failedimitator
NOTEBOOK.MADEBYAL
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TRUTH IS TREASON IN AN EMPIRE OF LIES!
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Long Portrait: Self [[2022090401234]]
https://vimeo.com/746183889
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03 Ramadan 1443 AH
For the first time in my life (or the second, if you count the year of my actual birth) my Islamic and Gregorian birthdays are overlapping. Not perfectly -- as in the year of my birth -- but almost.
The Gregorian calendar is a solar one with mostly 31 days (sometimes 30 and of course there's February), while the Islamic calendar is a lunar one with 29 days (sometimes 30 and no February). Because of this, the Islamic calendar is shorter by -- give or take -- eleven days. So every year, the Islamic months start earlier -- or at least appear to, from a solar perspective -- by roughly eleven days.
In 2021, for example, the first day of Ramadan on the Gregorian calendar fell on the 13th of April. This year -- 2022 -- Ramadan started on the 3rd*.
So if you take those 11 days a year and multiply by 33, you get 363. 363, which is just 2 shy of 365: the total number of days on the Gregorian calendar. What this means is that after every 33 years on the Gregorian Calendar, the Islamic calendar laps it by one.
And that's how I just turned 34 years old today, and in a couple of days, I'll be turning 33.
Subhanallah!
(*or the 2nd, depending on where in the world you are. There are Earth rotation reasons for why that is. One could also argue that it actually started on the 1st because -- technically speaking -- night comes before day in Islam).
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In his essay about quitting smoking, David Sedaris put forth the idea that maybe we're each born with a set number of cigarette sticks to our name, and it's only once we've smoked however many sticks assigned to us (even if that number is zero) that we're allowed to stop.
"I'm done with cigarettes," one might say after quitting smoking. Except it's not so much quitting, David proposes, as it is finishing.
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I've been meeting people from the Internet for pretty much all of my adult life, and for most of that time, the word "ghosted" didn't exist. Not that people don't disappear on you back then, they do, but -- and maybe I'm misremembering this -- it didn't sting as much.
My guess is that back then, we didn't have social media on the move (Twitter and Instagram and other things on our phones that bring the ghost along), so the hauntings were a lot less frequent.
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I wondered if -- like David and his cigarettes -- we're also assigned a certain number of interactions with the people we meet over the course of our lives.
Five words and a single text with this Uber driver. Six thousand voice notes from my mother. Three full-belly laughs and a hug with that Bumble date.
And then it's finished.
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I don't think this is unique to me, but whenever someone ghosts me, a part of me wonders if it's because of something I said or did.
I go through texts and memories and dissect words I've written and things I've said. I imagine my body language and voice tonality and wonder if any one of those things might have been interpreted unfavourably.
The Occam's razor answer, of course, is that it has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said or did specifically. What's more likely is that they didn't feel a connection or spark (or any one of the many words we now use to describe old familiar feelings of comfort), and don't want to have a potentially awkward conversation about it.
I know this because I've also ghosted people.
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"Was it something I said or did?" I texted, "Or did we just run our course?"
"I think we just ran our course."
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Today, 15th October, is the birthday of Fela Kuti -- world-famous for being the pioneer of Afrobeat. fono -- world-famous for being the best music venue in KL -- asked if I could curate an Afrobeat or Afrobeat-inspired playlist to mark the occasion. I said yes.
Growing up, I knew of Fela -- most people did -- but I’d never heard any of his music. There wasn’t much music in the home I grew up in. Neither of my parents listened to music. Although they used to. I know this because as a kid, I came across some old dusty records in the garage, which I proceeded to play frisbee with. And my parents didn’t stop me. Today, they probably would’ve been worth something.
But I digress.
I only started listening to music in the early 2000s when I was at boarding school. At the time, 2face (now 2Baba), P Square, and Styl-Plus were all the rage. Later on, Bracket and D’banj came on the scene. But it wasn’t till Wizkid came on the scene that the genre we now call Afrobeats really took off internationally.
And this is the part where I tell you that Afrobeats is not the same as Afrobeat -- a fact that I only just learned while writing this.
