King Youngblood - Make Your Voice Heard Loud & Vote Tour

King Youngblood plays the University of Minnesota - Coffman Memorial Union on Monday, October 26, at 12 PM. It's a midday stop on the Make Your Voice Heard Loud & Vote Tour, a 35-date, 35-day run across 35 US colleges. The tour is nonpartisan and focused on voter registration and civic engagement, and all the campus shows are free.

King Youngblood is fronted by Cameron Lavi-Jones, a Seattle-based musician who started the project in 2018 to mobilize youth voter registration and turnout. The full band includes drummer Paul 'Styx' Stoot, cellist Chet Peterson, and bassist Samy Garcia, and they describe their sound as reclaiming black-fronted rock with strong songwriting and an Afropunk attitude. You can hear that coming through on their 2022 album Big Thank and the single "Thousand Songs," which premiered on KEXP 90.3 FM. There's also a comic-book series, Afrothunda, tied to the project.

Lavi-Jones brings a lot of different threads to the work. He's the son of former Black Panther Maurice Jones Jr., studied communications at the University of Washington, and has worked as a social-justice public speaker, musician, producer, and filmmaker. During the 2020 Capitol Hill protests, he co-founded the podcast The Revolution Will Be Harmonized. Alternative Press called him "Seattle's Alt Rock Prince."

This particular tour is stripped back: each stop is a pop-up acoustic show played with a handful of guitars, a small PA, and a generator. The show at Coffman Memorial Union starts at 12 PM on Monday, October 26, and it's free.