Where did the music go?

I remember the days when being in the car for a short drive meant listening to music so good I sung out my lungs on the drive. That was such a long time ago, because gradually the state of the music changed. While the beats made me want to move my feet and dance, my brain refused to communicate to my mouth to sing along to the lyrics because singing along meant I agreed with these lyrics, some of which were down right degrading and most often misogynistic.

Initially lyrics that were foul were often sung by male artists, but over time, female artists wanted a share of the foul lyric pie. Oddly enough though, they have managed to compete with their male counterparts and are holding their end in that regard. On a recent trip to Jamaica, as our tour guide drove us from Negril to Savannah La-Mar, we chatted about the latest songs on Jamaican airwaves and I was able to sample some. While I enjoyed the male artists, I wanted to hear what the females had to sing. Cue in Lady Saw one of the hottest females on the Jamaican pop scene. I could only stomach all of ten seconds as every other lyric heralded the virtues of her lady parts.

On my return back to the states, I was met with the same familiar misogynistic lyrics. But this time, the buzz was about a certain singer who might have performed at the inauguration of the President. The lyrics were an anthem asking female detractors to pay homage. If only the lyrics asked for a curtsey it would have been somewhat palatable, but then the lyrics and the name of the song were a cruel reference to detractors who were referred to as bitches and asked to bow down. The defense has been that the song is a part of a much bigger production. However, why release a degrading sound bite for sensationalism sake? Isn't there enough negativity on the air waves already.

It seems as though one female singer asking bitches to bow wasn't enough because soon enough the males had to seize the crown and show who was boss in the art of denigration. Enter in Rick Ross, singing the praises of date rape, followed by a half-baked apology after pressure from women's groups mounted. Since when do we glorify rape and make a mockery of sexual assault and violence against women? Maybe since the Constitutional Convention and the passing of a certain amendment protecting artistic freedom. Just maybe.

My commute is totally different now. Gone are the days of listening to music in the car. Sure, there are good songs on the airwaves but I'd rather listen to the news these days. The good songs are few and far between. Oftentimes on radio stations, the order is one really decent song and then a lineup of trash. My salvation comes in switching to an oldies station where I can be guaranteed that Earth, Wind and Fire will not be glorifying rape or Gladys Knight singing unashamedly about the powers of her lady parts.

Makes me wonder what the next generation will listen to. The airwaves are full of trash these days, but there's still hope. Try Adele, Bruno Mars, Pink, or maybe Amy Winehouse sometimes. While these artists may have some lyrics that are not all the way Kosher all the time, they are true artists with undeniable vocal talent something most other misogynists do not have or ever will.

Four More Years of the Obamas

President Obama took the oath of office for the fourth time before a crowd significantly smaller than that at the first inauguration in 2009. The theme of his speech it seemed was equality for all Americans. By far, the most poignant moment of all was Obama stopping as he departed the platform to take one last look at the crowd saying "I'm going to take a look one more time...I'll never see this again." Very evocative words.

Catfish, 787s, Armstrong, or Happy New Year!

What a week it's been! The "witch hunt" that began years ago with allegations of doping ended with Lance Armstrong confessing about his use of performance enhancing substances in several of his cycling competitions in a sit down interview with Mama Oprah herself. So, maybe it wasn't a witch hunt after all. Former cable television executive turned former mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin was indicted on 21 counts of bribery, Boeing 787s were grounded across the globe for faulty lithium batteries that were potential fire hazards, several foreigners were taken hostage in Algeria owing to the intervention of the French in the crisis in northern Mali, Ben Affleck won the Gold Globe Award for Best Director for his movie "Argo" despite being snubbed by the Academy, Ann Landers the advice columnist for "Dear Abby" passed away, I began the first week of my last semester in law school, I returned back to my clerkship at Halliburton, and finally Manti Te'o and Catfish were reintroduced as household names in a sick and bewildering twist. If this week is any indication of what lies ahead in the month of January or if it forebodes the rest of the year, then it will be an interesting and adventure filled year.

For those reading this, making it into the new year was a feat in itself, a defiance of the Mayan prediction of the end of the world. But getting past the Mayans, 2012 was an interesting year for me for many reasons. It was a sort of coming of age and one of those years where I can say I had so many experiences that shaped and are still shaping me into the woman that I am becoming. 2012 was a year filled with so many experiences, unanswered questions, bumpy rides and hot air balloon highs.

