The Three: June 2022 Edition

This month, I shared a couple of albums I've enjoyed recently, and a little something on women, humor and online spaces.

It feels so good to be writing another newsletter edition! I’m not quite free of my academic commitments; my MA thesis is nearly (very very nearly!) done, and I’m cheating on my one remaining paper besides my thesis to write this. Why? because this is more fun — just don’t tell the person I’m writing the final paper with that I said that :)

Previous editions of The Three here and here.

Obongjayar, the Explorer

A marked departure from his Sweetness EP with the amazing Nigerian producer Sarz, what Obonjayar offers this time with Some Nights I Dream of Doors is a colorful watercolor painting of a record. Here, moody blues bleed into dreamy pink and whites; and beyond the verdant thicket of emotion, a picture as coherent as a river. The songs are by turns reflective and nostalgic, despairing and vulnerable, defiant and confident. It’s almost cinematic, the way the music in Try rises and falls, moving with the same dynamism as his voice. Parasite especially reminds me a bit of Solange’s Don’t Touch My Hair, in the way the defiance of it contrasts so well against its delivery. My favorite on the album is Wrong for It, where you get the sense that when he tells you that “you’re a dreamer, with eyes as wide as the ocean” and gently urges that you to “stop trying to please everyone else”, he’s singing as much to you as he is to himself. Another favorite I Wish It Was Me showcases the thing I love best about this record; its bravery in the face of complex emotions, and it’s desire to mine its depths without moralising. It’s refreshing to see such vulnerability, moodiness and gentleness alongside the swagger of songs like Sugar and Tinko Tinko; it’s the kind of range I want to see more Nigerian artists explore fully.

So much of Nigerian music mirrors our desire for escape; whether it’s escape through migration, through alcohol, through making more money, through crazy parties where we can pretend that there’s no shitty government ,and no SARS, and no black tax, and no electricity. But there’s so much to be said for music that also explores what it means to be a human being amidst it all. The humanity of Doors is its quiet power, the kind that makes it at once personal and universal. 

Victony Thanks God for Life

Victony survived a car accident and seems to have emerged from that experience with a renewed appreciation of all things worldly. For that reason and that reason alone, the man can sing lines like “all power belongs to your bumbum” and “my salvation dey for your body” as much as he likes. Between this and the invocation of “Holy Father” in his breakout single last year, only to rhyme it with how his Lady Gaga’s “got me in my feelings”, the man is fully snatched from the grasp of the ethereal and firmly planted in this world, standing with a full pocket amidst all its treasures. He’s more than earned the right to enjoy all the wondrous things of life, including bumbum.

This EP is a vibe and a half, a perfect blend of r’n’b and amapiano influences. It’s actually wild how much amapiano has influenced our sound, and has become the “what’s that?” element in a lot of the hits dominating our music today. Victony’s a lot of fun, and this Outlaw EP has been such a pleasure to burrow into. This is afrobeats at its carefree, lustful finest.

Aside: I would absolutely LOVE to read a South African’s take on the use of amapiano rhythms beyond the country’s borders. Meanwhile, check out The Native’s big piece on the rise of amapiano from 2021, and this one also from Native on why Nigeria shouldn’t be looking to own amapiano as a genre.

Another aside: It’s crazy how Niniola was one of the forerunners of South African-influenced sound in Nigerian music and is now nowhere to be found when the genre is really taking flight in the country. While it is true that “first to report no be first to win case”, one gets the sense that somewhere between Niniola’s song selection or overall management, there’s something majorly missing.

Funny Women Online

One of favorite things about the internet is being able to see women as we see ourselves, which is to say: sometimes sexy and beautiful, yes, but also something else. Like quirky. Or silly. Or eyeroll-inducing. Or vulnerable. Or funny. 

Y’know, just full human beings.

The notion of women not being funny has always been a thing. The late Christopher Hitchens famously wrote in Vanity Fair in 2007 (twice!) that women just aren’t funny largely because we don’t have to be; and the same publication did a riposte “Who Says Women’s Can’t Be Funny?” the following year. Men, Hitchens’ logic goes, need to be funny because, hey, men are trying to get babes and need as many aces as they can get in that Indiana Jones-like treasure search. None of this logic is original by any means; lots of dudes — famous and less so — have said that women aren’t funny.

Women, however, have always known other women that were downright hilarious. Besides, where women finding men being extra-specially hilarious is concerned, there’s no man on earth as funny as the man you’re trying to get in…

No, let’s not digress. Where was I?

Oh, right. What I think is interesting about this particular cultural moment with social media’s rise, is that women are having intra-community conversations out loud, in digital public spaces. People are different when they feel at “home” in certain company, and that allows you to see them more like how they see themselves. I think that women, having created online spaces where they can share their own perspectives on things in a way that gets affirmed by other women, allows them to be the full kaleidoscope of humanity that they are when their audience is other women. There is no need to only play up only desirability to a female audience. This, as opposed to the carefully curated self designed more for desirability they may serve up when engaging with men.

This means that women finding spaces to be themselves online would inevitably see them finding spaces to be many things, and tell stories that are multidimensional. Including being hilarious as hell. It’s all the more interesting to juxtapose the thriving use of humor by women — and minorities as a general matter — in IG and TikTok skits at a time where we’re told that jokes are too scary to make now that everybody get’s offended so easily.

To be clear, we have always had funny women in entertainment spaces, even before social media was a thing. Ellen Degeneres and Tina Fey did not come to us through social media, after all, but there were so few women breaking through the ranks precisely because the rise of women in comedy spaces was mediated by men. And if a lot of guys simply don’t think women are funny, what you’ll end up seeing in a space that needs acceptance from men is the few exceptions to the rule that a lot of these guys arbitrarily make.

Anyway, the reason I’m thinking about women, humor, and online spaces is because I've been thinking a lot about Issa Rae and Quinta Brunson, specifically the role of social media in their rise. Issa Rae’s “Insecure” wrapped after five great seasons, and the only TV show I’ve managed to finish while I’m doing this damn Masters is Quinta Bronson’s "Abbot Elementary.” Both of these women rose to prominence first by growing their audiences online, then leveraging their online success into creating content for major television networks. That, though, is where the similarity between both of these women end.

“Abbot” is a mockumentary-style sitcom following a rookie second grade teacher in a fictional public school in Philadelphia called Abbot Elementary, and focuses on the group of teachers and hilariously incompetent principal who work there. It shows both the travails of being a teacher while trying to grow and find one’s place in the world with so much heart and humor. It’s as wholesome and hilarious a show as you would ever watch, with such great chemistry between the characters. The show has a mostly-black cast, as well as a young female lead whose main story isn’t entirely about her love life but her larger personal growth. It is the kind of show that one gets a sense that we would never have gotten without social media giving us an opportunity to show that there is an appetite for something different. Social media is far from an uncomplicated force of good in the world, and it is often quite a difficult place to be a woman or minority, but there is also this. And I’m very grateful for this.

Aside: I’m not a Charlemagne fan (like, at all), but I enjoyed this interview with Quinta Brunson where they both talked about being raised Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Another aside: While we’re on the topic of humor and women, I’m really digging SimplySayo’s playful, funny “poems” on her IG. This one’s one of my favorites.

Until next time.