3 x 3

I love music. I love cinema. Here are my top three films about music in three words.

⏯  Whiplash
Purpose Discipline Tenacity
P.S: Watch the video to the end. It's totally worth it.

⏯  Begin Again
Freedom Creativity Authenticity

⏯  Beats of the Antonov
Conflict Resilience Acoustic

Alternative Soul from Nigeria? Yes please and thank you J-town!

Allow me to publicly thank the Federal Republic of Nigeria for giving us the breath of fresh air that is Bez (Emmanuel Bezhuwa Idakuya), a talented musician who grew up in the city of Jos. His website classifies his music as alternative soul which is apparently a hybrid of rock, jazz and soul (which I love!) as well as RNB (which I'm not so crazy about but can tolerate). Basically, it's swing and I can't get enough of it. This is the kind of music that I want to write bestselling books to, I want invent disruptive innovations to, I want to sit back and watch the world go by to, take a long spontaneous road trip to, walk the streets of Stone Town to, take a nap to, raise amazing afro haired babies to, study epidemiology to, write reports about orphans and shoes in Lesotho to, dance on an empty dance floor to... this is the kind of music that constitutes the mental soundtrack of my life.

I discovered Bez courtesy of one of the directors of a project I am working on who pleasantly surprises me on a regular basis with his eclectic life pursuits that range from being a health and development capacity building practitioner, to being a pretty good amateur photographer slash sound engineer slash disc jockey slash highly credentialed statistician. I like weird mixes of things and I like it when people's arms and legs poke out of the neat little boxes we try to stuff them into. So anyway, back to Bez. His beautiful acoustic guitar riffs make me reminisce about warm summer nights under starry African skies. As I listened to his debut album, Super Sun, I felt a euphoria I felt when I stumbled on London Grammar performing live in Paris in 2013 and fell instantly in love. It's the same feeling I felt when I discovered Bez's fellow Nigerian, the prodigious Asa in Bulawayo in 1996. In fact, Bez has a very similar style to Asa. It's like if Asa, John Legend, Estelle and Corneille all combined their musical DNA, the result would be Bez. His big band sounds have had me finger snapping (I am not cool and I don't care!) and toe tapping for hours. 

The album Super Sun is at times warm, soulful and mellifluous (More You) and at times playful and swingy (Stop Pretending and Stupid Song) and often times it's a little bit of everything (Super Sun and Zuciya Daya), giving credence to the "hybrid" label on his website. It has the singular honor of being the only album inmy iTunes library on which every track has a rating of five stars. Even Lupe Fiasco's phenomenal Tetsuo and Youth doesn't have a clean sweep (thanks to Winter and Deliver). Super Sun is a super Saiyan piece of work and I can't wait to check out Bez's sophomore album. Who knows, with the way my life is stalked by serendipitious encounters, I might just accidentally walk in on a live Bez performance in some random corner of the Earth. Best believe I'll rock out until the sun comes up. 

Check this guy out, kick back and be grateful that you are alive at such a time as this!

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man...I mean, heal a broken heart

Let's say I know someone who found herself deep in the throes of an little bit of an unrequited love situation for, oh let's say the greater part of the year. This mostly bitter and only occasionally tantalizingly sweet ordeal was punctuated by melodrama and much, much agonizing (because we all know love is the purest form of agony) with friends, family, colleagues and strangers in strange places, and eventually culminated in a resolute declaration that the smithereens that her heart had broken into would never be reconstituted again. Well, it is my pleasure to write that this hapless young woman's heart has in fact reconstituted itself and is well and truly recovered from what can only be described as a highly emotionally taxing situation no human being deserves to endure. There are so many reasons why she has recovered and so many contributory factors to her arrival at the place of sanity and wellness that it would easily take me months to chronicle them all. I can however, quite confidently say that a very large role was played by the music industry, for it was in music that she came to the realisation of the (rather obvious) fact that hers was not the first situation of this type and if simple, ordinary people like multi-platinum recording artists could seemingly experience and overcome these things to the extent that they could even use them to earn a living, well then surely, a bright young fox like me (I mean, this young woman) could do likewise and come out on top? The following is a taste, a mere sample, of the soundtrack of an eclectic muso's journey out of the mire of ill-fated love. You could also think of it as a five step algorithm to getting over a broken heart. If you get stuck on any step go back to the one before. The fact that I can blog about this without being reduced to a heap of incoherent, jumbled up emotions is proof that it works!

Lesson 1: Hey, it happens to the best of us...


Daniel Bedingfield: If you're not the one.

Angie Stone: Snowflakes.

Dela: Lucy's and Loose Leafs.