Approaching the new year, I had to change my resolve, look through a different lens. I did not make resolutions, I have not made resolutions in years, rather I set goals. I covered a page with about 39 of those and my list is still growing. I made some lofty goals and I plan to check periodically to see how I'm doing, see if those goals needs to be adjusted and of course I have my red pen handy to cross off goals once they are accomplished. As with years in the past, I always pick out a scripture as a guide for the year, and as 2012 drew to a close, I kept on running into the Proverbs 17:22, "a merry heart doeth good like medicine." It is a scripture I plan to keep close as a reminder to be merry, joyful, and cheerful all year long. King Solomon may not have made good choices with his lifestyle, but the proverbs he was inspired to write still hold true today if adhered to.

So, I am excited about the new year and although my post might seem a little late, there couldn't be a better time than today to publish it. It has not only been an eventful week, but the weekend and the week ahead will be even more climatic with the second inauguration of President Barack Obama following on the heels of Martin Luther King Jr. day. While the new slogan for the Obama campaign and administration may be "forward," the name Obama and the four letter word "hope" will always be synonymous. Today driving to work, I listened two clergy men speak about hope on NPR and I ended my day reading a poem by Emily Dickinson, titled, "Hope is the thing with feathers." While I don't have the poem memorized yet, I feel as though I could add my own words and give the word hope meaning just drawing from the imagery and symbolism of feathers.

But importantly, today, my brother sent me a forwarded email about change, moving on, and leaving. He and I always have the deepest and most enriching conversations, so it's no surprise the profundity of the email's content. The letter, the reflections of an artist struck such a strong chord with me. I read it parked in my car and then read it again curled up in bed. Certainly, there are changes I need to make because anything that doesn't grow dies and sometimes we just have to leave certain things to make room for the future and what it holds. While the letter was rather lengthy, I have included some excerpts from it below and hope it speaks to someone reading it as it did me.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest things I can liken life to is as book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

Here is something I found to be true: you don't start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

Photo credit, Steve Martin by Norman Seeff, 1978.

#Forward

They said he couldn't run a campaign on a slogan as flimsy as "hope." They said the only change we needed was change that would come when he exited the White House. They riduculed him and said all sorts of vile things about him. They mocked his wife and her physique. Her arms were brawny and needed to be hidden, her posterior was too big and thus she was unhealthy. Thankfully, they left his children out of the charade. They mocked his policies and derided his logic. But tonight, after a long drawn out battle, President Barack Hussein Obama, the incumbent won the presidential election and next year will be named the President of the United States for the second time. Hope. Change. Yes we can. Obama2012.

Growing Up, Moving On

I mused over the title for this blog post in February. Actually it was sometime in the fall of last year that I got the idea to write a post about how life had changed and was changing. 

At the close of last year, I was half way done with law school. By the end of this year, I will be a semester away from getting my law degree. It’s almost coincidental that I wanted to write this post last fall because today is the first day of fall, which happens to be my favorite of all the seasons. Since last fall, life has changed in many ways I could never have imagined.

My little sister Walrus, left for college last fall and today happens to be her 19^th birthday. My sister got married and had a baby, thus I became an aunt for the second time and also godmother to my niece. My sisters both graduated from business school, and my brother moved to Chicago, after years of telling us he was moving. He applied for a job and his dream of living in Chicago and landing a dream job came to pass. But before my sisters graduated from business school and before I became a godmother and before my brother moved to Chicago, my cousin passed away on January 30^th.

I still remember sitting on my couch when I got the phone call. I had so many questions and at the time there were very few answers. She died during childbirth. The baby died as well. Death is one thing that is common to all, for we all must some day die. It’s inevitable. At the end of the day, death is the great equalizer. However, when someone so young dies, especially in circumstances when the outcome could have been different the loss is hard to bear. I think about my cousin every day.  She was the closest cousin when I was growing up. We spent long, hot summers together. Talking about cute boys, gossiping about nosy neighbors and church folk. I remember being huddled in the room on Sunday afternoons listening to the radio and having a good time as our Sunday lunch digested slowly.

