Where music lives
Gala* always pairs well with La Casera* — when you can afford it.
Sluggish commutes readily force us into impulse-behaviour. They’re the only times when we feel the need to patronise in one go, the stream of groundnut sellers, mirror merchants, ice-cream peddlers, etc. hawking amidst the traffic. At the end of which, we’d wish we didn’t: ask me, I know. Third-world realities.
Making it through a traffic-logged situation without a music player in your transport is, well, impossible. You can’t, and quite frankly, shouldn’t. Relatively, music is the only fallback that makes episodes like these, and others, more sufferable. Whether making or listening to it, doesn’t matter, it goes both ways.
Street kids that choose to ‘make good ‘ of their time, scratch out improv studios, exploiting broken desks at school & roadside twigs for better use. Taking leisurely cracks at innovation from the humility of local hang-outs cradled in street corners.
Fooling around beside kerosene lamps with the after-school hobbies of faux rap battles — fake ‘yankee’ accents, shitty China-made blings — and lyrical contests that may one day segue into marked passions, if nurtured with the right deal of time and effort. Like this :
The original multi-task — selling mother’s wares while rhyming with friends simultaneously; shared traits being the distended stomachs, and the rhythmic bars slipping through everyone’s lips. Raucous laughter and inexplicable foot work accompanying.
But music isn’t just a coping mechanism.
Next street, low-key strumming and synth beat; the slow lissome writhing of a girl, petite and supple, full in all the right places. An athletic boy, breakdancing, all taut in sweaty. Both synchronised to coil around one another — and to the pulse of the bass: teasing out meaning from the aura about their glancing, barely covered bodies. Music at work, translating without language.
An unfaithful lover has commonalities with a failed business enterprise, and cheap dates — barely acknowledged miseries; bad religion, too. A la Frank Ocean or James Josephus. Or even chanting dreams of hitch-hiking through picturesque ‘Better Places’, nudged between a quaint acreage called despair, and the badlands of frustration.
Desire, want, need, a way to tell life it doesn’t have the bead on you. Desire. Escape. Music.
And the resulting rage against the things that keep you grounded when your wings are raised and open. Ready to soar. Music.
Everything is transactional. Everything is relative. Easy. Music don’t count under everything. Case closed.
Music is emancipatory. To blazes with record labels. Music is celebratory. Class traitorship.
Still,
Let’s backtrack to the third world realities and the ‘making-good’ street kids.
Let’s settle in a place, maybe Nigeria, seeing as it fits into the parameters. 2 in 3 kids not getting well fed. More than 10 million kids dislocated by unrest and hard-nosed poverty, more than 50 million school-less on many levels.
Contributing more billionaires at the top decile of the African Forbes rich list than any other country. Excepting maybe South Africa.
Juxtapose. Or as they say on the streets, je ko ye e! Be guided.
The desire is obvious, the rage is naked. Music is desire articulated, rage philosophized, an overcrossing that ferries us into the vicinity of our beau ideals, conceptually and otherwise. Peering over the divide that insulates us from our core desires, for a moment, or two; an escapist glimpse into the blanket ideation that is our dreams, fractured as they may be.
Stroll back to reality for a sec., really.
What is music to those whose roots are transient?
Aminatu at Bama refugee Camp loves the evening time. She gathers with her friends under the oak tree near the entrance to the camp, and they sing and dance and tell happy stories about a past that has been cruel to them, and a future they can’t afford to own, just yet.
The previous Friday, after Ju’umah, Aminatu and her friends sang and danced with Salimotu and Anwali, the new couple who met at the camp and fell in love. They had no food or wine to party with. Music was the communal celebration. If music be the food of love…
Further south, at the Makoko extension of Lagos, Peter is paying for a studio session with money he stole from his church’s tithes.
Tomorrow, he’d join a few friends to go siphon petrol off a government gas pipeline. They’d sell it, and he’d use part of his share fromthe proceeds to feed his siblings for the rest of the week. The remaining would go into producing his single.
