Holela!

A moody hip-hop/urban/afrojazz/neosoul/afrosoul compilation, with notable appearances from: Kenyan duo Kwame and Nyach delivering a haunting HIV/AIDS awareness message in their song 'Holela' (watch the delightful music video HERE), Kenyan piano maestro Aaron "Crucial Keys" Rimbui off his album Keys of Life (available HERE) AND Ukoo Fulani Mau Mau and Dead Prez coming together for the very classic and patriotic 'Red Black and Green' reppin' for Kenyan talent.

Drake and Jojo also go head to head with their versions of the very popular 'Marvin's Room'.

If it touches you, you can download this bunch HERE.

Holy Shit!

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy!
everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!*

Stuck in traffic heading towards the city centre, a driver and 13 others. Ignoring the pungent smell of yesterday’s and Lord Knows How Far Long Ago’s sweat still stuck beneath someone’s pits – silent declarations of how they would gladly donate their bathrooms to rid the culprit of his or her own biological possessions that he or she dares to carry around like that without shame. Rejecting similar charitable offers from the passenger next to them, palm stretched out to reveal extra candies. Pretending to ignore the endless sex rants on morning radio shows comprising a supposedly homosexual man moderating many married women - only the corners of their lips gleefully responding and involuntarily stimulated. Some boys in the back, some girls in the front. Boys talking about the girls’ backs and fronts, debating on which they could fuck, which they couldn’t fuck even with a ten foot dildo and which they could fuck if they agreed to put a napkin-face on. Girls scouring through every brick on the boys’ facebook walls and the boys’ friends and their friends’ friends, cross-referencing the dirt on the walls to the corresponding cleanliness of the respective inboxes. A first-time mother nervously breastfeeding her baby, tempted to reprimand this adolescent next to her who is struggling not to stare and failing miserably. A phone departing from its owner’s pockets into the foreign hands of a frail old man and immediately starts to ring. The old man’s fingers frantically fidgeting with the keypad in order to conceal the act of theft. A loud explosion raptures deep in the lobby of a nearby building letting forth a gush of fire, smoke and shrapnel. Shouts of “Holy Shit!” heard as if from far through stunned eardrums. Faces spewing forth blood, mental states upturned by shock. Every pair of eyes looking around desperately for any source of comfort and re-assurance, hands reaching out to one another as if their owners are teetering on the edge of a bottomless pit. Who said strangers cannot be friends?

The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!...
holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!...
Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace & junk &
drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the
cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious
rivers of tears under the streets!*

The bombing changed her life, took away the things she always had and gave her things she never thought she’d have. Physiotherapy couldn’t save those long, endless legs that had graced several catwalks of fashion capitals. Limp, they were. Limp as a stray dog that had just received a proper beating from a drunkard on the street annoyed that it had barked at him as if his wife doesn’t bark at him enough at home. The face that would be the first option for anyone who intended to successfully launch and ad for this cream or that gloss could now only be fit as an iconic image of a long drawn battle – battered, scarred and strapped to an inhuman metallic mask like Iraq, like Eastern Congo, like Afghanistan, like Wagalla, like Syria… The bombing had given her a war with the part of herself that still wanted to live, and she sure fought it. Friends, family and lovers were first relegated to mere spectators by her bedside but gradually reduced their visits since they could not take her awful screams of “I can see it in your eyes, you can’t fool me!!!” any more. True, their eyes were full of unuttered “Holy Shit!” gasps and the pitiful stare of one eager to perform an act on coupe de grace towards this pathetic, suffering soul. The solitude seemed to calm her down… brought life back to her fingers not to hold the eye pencil but to hold the fountain pen. She wrote on newsprint paper and enjoyed how words emerged bloated. It amazed her how musical she was, how words seemed to flow from that left hand like the blood that flowed underneath. It amazed her, when she wheeled herself outside to the porch, how the sky would cloud up and let loose showers when she had dark thoughts and shed tears of rage and misdirected pity. It amazed her how the sun would emerge from the clouds when something made her smile… It amazed her, this new universe she had never seen before. A universe of pomp and circumstance. Later that night, several motorists hardly noticed as they ran over some poor soul's body not so far away from her hospital window.

Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in
space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth
International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the
soul!*

*Excerpts from ‘Footnote to Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg, 1955.

B/Cf

"Reckoner/You can't take it with you...You are not to blame..." _ Radiohead, 'Reckoner'

I hate accounting, perhaps because I hate accountability. I hate accountability because I hear it being mentioned in the very same places where it seems to have failed. We (am sure there are quite a BUNCH of us) are not the type to sit down, balance books and announce pre-tax profits or worthy successful tenders. We are not the type to follow up if the foreign aid we were given to buy some child at Olympic Primary School a few pencils actually got to a stationery shop or someone else's Barclays Ultimate bank account. No, that's so bila style. We go the barber, get us a conman’s haircut, pass by Westgate for a pair of stunners and call a press conference… call a press conference to twist mouths and tell long twisted tales like a bowl of spaghetti(and a cow’s balls stuffed somewhere in there, yes, the things we have eaten, nay, chewed). Alternatively, we wait for the press conference to abruptly catch up with us then we pull a stupid face and ask, "4.2 billion? What 4.2 billion?"

I hate accounting because accountants are people who mostly sit they collective asses down from 9 to 5, managing OTHER people’s money, OTHER people’s valuables, OTHER people’s property, OTHER people’s inheritance. . . I believe the only advantage these people have is that those charlatans who invented religion are still trying to figure out their role in Danté’s Divine Comedies (eg. all lawyers are going to the deepest chamber of Hell etc. etc.)… The IRS need them, America's Real Housewives need them to keep tabs of their bitch fits and monthly periods or whatever, Kim K needs them for her next sextape, heck we all need them but its miserable still. And in the end, they are the ones who shoulder most of the blame when fuck-ups become colossal. Not to say that they are never behind most of these fuck-ups, they usually are. Its just that people like us are too bored to detect the aroma of books being cooked and millions of shillings being flambéd into meals destined for non-meriting dinner tables.

Anyway, anyway… So here I am again at the start of yet another financial year, conman’s haircut – check, twisted mouth Kiraitu style – check, stunners – check, an assistant expert who unfortunately is as dumb as myself, Prof. Ole Kiyapi, please stand up usalimie wananchi – check. Here I am once again to tell y’all how I utilized the funds in my memory banks and other banks that we can only mention in the middle of a Family Law lecture á la Paton v. Paton.

It has been a strangely numb enterprise this past year. I sat down with my shrink the other day, and she was repeatedly asking me in a hundred different ways how I felt (that’s what they are paid to do anyway), And I kept repeating in a hundred different ways that I didn’t feel anything at all. Felt nothing at all because all there was to feel had been felt in advance, speculated in the stock market and trampled upon by a bull run. Speculation out of no fault of mine own but through a series of unfortunate happenings. But there it is, there it is… Balance carried forward… futuring the past, perhaps. I don’t know.

This state of mind makes The Now irrelevant because it already happened in another alternate reality, and I tend to smile when I do not stop myself from doing what I'd already done in that alternate reality and terribly failed. I like it when I ignore my Quantitative Skills II classes and watch my assets crush and burn because I hate accounting and there is no way the world will make me one. Cut off that pound of flesh dear Shylock… will make a good scene for an episode of Nip/Tuck won’t it? That is the cost of letting me manage certain valuables, property and inheritance. Dead whistle blowers (or those who have been in hiding for so long that they emerge to get married at 40), the wrath of chain-and-padlock wielding activists, hate tweets and numerous twitter unfollows not forgetting billions of foreign aid lost and basically scandal upon scandal upon scandal...

I am not a good example…

I am not a good person…

At least I am not an accountant…

Space Bound Sounds

Just a touch and go set, the dubstep section and most of the rest of it is a bit hurried, as if space bound (150BPM), hence the name...

Download HERE

Birthday Mashup: P. Unit vs. Tallywood String Quartet

Since its my birthday and all, I was thinking maybe I should gift YOU a lil something something just to push the Sunday along. Here's a couple of mashups based on P. Unit's probably most well known song, Kare. I managed to tag along the Tallywood String Quartet to give Kare a fresh, classical feel with tracks from their Linkin Park Tribute album. This is the kind of picture that formed in my head in the process:

Anyway here are the tracks for your enjoyment. Feel free to download them if they touch you and perhaps feedback on which version is better? Cheers. Oh, and one last thing,did I mention today's my birthday? :)

1. In The KArEnd



2. Kare Me Away

Rolling Credits

Whoever said real life is not a movie is a pathetic liar and should probably be burned at the stake and fed to those domesticated hyenas I saw on TV. All we know is that we are supposed to act out this motion picture called Life. There’s no script, but we refuse to believe that, there must be a script, there must be a goddamned script – there must be some form of order. Then others go passing around scripts – different scripts each with its own storylines and roles. Sometimes you are the main character, sometimes you’re supporting, sometimes you’re one of the extras that only gets to pass by the camera to create the buzzing city aura for example. And they all insist that theirs is the right script, then it gets all confusing…

It gets all confusing when we need self help books and empty shell template novels and TV shows to boot us back into working order and yet we are the ones who turned the switch off. It gets confusing under a heap of lies dumped in an entire land-fill of truth. It gets confusing because all the metaphors and similes we used at once to describe a man in insha and composition at school results in somebody who hardly looks human at all. It gets confusing when all the polytechnics are becoming universities because we all have to get nothing but good decent desk jobs. It gets confusing when all the desks and chairs we plan to sit on will hardly last a month before being replaced because the carpenter who made them wasn’t lucky enough to go to a polytechnic to hone his craft. It gets confusing when we still wonder why walls aren’t well painted, the jua kali engineers can’t really fix our cars, when four-storied buildings crash and tumble to the ground. It gets confusing when we say we are going to grow our economy by 10% in a few years. It gets confusing when we try replicating a Big Brother situation and then when people fuck in there we all get disgusted as if we don’t do the same then go to church on Sunday and pray to an omnipresent God. It gets confusing when it is wrong to have something on and also wrong to have something off be it a stud on your ear or no pants at a concert. It gets confusing when you make your home the leeward side of a glass mountain and not expect your grass to be less green. It gets confusing when you will probably get hated for doing the right thing. It gets confusing when people talk about being used in situations where you cannot get used without using another party. It gets confusing when the things that matter the most will probably try to kill you. It gets confusing when each and every one of us cannot get by without being addicted to something. It gets confusing because you can see what somebody else is addicted to and you can’t figure out what you are addicted to. It gets confusing when we are not told to judge both the book and the cover. It gets confusing where the genesis of terrible, heart rending things can be traced down to a random act of kindness not very far away. It gets confusing because it’s the homosexuals and not the “feminists” that are staying in the closet. It gets confusing when more and more insane people seem to make more sense than the rest of us do. It gets confusing realising there are less and less children above the age of 13 these days. It gets confusing as when they sterilize the lethal injections for death sentences as if the sentencee will take a HIV test after his death. It gets confusing when they forbid us from trying to commit suicide and then they pressure us to kill ourselves slower through cigarettes, drugs, alcohol and shopping. It gets confusing because I think we also deserve to make a nuclear bomb too if we please. It gets confusing when the best time of the day is late at night when everyone and everything has shut the fuck up and you can at least hear yourself think.

But then again, why is it confusing? Life is a blockbuster movie after all…there is no way anyone can buy a ticket to go watch a film where everything makes sense, where there is no suspense, where the characters are not riveting. The dialogue, the CGI, the screenplay, basically everything must be perfect to keep the audience laughing and crying throughout. Everyone wants to watch that great film that made you relate to it, bring certain memories back, bite your nails and tightly grip the edges of your seat because the dialogue is riveting and you have no clue what turn it will take. Everyone from watching a good film is usually deeply moved in some way or the other. So, maybe it isn’t confusing at all. Maybe it’s just one of those really really good movies that everyone has to see before they die…

Today was a good day shooting Life: according to WP. A dog died and is now blissfully rotting on the route I have to take going home. The same route with a tree full of a hundred or so birds trying their best to shit on all who pass below...

Catharsis

"Like a poem poorly written/We are verses out of rhythm/Couplets out of rhyme/In syncopated time/Lost in the dangling conversation/And the superficial sighs/Are the borders of our lives." _ Simon & Garfunkel, 'The Dangling Conversation'

If to you it is like
A lavish feast after days of nothing but dew and sun
Walking feebly through vast deserts and barren wildernesses
Wait for the rest to serve, serve and serve till there's none
To scoop the last dessert and even try to munch your sudden kindness

If to you it is like
A warm furry coat during the most chilling of winters
That made heads turn when you wore it for promenades around town
Tear, rip, cut it piece for piece and add it to the fireplace embers
Swallow the lead buttons, so now you wear it inside where it cannot burn

If to you it is like
The lifeless body of a loved one previously lost at sea
That had gone so long, all you could was place an epitaph atop solid earth
Wrap all that flesh, bone with stick and heavy stone, then toss back to sea
Uproot the epitaph, make room for a back yard, garden or a secret foot path

If you have to cry
Look for a fountain
And face it...

Super Bass

A lil something something for the holiday...just a feel-good set including tracks from Owiny Sigoma Band, Fela Kuti, Just A Band, the late Gil Scott-Heron (with a little assistance from Jamie xx) etc etc. you can download the set HERE if it touches you:

Happy Madaraka Day, everyone...

Super Bass by Willpress on Mixcloud