I moved to Malaysia in 2006, and my connection to Nigerian music pretty much froze at that point. I still listened to the artists I knew. I played their old songs and their new ones if they have them. And whenever they feature some new in a song I like, I check that person out. It’s a very slow way of consuming music, but it worked for me.
Fast-forward to 2020 -- to the pandemic -- and most of us are stuck at home in lockdown Being one the many people who live alone, one of the ways I tried to connect was through Instagram -- an app that up until the pandemic, I didn’t really use very much.
I follow a lot of black creators. Photographers and filmmakers, mostly. And because Instagram music is now a thing -- and because this genre that we now call Afrobeats is a global phenomenon -- every day of the lockdown was music appreciation class for me. And because of how Spotify works, the more Afrobeats I listened to, the more Afrobeats it recommends to me.
In the last 12 months, I’ve listened to more new Nigerian music than I did in the last 12 years.
But this isn’t really praise for these tech giants connecting me to the music -- although they do get some credit. What this is is a testament to the power of this West African dance music. It’s an infectious sound that goes through your ears, takes hold of your body, and the only thing to do is dance. It’s a very joyous music.
About 8 years ago, I was in a Grabcar -- back then called MyTeksi -- and the driver, an elderly gentleman in his 50s, asked where I was from -- a very common question here in KL. And when I told him Nigeria, he immediately lit up and said “Wizkid!”
That’s when I knew that this genre was unstoppable. If this uncle from the other side of the world knows of Wizkid, then very soon, the entire world will.
That’s not actually true. I mean, the story did happen. I was in the car and the uncle did say “Wizkid” when I said Nigeria, but I didn’t really think at the time that there was anything unstopable about the genre. But it seemed like a good anecdote to include in a story like this.
I don’t know what any of this has to do with Fela Kuti. Probably very little. And if I’d known two weeks ago, back when fono asked, that Afrobeats is not in fact Afrobeat, I wouldn’t have agreed to do it. Because while I do know a fair bit about Afrobeats, I pretty much know nothing about Afrobeat.
To this day, except for Zombie, I don’t know a single Fela Kuti song. But, like Adekunle Gold sings in one of the songs on the playlist, It is What it Is.
I hope you enjoy Afro-fono: Naija Jams.
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vimeo
202110012359
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202109292359
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202109282359
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202109232359
“Maybe this decision was a mistake
You probably don't care what I have to say
But it's been heavy on my mind for months now
Guess I'm trying to clear some mental space”
In Do Yo -- from his album Because of You -- Ne-Yo is essentially a mess. He's had a breakup and is reaching out to his ex that he hadn't seen or spoken to in a while. Someone who he assumes has moved on.
“I just wonder
Do you ever
Think of me anymore
Do you?”
The original song is all about Ne-Yo and his feelings. It’s a great break-up song.
But there are two remixes -- both with female vocalists playing the part of the ex-lover -- that I think add an interesting dimension to the narrative.
“Kind of bittersweet to hear from you now
Things have changed so much in both our worlds
Everything about me now is woman
The person that you hurt was just a girl”
Utada decides to play it straight. She’s the hero, he’s the villain. He's hurt her, and now she's over it. End of story.
For the bridge, in the original song, Ne-Yo sings:
“I know what we have is dead and gone
Too many times I made you cry”
In both remixes, the bridge is a duet, and Utada sang the second line as:
“Too many times you made me cry”
Mary J Blige, on the other hand, approached it differently.
“Found it lying bare in front of my door (door)
Pick it up before my man could see (see)”
From the opening you can tell that she's not quite in the place Ne-Yo is imagining her to be at. Which, to me, makes her more interesting.
“Knew what it would say before I read
Torn the letter up and threw it all away”
And on the bridge, the line that Utada sang as "Too many times you made me cry", Mary J sang as:
"Too many times I made you cry".
She sang it exactly the way Ne-Yo did in the original.
In her narrative, she’s the villain. Or at least she thinks she is, on the same song that Ne-Yo thinks he’s the villain.
When a self-aware couple breaks up, one of them would probably think there’s this and this thing that I did. While the other person would also be thinking there’s this and this that I did. They’re both, essentially singing “Too many times I made you cry” to each other.
There rarely are clear-cut heroes and villains at the end of most relationships.
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