My cousin’s passing made me understand death in the most elementary way. Death meant my cousin was never, ever, ever coming back. I had to take on the mind of a five year old to really understand. “Look Harriet, I told myself, she’s never coming back. Not ever.” Her time on the earth was spent, it was done, it was over. Over. I hate to belabor the point but I had to talk to my inner five year old because I had to understand this painful experience in the simplest way possible. Death means the person is never coming back.

The experience made me more aware of life and I had so many emotions at the time. I was afraid, I was angry, and most of all I was very sad. I was sad I would never see her again on earth, but mostly I felt so bad for my aunt. I knew she’d be severely crushed because that was her oldest child, her best friend. I was angry because childbirth should not be a death sentence. But in a country rife with inequalities and inadequate healthcare facilities, childbirth is faced with trepidation. Unfortunately, Nigeria still proudly ranks high among countries with the highest maternal mortality rates and not much is being done to remedy the problem.

There’s a lot of guilt that comes with loss. The guilt that comes as a result of being powerless to help and the guilt that comes from forging ahead and leaving the dead in their resting place. My cousin was dead and I had my life to live. And I did live. The summer that followed was filled with a lot of great moments. The birth of my niece, endless fun in Atlanta; the Jazz Festival, the Red Bull Soap Box race, traipsing around museums, graduations, parties and travel. The summer brought trips to Charleston, Philadelphia {for July fourth that was surprisingly packaged with an impromptu concert by Common, Queen Latifah, Jazzy Jeff and Lauryn Hill. The best part about the concert was that it came with no price tag and Ms. Hill was on her meds. She did a full set, she was properly adorned and she sang her heart out}, the Jersey Shore, and Washington D.C. I went on two solo road trips totaling over eighteen hours and I bought my first pair of tennis shoes since my sophomore year of college. In the end, I had to live for it was my only option.

But growing up meant that I was becoming an adult. Several times over the summer I thought about those times when as a child I talked about growing up with friends and siblings and here I was, a grown up. Then, being an adult meant not having to follow the rules, staying up late into the night watching the television. One thing we were not told was that being an adult was hard. It was not all fun and games all the time and there was no school that taught you to be an adult. Nonetheless, I learned quickly that adulthood meant a lot of responsibility and many challenges. And finally I realized that challenges are the birthplace of opportunity.

Opportunity can be given and sometimes with some ingenuity and a lot of struggle it can be created. Lately, I have become a fan of the latter. Adulthood has taught me that some times doors close more than they open up and when those doors are open, there are many adults waiting to walk through them. But when I make my own door, it only follows that naturally I should have first dibs at walking through them. This truth is not revelatory in any sense, it seems like common knowledge but sometimes what is common is not always readily known. Thus in this regards, I have my amazingly insightful and very wise boyfriend to thank. For always telling me to stop waiting on doors to open and to go about building doors. After all, isn’t that what adulthood is all about? Or rather shouldn’t that be the point of growing up? For in building my own doors I make opportunities for others with hopes that one day, they too will build their own doors if I choose to close mine.

This Aha Moment of sorts was given wings just yesterday as I sat as part of the audience at an independent TED talk at my school. The theme was “re:Think.” Simple, yet profound. As speaker after speaker took the stage, they challenged the audience to rethink concepts and ideologies they had. Rethink home, rethink community, rethink design, rethink______________. Maybe even rethink opportunity. Importantly, rethink God and let him out of the box and who knows what might be. Adulthood sure is hard, but then it provides for a fresh start to rethink and recreate concepts foreign to the mind of a child and truly build a world that is indeed ours.

My Reading List

Books are a huge part of my life. At any given point, I usually have my head buried in the pages of a book or two. I have been stuck in the pages of several books for a while, not quite finishing any. I read as much as I do because reading makes me a better writer. However, I have not been an engaged reader for a while. Life happens. Thus, I have not written in a long time. I plan to return to reading more actively and to finish all books I have both in my closet and on my Kindle. So here goes a list of books I have been reading lately;
1. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Jeffrey D. Sachs
2. Zen and the Art of Happiness, Chris Prentiss
3. Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home, Kim Sunée
4. The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, Gary Chapman
5. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
6. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
7. Open City: A Novel, Teju Cole
8. Something Blue, Emily Griffin

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you;
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired of waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies
Or being hated don't give way to hating
And yet don't look too good, or talk too wise;

If you can dream and not make dreams your master;
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after you are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor living friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distant run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And which is more, you'll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling