How COVID Created a Community
2 years ago the world stopped turning. We left our houses only for groceries (that is if you didn’t order it from services like InstaCart) or the pharmacy. People were laid off, or started working from home — trading in the commute and the 9–5 for coffee and sweats from a makeshift office, the kitchen table, or the couch. Classrooms were traded for Zoom, meetings happened on Microsoft Teams, and TikTok, Twitter, and Twitch became hangouts, hotspots, and havens. Gone were concerts or live shows, festivals and movie theater premiers. The people needed something.
Enter Kenny Beats.
Kenny Beats, well-known hip-hop producer, creator of The Cave on YouTube, and founder of D.O.T.S., started streaming on Twitch — cooking up beats and amassing a following of bedroom-producers and DJs around the world.
With a Go-Pro, MacBook, Ableton, and occassionally Aris, Kenny streamed. Chatting about gear, guitars, and drums — he started sharing secrets and tips for music production — creating the space for a learning community in the middle of a global pandemic. And when I say secrets and tips from someone — it’s not just any bedroom producer. A lot of time people know the album by the artist and not the producer, but Ken’s discography is nothing to scoff at. He’s the producer behind tracks and albums with artists including ScHoolboy Q, Kendrick Lamar, Vince Staples, Rico Nasty, Dominic Fike, Ed Sheeran, Gucci Mane, Slowthai, DaBaby, Denzel Curry, Aitch, IDLES, Joji, FloMilli, and Roddy Ricch.
Huge names in the industry, and mid-quarantine Kenny and his Go-Pro in his home studio were teaching thousands in their bedrooms through Twitch. Late night Pain Chats with ZaZa warnings started — creating a space for people to bring their pain with relationships and difficulties with music to talk about and air in a safe community. A Discord server started. But this is no ordinary server or community. Rule number 1 is “We have a zero tolerance policy for hate speech. Any racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, body-shaming, bullying, harassment, instigating, etc. will not be tolerated in this space. Any interactions making other people in the server feel unsafe will be taken seriously- this includes misogynistic or demeaning behavior, comments about peoples’ appearance, objectifying other members, or being sexually explicit in text chats, dm’s, or VC’s- to keep the space safe and welcoming for everyone.”
The server is now over 100k members large, with 0 space or allowance for these behaviors. A rarity on the internet.
Beyond creating that safe space, the Discord offers subscriber rewards for Twitch subs, which include samples of Kenny playing guitar, drums, and piano for producers to use, royalty-free.
It may be a safe and creative space — but put a bunch of creatives together and things get a little weird. We promise we aren’t a cult. We might be a religion (only if we get a tax break). Permission slips for field trips must be signed. No toads were licked or harmed in the writing of this article. Also, you can’t mention the cops, or burning a passport. With that housekeeping in mind, the twitch parties were safe and fun. The beautiful era of Blazercore began.
With love, and his blazer, Kenny made us mixtapes. And we gathered around and listened. The chat was wholesome, the vibe was lit, and memories were made. (Bring back Blazercore).
In 2020, Season 1 of the Beat Battle also began. Stream would start, the sample would get dropped, and everyone had an hour to cook up, upload to SoundCloud, and then voting would begin. Winners would win prizes — from plug-ins and Splice credits to microphones and other gear — in 2020 and 2021 Kenny Beats and the D.O.T.S. team gave away more than half a million in prizes to up-and-coming producers around the world. We’re now mid-season 3, and Battles are held on Saturdays for more people and different folks to have a chance to get in on the action.
The community has had watch-parties, and Thanksgiving 2021 we watched the Kid Cudi documentary A Man Named Scott. In a time where we were still disconnected from close family and friends, there is a community where we can come together and spend time, and hang out and watch a movie. A place that feels like home.
And what is music without concerts? The pandemic might have impacted how we can go to shows, but the community has found ways around it. With the 2021 release of IDLES album CRAWLER, which Kenny produced during the pandemic in England during 2020, we gathered on stream for a concert — a watch party of IDLES performing songs off the album CRAWLER live. The chat was amazing, we had digital moshpits — where the rule is to *of course* pick people up if they fall down.
So here we are, 2 years, hundreds of thousands of people later, with a community of amazing people and talented creatives. The Kenny Beats Discord has created multiple mixtapes, and EPs, working together and collaborating entirely online. It’s even branched into its own micro-community with the creation of an entire new community KBD: Continuum — a server for those working on current collaborative projects to share with the KBD community — it started in 2022 with the Valentine’s Day EP Limerance, with all money from album purchases going to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and the 20xx project.
Over the last 2 years, this amazing community has grown in size, and raised funds for a number of different causes and foundations — and only plans to continue to do so and do more. If you’re a music enthusiast, bedroom producer or DJ, and the way life has changed over the last few years has left you feeling alone — you have a home with the Kenny Beats Discord. You can learn, vent, laugh, make friends, and collab here.
