Escrava Isaura('s Retirantes _ Dorival Caymmi)

Now, lets not get things twisted. I AM NOT a soap opera kinda guy. The philosophy behind a huge bulk of telenovelas resembles that of marshmallows - it leaves me wondering WHY THE HELL DO THEY MAKE THOSE THINGS if not to exploit those with unnecessarily sweet teeth (is pluralizing expressions allowed?)...light spongy and excessively chewy things is what soaps and marshmallows are. Things made just for the sake of it with too many calories thus contributing to the ever increasing group of physically and/or emotionally obese. Yes, most soaps just baffle me, really. What is all that romance on steroids for, and why are grown men crying about storms in teacups, and why are Thai men being given straight up conservative Western names, and whats with people always having a secret lovechild somewhere that they remember at their deathbed????? I guess, we will never know. All we know is that at 6PM, it is advisable to stay away from the TV room...I could go on and on, but...

BUT...

BUT...

BUT every rule has an exception, every man has some guilty pleasure or the other... So, the purpose of this post is to admit such an exception when it comes to me and soap operas. There is one soap opera however that I enjoyed immensely in my older childhood years - the 1976 telenovela adaptation of Bernardo Guimarães' book, A Escrava Isaura. It was a big hit in its home country of Brazil and went on to be one of the most dubbed shows to date, having been translated to over 80 languages. This thing had people HOOKED. I mean seriously hooked like bicarbonate soda on crack. It brought Communist China to a HALT every time it was aired. CHINA!!!! The streets were empty in Russia for an hour because of this show. RUSSIA!!! And UK, and Europe and everywhere. Being the sole TV provider,nobody noticed KBC were over a decade late when they started airing it here in the late 90s, but it was gripping stuff all the same. That ish got me defying 9.45PM TV curfews and much later devising how to set the TV sleep settings and VCR recording the show so I could catch up with it on the days me and my brother were discovered huddled barely inches from the TV which was at volume 2 or 3 with the lights off way past our bedtime...

Why did it get whole populations from all cultures so gripped in ways a modern soap opera can only dream of? Firstly, its entire setting was an invaluable historical timepiece in itself. Very little had been said about the slavery situation in Brazil in the 19th Century. Everybody's eyes at the time was concentrated on the North American situation yet even worse forms of slavery and human rights abuses were taking place in the quiet seclusion of the Brazilian Empire. So you can imagine the controversy that surrounded Bernardo Guimarães when he decided to write about a black slave girl's trials and tribulations at the hands of an incredibly evil master and plantation owner in 1875. Suddenly the don't-ask-don't-tell policy was done away with laying bare the situation down South.

The Escrava Isaura story also dealt with universal themes at the basest level. People simply trying to secure their freedom , love without fear, revenge the loss of those loved and basically good triumphing over evil. Anybody around the world can relate to that and aplly it to their daily living experience. The fantasy was not stretched to outrageous extremes but it was enough to make us think of our own lives and where we wanted it to be at. Chinese citizens have always been oppressed by The Party. Small sidelined portions of the Soviet Union were itching for independence from their Russian lords etc etc. Anyone in whatever level could relate to it. The characters looked ordinary enough for their time and the solid cast outdid themselves to portray levels of passion and emotion that glued peeps to their screens.

Being still a kid and not really in touch with these sentiments, what interested me most, however, was the opening theme music and art. I did some digging around and discovered the signature tune that played at the start of every episode is called Retirantes by a classic Brazilian singer-songwriter Dorival Caymmi. The tune basically composed of two verses accompanied by some eerie chant by a group of women. Its like an ethnic slave song, savage sounding but extremely beautiful as well. I guess that is how negro slaves were back in the day. Seen more for their seeming savage look than the beauty they brought in their hearts and minds as they were shipped from Africa to toil for the South American elite just as depicted in the montages/paintings used in the opening credits. The lyrics were also beautifully sad going something along the lines of (pardon my Portuguese*):

Vida de negro ã diffãcil
The life of a nigger's difficult
ã diffãcil como o qua
Difficult from the beginning
...
eu quero morrer de noite
I want to die in the night
na tocaia a me matar
To be killed in an ambush
...
se tu, negra, me deixar
If you, nigger, let me

Here's how the opening credits looked and sounded like:

Another version of the opening credits was also used in other countries. Here is the other much clearer version where you can also appreciate the artwork used although its sung in some strange dialect not Portuguese*:

For those hardcore Escrava enthusiasts like me, Retirantes is available for download HERE along with a newer, smoother, jazzy version done for the 2004 remake of the soap by Rogério Machado. Enjoy...

Otherwise, happy November to errybody...

*The official language in Brazil is Portuguese not Brazilian or Spanish as many would like to think :)

Green Feathers, Blue Candles _ John M.

I've just recovered a good bunch of poetry and random notes from way back in first year of university, some my own and others from my friends... John M. is one of those pals who just doesn't go away and gets forgotten in the sands of time. We tried to write a book together in 1999 and burned out, got together in Uni to do some poetry collabs and it worked out pretty fine. He has the widest and finest taste in books, I ever saw, meaning I hardly have to buy any books (HUYAY!). And he is the guy to see when you want to talk about PROPER rock, world and hip hop music. Enough with the dick riding already, here's a lil something by a brother from the recovered collection...

Double Treat of Conscience & Consciousness

This week, I have been having a very enlightening twit-versation with AkelLove about the state of hip hop in the 21st Century and whether it has completely evolved or still maintains the spirit it at its conception in the late 80s with a special reference to B.E.T's unveiling of a list of who it thought were the Ten Greatest Rappers of the 21st Century thus far.Among the criterion for selecting the rappers in this list, apart from basic MC skills and cultural impact, was how much money the rapper has racked in the past decade and also something they called "digital skills" that is the rappers ability to create enough presence, following and influence on the internet mainly through social networking platforms. These criteria indeed truly reflects the state of hip hop music at the moment. The game is heavily influenced with notions of commercial success with little relevance being placed on how the kind of music produced can help spread positive messages to the lovers of this genre. Large corporations have taken over all the popular record labels and they tend to want to take over even the creative process of the artists they sign. The sadder bit is that the up and coming rapper of the 21st Century is likely to be driven solely by commercial success and basis their content on what society has been engineered to aspire to - cyclic stories of sex, money, drug abuse and senseless fashion habits.

However, the picture is not entirely gloomy. Somewhere in the midst of things, some artists refuse to succumb to the appeal of commercial success and go out on a limb to prove that hip hop (and any other urban music genre at that) can still be a source of unadulterated art and positivity. This anti-establishment wave operates on two fronts - either producing positive, inspiring music as a form of best practice (also known as the passive-aggressive route) or a head to head confrontation with the "commercial" artists and poke on their conscience eventually sending a direct message to the industry as a whole (the pure-aggressive reaction. This post will showcase two different pairs of artists in this group who employ one of the two anti-establishment strategies, be it the passive-aggressive or pure-aggressive means.

The first pair is collectively known as Mattafix, a UK based group that combines hip hop, RnB,reggae, soul, afro and jazz sounds to come up with a unique and definitive sound that is nothing short of amazing.They also strive to inject some positivity and inspiration within this unique sound and succeed tremendously. Case in point is Living Darfur, the lead single to their second album, Rhythm & Hymns released in 2007. It mainly dealt with the deplorable humanitarian condition in the Darfur region of Sudan which has been ravaged by armed conflict for decades. Even with Mattafix's relatively small commercial success at the time, positive message of the single moved the likes of Mick Jagger to fund the shooting of its music video which in itself broke ground by being the first music vid to be shot in a conflict zone. Check the beautiful video below:

BONUS: Just to showcase their unique sound, here's the music video to another big hit of theirs called Big City Life which used to be featured a lot on TRACE TV back in the day

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The second pair, consist of much-celebrated emcees Masta Ace and Edo G also known as A&E, present the best showpiece of the pure-aggressive anti-establishment method of changing the game. Both of these artists have been doing their thing since the early 1990s and have worked with hip hop pioneers such as DJ Premier and Pete Rock and thus have watched the genre deteriorate to the mess that it is today. Understandably, they react with a no-holds barred criticism of contemporary emcees who dilute their talent in their first collabo album Arts & Entertainment. A single from that alb, Little Young,is a criticism of the current trend of rappers having names beginning with 'Lil' or 'Young' and they joke that this could reflect their lack of artistic maturity. The video is something and a half:

A&E's videos also highlight how hip hop is a visual art as well.Their videos tend to aptly illustrate and compliment the message the song is trying to convey to an extent that even if you watch some of their videos on mute, you will still get something. So the BONUS: here's another amazing video to As&Es, another pure-aggressive piece.

As many such artists continue to come up, I remain optimistic that we are moving closer to a Renaissance of Hip Hop, a time when conscience and consciousness will once again manage to rule the music charts.

