I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NILÜFER YANYA-“Baby Luv” NPR’S SOUTH X LULLABY (April 6, 2018). 

Sometimes I wonder if I should automatically know a featured artist. So it’s comforting when you find out that an artist is “relatively new” like Nilüfer Yanya.

For our final lullaby recording during South by Southwest 2018, we meet the London-based singer Nilüfer Yanya for her performance in the memory-filled world of Uncommon Objects. It’s a shop in Austin, Texas dedicated to sentimental curiosities of a world gone by. With that in mind, the relatively new musician with a bright future tackles a tune about something old and familiar: fond memories overwhelmed by the pain of love gone wrong.

“Baby Luv” can be found on Nilüfer Yanya’s 2018 release Do You Like Pain?. The EP’s title is a line she repeats multiple times on “Baby Luv,” while her choppy guitar punctuates a weary, clock-like rhythm. That ticking beat is then amplified by the saxophone of her bandmate, Jazzi Bobbi while a camera pans a literary world of books that all seem blood-red. Objects once shiny and proud are worn and somewhat torn, with a future as uncertain as the love in this song.

The song is a simple up and down melody with her startlingly staccato singing style–in which words are somewhat audible but not always clear.  Like the strange, repeated chant of gain again again.

I love that Jazzi Bobbi is visible, but how on first viewing, you gloss over her as she sort of blends in with the curios.  It’s when her sax comes in that you realize she’s there.  In fact it’s her sax that is the most compelling part of this song.  It’s the strangely amorphous notes that seems to burst from nowhere that are more compelling that the repeated guitar.

[READ: April 5, 2018] “The State of Nature”

I enjoyed Bordas’ previous story quite a lot.  I loved how it was structured and the surprising twists it had.

This one was also enjoyable but for different reasons.  It opens with the narrator admitting to us that she had slept through a burglary.  A cop asked if she was unemployed since she was napping on Thursday afternoon.

She tells them that she is an ophthalmologist  with a varied schedule who can sleep through just about anything.

A varied assortment of things were stolen–a rug, some jewelry and an optometrist case.  It was quite old and has sentimental value (she told the cops).  An average person wouldn’t have thought much of it but it could have fetched about $1,200.

When she returned to her apartment her cat, Catapult, seemed to be vocally distressed.  She believes the cat is sad because her favorite napping place is now gone: “You could have summoned some of that bitchiness earlier, when they came to steal your bed.”

I enjoyed this comic interruption:

I wont talk about Catapult too much only when relevant to the story.  In fact maybe I can reveal all of Catapult’s arc right now and be done with it:  Catapult was … pissed because she missed the TV.  The way she comes to that conclusion is amusing.

There’s some details about a patient who wants to get laser surgery so he can hunt better.  And then there’s some information about her mom who wants the narrator to meet Rita.  Rita likes to go to the local flea market, called Thieves Market because there are vendors are known to sell a lot of stolen goods.  Rita helps a lot of people buy back their things.  She doesn’t want money for the work.  She gets great satisfaction from returning things to people.

As they were about finished walking around–not seeing anything–Rita handed her a plastic whistle.  This was weird, but the tie in to the rest of the story is expertly done a little later.

Her mom calls to see how it went.  She tells her mom that they didn’t find anything.  Her mom is okay with that.  She is busy making her go bag.  When the narrator remarks that you need to have it with you all the time since an emergency could happen anywhere.  Her mom says that her fanny pack is her mini go bag.  The fanny pack was given to the narrator twenty years earlier and she never used it.  Her mom, in contrast, leaves it under her sweater at all times.

This story is kind of small in that it doesn’t have Ideas, but there are a lot of wonderful sad small moments. Like when Rita reveals that hunting for stolen goods like this makes her a loser.  Or when she runs into that earlier patient at the Thieves Market and both she and the patient are embarrassed for different reasons.

The final section brings in the fanny pack again, this time in an unaccepted and yet sort of foreshadowed way.

I enjoyed this piece for all of its quirks and for the great writing.

For ease of searching, I include: Nilufer Yanya.