WHAT IS 'GOOD'!

Hello. At this rate, I might have to make this guy an admin on my blog. He has been prolific to say the least. Including this post, he now has three posts on MY blog; and the trio have been thought-provoking. Big ups to the Engineer.  For a recap of his previous missives, click here and there. For today's post, here you go:

"I don’t have a day job (that should not necessarily be translated as me being jobless). That probably explains why I spend every waking minute, and some sleeping minutes of my life thinking about random topics. Just the other day, I had a dream in which I was thinking about stuff that made me cry. I woke up and the tears just wouldn’t stop. So, I THINK I brood in my sleep too.


Now, having a lot of spare time in the day only partially explains why I think a lot because there are millions of jobless people everywhere who still never sit down to think about anything. The real reason will be that I am just Homo sapien personified. I like to fix every piece of any [figurative] jigsaw. Discrepancies between two recounts of the same event keep me awake all night. When timelines cross, I am always busy thinking. Mostly I am not looking for the lie alone; I am looking for the “why”. Why things happen… Again, I deviate.

In June, I had to embark on the same 8hours road trip four times in four days - coincidentally,  I am typing this in transit of the ilk. Not driving afforded me enough time to do what I do best: sleep think. The driver of the commercial vehicle on one of such journeys had an mp3 transmitter that kept doling out Naija “hip-hop” songs, mostly Olamide’s. I loved that. Then a point came when the music genre changed to Fuji. My music taste only excludes songs by Lady Gaga, so I had no problem with that. I even sang along in my mind. Then a co-passenger made a comment that means “where have you been hiding good music all this while?”  Now I had a problem with that statement. Who told him what good music is supposed to be? Who?!

As general as pretty and ugly can be – because I believe everybody agrees on who is pretty. It is the ugly ones that are up for debate – people still come up with a consolation sentences like “beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder” [“and the angle you are beholding from” as my lovely ever-recurrent ex girlfriend will put it]. If that applies to beauty (I believe if your beauty depends on who is looking, you are just not pretty – come sit with me), then music is an even more appropriate topic to apply that.

Ultimately, music is entertainment. Different people find different things entertaining. When a musician sings, he/she does so with the hope that someone somewhere finds it entertaining.  If you do, it means that you can relate to whatever message the song is sending; it doesn’t mean that people who don’t like it are doing anything wrong. A Yoruba adage translated to English will mean ”a mad person is fun to watch, not fun to birth”. I am not in cahoots with that. I don’t find mad people fun to watch one bit. But then, I don’t begrudge those who find madness funny their fun. I also have weird ways of catching fun too (like watching people die in SAN ANDREAS* - a classic comedy IMO).


Music has very broad genres. Even within the same genre, styles differ. I know Dare Art Alade, for instance, knows basic music. I know he knows the quavers, clefs, notes, scales and other music jargon, but I am not sorry that I don’t find what he sings as entertaining as Terry G’s. Lil Wayne just talks, I hear none of the Igbo Phyno spits, Baddo and Reminisce are razz, but their songs attend to my issues every day. Of course I listen to every other kind of song depending on my mood and what is obtainable. But then, I will not be caught dead singing Timi [Dakolo] or Simi’s praise. And don’t even get me started on Praiz. That don’t mean I’ll go about calling guys who love slow female songs (whatever they call that genre) fags - what I think of course is in my mind.

In essence, when BET or Grammy declares that someone won an award, the person won THAT award. After all, there is no standard as to what songs should be like. So whatever the organizers decide holds. Now if the Headies decide that Sean Tizzle had more votes than Burna Boy, the “elites” should welcome the idea instead of boring us with how the process is flawed. It’s not like it is not these razz music we [the local ones] and the elite alike groove to in the club.
It is not impossible that I will feel differently about the paragraph before this after right now. But the message today is that: what is music to you is crap to someone else, and quite rightly too. Live with that or kee yourself."
                     --->>>El-Jay ( @laycawn)

*I find it funny that with the number of people (who also have families) that lost their lives, the movie only focuses on a family's survival. Viewers are tricked into only really pitying that family, like the other lives are expendable.