Walk To Work Sessions [Sep 29 - Oct 8]

*I'm following the footsteps of the Police Force in Stalin's Russia who were given a quota of people to arrest in a given period, so they had to find very CREATIVE WAYS of fulfilling that quota, and they sure as hell made an art form out of it!! So, for example, if you were the first to stop clapping after a high-ranking official's speech at a function, chances were very high that you would be thrown into a Black Maria bound for the Gulag Archipelago that very night. I too am on such a blogging quota. I have managed to arrest a bunch of tweets of mine from the past few days on the trumped up charge of being of blog-able quality. It actually started with this tweet when it hit me that I could come up with some few rhymey lines as I walked to work, just to get there faster. Your Honour, I present to you the damning evidence below*

//September 29

Bubbly like a Lupe freestyle, fingers doing the talkin, organized rhyme from a keypad gangsta...gettin paid like a police roadblock...

September 30

Systole over diastole, piston inside the cylinder, perfect play of BPMs and RPMs, bouncy like Lupe, not getting paid like a pre-nupt...

October 1

Loopy like Lupe, name on the class register, present with apologies, got em tearing up like they in gas canisters reading eulogies. . .

..caught in the act but I'm still gettin paid like police roadblocks, the is no wrong and right the only traffic rule is look left and right

...caught in the sac but I'm still getting laid like golden geese on energizer batteries, going on and on like crash test dummies...

...through walls and black holes am ahead of my time through pals and most foes a hundred bridges I've burned..

A hundred bitches av slapped, reputation av soiled and regulation av foiled, av battled it out now am taking the spoils

October 4

Like Lupe am loose, am on the Hangman's noose, suicide rap as if am repping Arsenal, sure shot crap like arse and all. . .

I dont kiss and tell, I buss and sell, my shot to the highest bidder, you see that is what pedigree is. . .

I get you out of bed like a bad dream, you want me outta your head lile a bad weave so much for your therapist and hair stylist...

Gettin paid like a security guard, imma get a gun too and lets see what you gon do, withdrawal method as i pull out my murder weapon. POW!!

October 6

Looping Lupe loops making the big heads boop, its a mental hula hoop just a little doo-woop after taking half court three point hoops...

Got them LOLing on the cyberspace, got em choking on their Chupa Chups, murder is the case, acquittal is the rest, making VIPs RIP...

We sin without evidence of the same, No recycle bin, we just control and delete them, keep the tabs open if the windows stay closed..

Aint got nine lives but I got nine wives homie, that means 9 times 9 , 81 lives homie,the new danger we choked the chicken, no more Akuku..

Not getting paid like PLO recorded my calls, dollar dreams got me thinking up ponzi schemes and things like those,in the Emperor's new clothes

No longer proud to come late, smelling like New Delhi coz they dont like that no more, the fire gone once they know you no longer hired...

Things no longer how they seem, it look like you poured on your shirt a whole bottle of self esteem, change or wipe it off...

October 7

So i stopped the Lupe loop to acapella for a few, perhaps not acapella for i still hear the tunes and exhaust fumes. . .

..from car and cycle, going round in vicious circles,lives half led, many men lumbering money trees with so much as razor blades..

...many women getting in they hubbies boxers, to guarantee they get something to fill they kiddies lunchtime boxes...

...insurance brokers as sure as broke ass, drop dead gorgeous still cant meet quotas, pre-qualification not yet qualified..

Erase and rewind its still all the same, full with empty and empty with full, too big for public transport, too small for public speaking

So maybe walk to work, and converse in private, never late to tell mum u love her everyday, even though she threw ur comic books away...

October 8

Bringing it back, Lupe chopped and screwed, deja vu on my rearview, almost like JayZ reppin auto tune...

You wont get the point coz i'm overlooked like em decimals, but still overbooked like Hay Festivals, far from motivational, shit violent

Broke the silence, ripped mindsets like temple curtains post crucifixion, new thought process speakin in tongues, cunnilingual..

Losing my religion,thought it was cooler to embrace Buddha, took it to church and to Allah, coz the kid in baby mama was facing Mecca...

Took it to Luther and the X, read the Panthers, prayed with the K, and frat boys cheering from the bleachers as we bleached our faces...

Case closed, lost without traces, but am still at large, scaling fish off teenage girls fresh from braces in V. Secret black laces...

Shout out J. Brown, I'm black I'm proud, look around, no challenge to these bars a nuke radius from this town... //