Ruminations On Love and Life

Jolly Saturday to Everyone (these photos are from an Oakland neighborhood that grows scary life-size giant plants):

  

 

 

This is a live post, meaning I haven't pre-written it and scheduled it to appear later. My brain is fried today so I'm just posting photos and various things from the past week or so. (Actually since I started this post a few hours ago and it took a year to download/compress and get Blogger to accept 10 minutes of a sound recording I'm totally awake now). I've been exploring different neighborhoods, being more social and making stealth (concert) recordings. Some of you online friends have been chronicling this lovely journey since I started this blog last July. Others have recently joined the conversations. Thanks to all of you for taking the time out of your busy day to spend a few minutes with me and my thoughts via Blogger and on Twitter. What a wonderful community of kick-butt individuals you are! Maybe some of you observers will feel less like a turtle and come out of your shell? I hope it's been an interesting and thought-provoking mind meld. I hope that I've challenged, motivated and inspired you as I've tried to do for myself. I've loved the feedback I've received and welcome more.

I had a personal goal of a new post every day that I've actually kept since November! Now I want to apply that level of concentration and discipline to other areas of my life. I'm still not ready to cut back my posting schedule but I prefer quality to quantity so this may be changing soon. I'm the "Little Blogger That Could" you know and still have some things to learn. Thank you for taking this journey with me. When I write about inequalities it's so that we recognize how similar we all are in our own way and how we can contribute to replenishing society - or taking from it. I focus on social justice, empowerment, changing our mindsets and being honest because if we don't how will we continue to grow as human beings? 

I also enjoy popular culture, music, art, etc. Anything that uplifts our spirits - even some things considered risque. It has become rather obvious how we need to take back control of how images are being disseminated, particularly those of Black women. Clearly being one means I have a vested interested in how we are shown (though that isn't the case with every BW sadly). We laugh, cry, smile, bleed and live just like everyone else but somehow we are being presented as inauthentically as possible. We are NOT the gum on the shoe of the world. Even if you don't personally have anything to do with that, you can certainly help thwart those that are. Of course I also want others to live in peace as well, but we all have our individual paths to take and purposes to fulfill. I believe this is one of mine.

We should also be able to live our lives freely without fear of recrimination. No one should go hungry. Greed must not be allowed to rule the day. Even as we take more responsibility and learn to make better choices we still need each other on some level. Everyone has to pull their own weight, but that doesn't mean it's ok to kick the person on the ladder below you when climbing it. Fairness doesn't always balance out but I don't see why goodness can't prevail when it really counts. As frustrated as I get with things I can't control it's because I'd like to see the bar raised with more opportunities for people. Or at least a minimal skill set that we know how to navigate for us and future generations. We may not all have the same privileges but that should not be a virtual death sentence for a quality life. Accountability goes in many directions.

So with that I bid you a fair day/evening and here's hoping it's a good one.

   

Amel Larrieux bootleg. I had to cover the lens and just get a sound recording but isn't it great! She even made her voice sound like a horn to accompany the other instrumentalists. I could only get this one still as she exited the stage and she turned so quickly all you can see is her back. Next time! There was a little reverb added to compliment her vocals but not one touch of Auto-tune was required. The other photos are of Ben Harper and a photo of the inside of the Fillmore before show-time. *Just added a little bootleg Ben (see above) and it's jumpy because they were already telling people no cameras the second we walked in - and yet there was a "professional" photog there hogging all the space :-(

 

Old School Friday - What Do You Do When You Listen to Everything?

So this week's meme is "Outside My Box", but I dabble in all genres of music so this isn't going to work for me. See not all of us limit ourselves. I have my preferences of course but I do try to listen to everything (except degrading songs of course). So now I've got to find some obscure pan pipe music from the Andes or something - nah I won't do that to ya'll. I'll just put up something I think some of you might not listen to or be that familiar with: like the two artists I just saw this week (I still have to download footage by the way). I had a slew of messages on Twitter not on the blog if you want to check my archives for those conversations. Which was also why I wasn't able to schedule my posts for future feed parsing. This is live baby! So consider these selections a precursor to a future concert series of blog posts......

Deploying A Little Negro Spirit: The Responsibility of the (Sometimes) Buying Public

So this was supposed to be the end of my series of cultural abandonment and appropriation but I think it bears continuing even as I expand the way it has been framed thus far.

I've had some very good conversations in real life and online from a variety of people (notably a majority of Black women) who are tired of seeing our sisters being dragged through the mud. We want to hold others accountable for spreading the virus but it starts with us. It begins with looking in the mirror at what we support and why we choose it.

I went to a meet and greet session with music artist Ben Harper yesterday (I'll have photos on my Flickr account shortly). Now quite a few people may not know who he is (or like his style of music) but that's because many of us aren't seeking out music that isn't played on terrestrial radio. Artists that don't fit into the R&B/Hip-Hop radio format of today may be ignored by the average listener. They're missing out on a lot of great music. Or at least missing out on hearing diverse styles. 

During our time with him he mentioned how he has never stopped seeking out ways to improve his musicianship (he plays guitar, piano and dabbles with other instruments). He also practices regularly. He talked about his exposure to a variety of genres thanks to his parents and grandparents being open-minded about what they played. He also discussed early hip-hop songs that blew him away. The difference of course is that he actually reads and plays music and isn't dependent on knob-fiddling to produce a sound. 

He doesn't need to reach back two decades ago for a great song to sample to center his songs around. Now one could argue that learning to use an MPC is a skill, that mixing is a skill but to what end?  Truth be told even the great DJs have seen the emergence of what I call the "CD Players", who don't even bother sequencing a song properly and just hit the start button and cue up songs on a laptop. I've been to many clubs where it's some variation of Top 40 boredom. 

Some of these lauded "music" makers have even been exposed as having used preloaded music for their "hits".

We as consumers have gotten so used to listening to watered-down music we wouldn't know quality if it bit us on the...If we demand more from music artists things will change. If we raise the bar for what we deem quality we will see an immediate improvement. The market will have to meet our needs instead of the other way around.