I wrote down
the names of albums for him that he wanted. A lot of people came up and said we had some good stuff coming out. Someone thought we were from KROQ. We just said, ‘We wish!’

Dateline: How do you think you’ve reached people by being a DJ on KDHR?

DL: I was in a recreation class last semester for part of my GEs, and as an icebreaker, everyone had to talk about what they did. I mentioned that I was a DJ on the station, and at first, everyone was saying, ‘KDHR? We have a radio station?’

But toward the end of the year, a couple of people had found me and my show on MySpace.com . They said,‘We don’t look like punk rock listeners, but we really like what you play.’ I get requests from them too.

Music touches people in different ways. I’m just glad I have a few different outlets to bring the music I like to people who are also interested in it. It’s about bringing people together, the kinder, gentler college experience. (laughs)

- Reported by Joanie Harmon-Whetmore