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Call her 'sophisticated punk', riot grrl, indie chic, any label you give her she will redefine...
Black Flamingo isn't your typical NYC punk, her core-of-the-soul style is a sound all her own. During the last decade she has worked with legendary artists such as Joey Ramone, Patti Smith, David Johanson, and in 2003, music producer Daniel Rey on her CD '5 Songz'.
She is constantly touring the east coast of the USA all the time and playing all the NYC dives to excited devoted crowds. Her song "Addicted to Sleaze" is on many compilations, including the *HUSSIESKUNK* compilation called "Mohawks & Whiskey Shots" and the NETSHOWS compilation for Media Factory Show TV.
Black Flamingo is one of the featured artists in filmmaker Kate Perrotti's amazing Rockmentry about Moms that rock! BF also founded Music & Love, an organization that produces benefits for charities. Some of them have been; the annual Valentine's Benefit for 'God's Love We Deliver', the NYC charity that delivers meals to homebound people with AIDS, Greenpeace, & so many more ... .
She also regularly performs for Musicians On Call in hospitals throughout NYC along with
John Mayer, Bruce Springsteen, & Avril Lavigne who also perform with MOC.
BF is an active organizer with MAMAPALOOZA ....the annual international festival for Moms that Rock!
A History
As a little girl, BF secretly wanted to be a singer and the messiah. To prepare for these careers, she practiced singing with a microphone-shaped piece of soap and dropped out of her spiritually bankrupt Hebrew school by the first grade. Later on, she would discover how the essence of punk rock and the Lubavitcher rebbes insights could intertwine and inspire her to reach new musical heights.
If I have learned anything, she says, its that everything is so weirdly connected.
These days, Flamingo a Union Square resident and a mother of two girls simply strives for tikkun olam, repairing the world. As a singer/songwriter with her own band, Black Flamingo has spent the past decade performing what she calls sophisticated punk or punk pop at New York clubs such as CBGB, Irving Plaza, Otto's Shrunken Head, & the Apocalyse Lounge. As the founder of Music & Love Productions, she also organizes benefit concerts for AIDS-related charities in honor of her brother Richard, who died of the disease in 1989. These concerts have featured prominent musicians such as Patti Smith, the Spin Doctors and Joey Ramone.
Described as a cross between Courtney Love and Barbra Streisand, Flamingo blends the raw simplicity often found in punk music with messages of love, peace, and other lessons from growing up as a Jewish girl on the fringes.
I just want to make the world a better place by being a New York, Jewish, punk prophet, she says.
Heidi Heft LaPorte, a professor of social work at Yeshiva University and New York University observes that Ludwigs appeal lies in her being very spiritual and honest. Shes not afraid to show her vulnerabilities as a human being and she doesnt try to polish herself. The result is powerful, she says.
Having attended many Black Flamingo gigs, Heft LaPorte adds theres something very Jewish about Ludwigs music in that all of her songs concern the story of Exodus. Her lyrics are always about going through the wilderness and getting to the Promised Land, despite all the golden calves along the way. That is the message of Judaism, which extends to life in general.
Thom Jack, the booking agent at the East Village, agrees that Black Flamingo is a spiritual, concerned person who gives uplifting, exuberant performances. While her songs are catchy pop songs, they always have a message. Theyre not just fluff, he says.
Seated in the livingroom of her dimly lit apartment perfumed with incense, Flamingo somehow embodies a wide-eyed, wholesome appearance despite her purple hair and heavy eye-liner. Born in the Bronx, Ludwig grew up in Westchester as the only Jewish kid on her street and attended summer camps populated by Jewish girls from the Five Towns in Long Island. They taught her how to blow my hair out, which I never got good at... I always came home wishing I was from the Five Towns, she recalls.
That wish did not last long. By high school, BF shunned the world of coiffed hair and embraced bell bottoms and platform shoes. A major turning point in her life occurred when she attended the prep school Choate for a year and had a nervous breakdown after a teacher caught her cheating on a history quiz. I knew then I wasnt going to be the doctor or lawyer my parents wanted me to be, she says.
In college, she further distanced herself from the archetype of the nice Jewish girl when she got kicked off a mission to Israel for university students. Ludwig says that she ate something from a Bedouin camp that led to hallucinations and accusations that she purposely ingested drugs. She subsequently spent a year studying in London and began to dye her hair the colors of the rainbow. There, she experienced another major turning point by conducting an independent study on the social origins of punk. I didnt relate to the violence of punk music but I loved that in punk, anyone can get up and express themselves and I loved the wittiness and sarcasm. The essence of punk made sense to me, she says.
Two years after graduating college, BF, who had been working in the skin care industry in Philadelphia, took a trip to San Francisco. In her hotel room, she wrote down her goals, made them into a paper airplane and sailed them out of the window. Afterwards, she returned to New York, began writing songs and took voice lessons. In 1988, she got her first gig. It never ended. Somehow, we'd always get a gig, there would always be a new lead, something that would prevent me from giving up.
Although thankful for breaking into the local music scene despite her relatively late start, BF, like any self-respecting aspiring musician, yearns for more. If my songs were played on the radio and really got out there, they could help people. Ive seen that my songs have an ability to touch people, she says. I want to help people accept themselves, as i continue learning how to accept myself.
To show thats shes more than just talk, Lady Flamingo picks up her guitar and plays her song Imperfect Girl. Imperfect girls/theyre everywhere/living in the world/I am the most imperfect girl youll ever see. I dont mind being known as the Jewish girl whos into punk. I dont mind standing up for everything I am.
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