Gabrielle: Out of reach

Juanes and Nelly Furtado: Fotografia

Lea Salonga - On my own (Les Miserables)

Diam's: SOS

Love is coming undone and hearts are breaking all over the world in different ways, for different reasons and in different languages. Who are you but a mere mortal to expect to be exempt from these things?

Lesson 2: Shake it off, champ. Just keep walking...


Madonna: Power of goodbye

Dido: Hunter

Maxwell: Pretty Wings:

Lupe Fiasco: The show goes on

Coolio: See you when you get there

Joss Stone: Could have been you

Coldplay: Paradise

Tough break, Johnny; just keep walking ..


Lesson 3: Don't just walk around in circles. You need to be walking AWAY from the object of your unrequited limerence and TOWARDS the person you used to be before you lost yourself. The old you was doing just fine before this whole debacle; the old you was aces...Even better if you can walk towards an even better version of yourself the world has never seen: wiser, stronger, better, more sympathetic with your audience, as it were..:-)

Enigma: Return to innocence
...if you want, then start to laugh, if you must then start to cry...

Lupe Fiasco: Beautiful lasers (2 ways)
...find a reason...simplest things, you really like summer, you really like music, you really like reading...

R. Kelly: The storm is over now
... I can see the sunshine (somewhere beyond the clouds)...

Oren Lavie: Her morning elegance
...and she fights for her life...

Common: Blue sky
...this is my Inception, I'm writing my dreams...immortal view of a star doing what I'm born to do...

U2 - Walk on So go on then. Time to do all those things you failed to do because you were busy wallowing in the sea of cathexis!

Lesson 4: if the darkness tries to creep up on you again assault it with positive self talk and think happy thoughts. The following music never fails to put a smile on my face.


Bobby McFerrin: Don't worry be happy
...don't bring everybody down!

Lupe Fiasco: Just might be OK
...affirmative, no further furnishing is needed...I believe we are completed...

OMC: How bizarre
...ooh baby, it's making me crazy...

Cornershop: Brimful of Asha
...she's the one that keeps the dream alive, from the morning, past the evening, til the end of the night...

Jimmy Cliff: I can see clearly now
...all of the bad feelings have disappeared, here is the rainbow I've been praying for, it's gonna be a bright, sunshiney day...

Queen: We are the champions

We are the champions, 

we are the champions, 

no time for losers,

 cause we are the champions... of the world! 

That's right. Not the room, office, city or country. We are the champions of the WORLD!

Don't be choosy. Take your happy fix however you can get it: a funny joke, a funny friend, an uplifting book, song or activity. Lap it up! And don't be afraid to exaggerate your self efficacy and play up your awesomeness. If you're feeling down and out then chances are you're underestimating it already so you'll just about hit the mark if you go a little overboard with the positive self talk. 

Lesson 5: Keep hope alive! No one likes a bitter, jaded, sourpuss so expect better, expect more and be ready for it. 

Rachel's: Water from the same source

Just pure instrumental genius that inspires and reinvigorates me!

I for one, am an insatiable optimist and fully expect this fantastic young lady to look back on this past year one day and throw her head back in laughter as she rides into the sunset with James Franco/ Michael Ealy/ Thierry Henry/ John Legend/ Jared Leto/ Common/ Ryan Reynolds/ Columbus Short/ Lupe Fiasco... the possibilities are without end!

Introduction: the beginnings of freedom

This is about collected things. Words, poetry, thoughts, music and images that I have stumbled upon, uncovered, marveled at and given place of pride. This is about cherished things, discovered and collected over time. It is about ideas, the kind of ideas that form organically after quiet observation, voyage and contemplation and slowly fit together like drifting continents revealing themselves to be a more honest version of the struggle of life. Because that's what it is, an exertion against the laws of nature from chaos to order and hopefully the highest level of existence: true freedom. So this blog is about collected things in my journey to freedom.
So where do we begin? We begin with a lesson on resilience; we begin with dandelions...

Dandelion Thinking 

Dandelions
don't care
that nobody cares
to cultivate dandelions.

Dandelions
don't know
that everyone knows
they grow everywhere.
Underfoot. In cracks.
Extravagantly. 

© Monica Cromhout 

I love this poem by the Zimbabwean-born Monica Cromhout because the vast majority of us have not had ideal conditions to nurture our development. Our leaders fail us, loved ones leave us, hunger, illness and natural disasters plague us, we blunder and fall. It's a life of hard knocks. But look at us still, dreaming, growing, learning, discovering and loving "extravagantly." Dandelions are those among us who are described by Paul in a letter to believers in Corinth a couple of thousand years ago as "regarded as unknown...beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich". Dandelions have nothing, yet they possess everything. 

Dandelion thinking is the beginning of freedom.

Freedom Square, Kliptown, South Africa. 3 000 resistors converged here in 1955 to draw up the Freedom Charter.

Two dandelions.

Will she make it through the cracks?