SOUNDTRACK: 47SOUL-Tiny Desk Concert #884 (August 26, 2019).
I had never heard of 47Soul and, surprisingly, the blurb doesn’t give any real background about the band. So I had to turn to Wikipedia.
47Soul is a Jordanian Palestinian electronic music group. The band’s first album, Shamstep, was released in 2015 and they are one of the main forces behind the Shamstep electronic dance music movement in the Middle East.
So what the heck is Shamstep?
Shamstep is based on mijwiz (a levantine folk musical style) and electronic dance. ‘Sham’ refers to the local region of “Bilad al-Sham”, and ‘step’ refers to dubstep. The band’s music is also associated with the traditional dance called Dabke.
So, that’s a lot to take in, especially if you don’t know what half of those words mean.
The blurb does help a little bit more:
Shamstep is the creation of 47SOUL. At its heart is Arab roots music laced with dub, reggae and electronic dance music, including dubstep. It’s positive-force music with freedom, celebration and hope for the people of the Sham region (Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria).
47SOUL play three songs and their instrumentation is pretty fascinating. Three of the guys sing. They also play bass drum (Walaa Sbeit); darbuka– a small hand drum (Tareq Abu Kwaik); guitar (Hamza Arnaout) and synthesizers (Ramzy Suleiman).
So what do they sound like?
Well, the first song “Mo Light” opens with some very synthesized “traditional” Middle Eastern music. It sounds like an electronic version of traditional instrumentation. The guitar comes in with a sound that alternates between heavy metal riffage and reggae stabs. The three singers take turns singing. Walaa Sbeit is up first singing in Arabic. Then there’s a middle section sung by Tareq Abu Kwaik who is playing the darbuka and an electronic drum pad. His voice is a bit rougher (the Arabic is quite guttural). Meanwhile Ramzy Suleiman adds backing vocals and seems to sing loudest in English.
For the next song, Tareq Abu Kwaik does the narration while introducing Walaa Sbeit:
“Is it ok if I do a little dance on your desk?” asked 47SOUL singer and percussionist Walaa Sbeit on first seeing the Tiny Desk. I thought a minute, went under the desk, tightened the bolts, stuck some splints of wood under a few of the uneven legs and (feeling reassured) gave him the nod. It would be our first traditional Middle Eastern Dabke dancing atop the Tiny Desk and the first sounds of Shamstep (a kind of electronic dance music) behind it.
The dancing involves a shocking amount of deep knee bends!
“Don’t Care Where You From” opens with a cool synth rhythm and then sung in English. It’s fun watching Walaa Sbeit walk around with the bass drum slung over his shoulder as he does some dancing while playing. The song is one of inclusion
Well you might be from Philly (?) or Tripoli / from the mountains or from the sea
maybe got the key to the city / don’t mean anything to me.
They don’t care where you’re from, it’s where you are that counts.
47SOUL’s message of equality, heard here at the Tiny Desk (and on the group’s current album, Balfron Promise) is meant for all the world. This is music without borders, mixing old and new, acoustic and electronic from a band formed in Amman Jordan, singing in Arabic and English. It’s one big, positive and poignant party.
It segues into “Jerusalem” with the controversial-sounding lyric: “Jerusalem is a prison of philosophy and religion.” The middle of the song had an Arabic rap which sounds more gangster than any gangster rap. The end of the song is an electronic dance as everybody gets into it–clapping along and banging on drums.
It’s pretty great. I hope they tour around here, I’d love to see them live.
[READ: August 27, 2019] Submarine
I saw this book on the shelf and was attracted by its busy cover. I also thought the authors name sounded familiar. And so it was. I have read some of Dunthorne’s poems in Five Dials magazines.
This was his first novel. And it sounded unusual. The back cover had this excerpt:
I used to write questionnaires for my parents. I wanted to get to know them better. I asked things like:
What hereditary illnesses am I likely to inherit?
What money and land am I likely to inherit?Multiple choice:
If you child was adopted at what aged would you choose to tell him about his real mother?
a) 4-8
B) 9-14
C) 15-18
Dunthorne is from Wales, which made this story a little exotic as well. It is set in Swansea, by the sea (where people surf!)
On the back if the book it says that he published the first chapter online and received wonderful encouragement which is what made him complete the book.
Every chapter is titled an unusual vocabulary word. The first chapter is titled triskadekaphobia. And that’s how we meet the first person narrator, Oliver Tate. He is precocious, dry and a bit unaffected by the world around him. I would dare to say he’s autistic, but maybe it just come across that his internal thoughts are socially inappropriate. But he knows how to behave…more or less.
Oliver seems to look at the world around him in as clinical a way as possible–like a person who loves the dictionary and spends much of his time learning new words instead of trying them out with others.
His mother is a bit worried about him. He realizes this after looking in her Yahoo! search history. But he is more worried about his parents’ marriage.
He is aware that his father is depressed. He knows the signs of his depression is lifting: if he does an elaborate play on words or does an impression of “a gay or Oriental person,” he’s on an upswing. His mother, on the other hand, well, “her mental health problems can be mistaken for character traits: neighborliness, charm and placidity.”
He decides the best way to get them both to open up to him is for him to pretend that he is emotionally stable. So he decides to make an appointment with a “therapist” and tell them about it. The therapist is actually a back specialist, but he decided to make an appointment with a doctors practice that has a therapist in the building for when his parents drove him there. It was good cover. Although he does waste the back doctor’s time. Especially when he realizes that the back doctor is the neighbor whose car alarm goes off at all hours of the night.
So while the doctor is feeling his spine, he tells the doctor, “I was sick on your car. The yellow one. Your car alarm had been going off all night and I wanted to teach you a lesson.”
The doctor is very nice to him and gives him a lumbar pillow.
The second chapter (flagitious) I found quite horrible. Oliver’s friend Chips is a bastard, an asshole, a miserable shit. He is “worldly” and a liar. He is also a bully. And as this chapter ends he (with no resistance from Oliver) teases a fat girl, Zoe, in their class, makes her fall in a pond and destroyer her journal. The next day they learn that she has transferred schools.
This is upsetting to Oliver because he has spent the night writing her a pamphlet called Seven Things Every Successful Teenager Should Know. It is a serious attempt at outreach to the girl with items like “How to Fit in with People You Don’t like Even when you are an Endomorph ,” “Breaking the Victim Cycle,” and “Kids Can Be Cruel.”
Oliver fancies a girl named Jordana. When we first see her, she is burning the eraser on her pencil with the classroom Bunsen burner. She writes in his book, “Hey Oprah. meet me after school by the tennis courts.”
She says she has found his pamphlet for Zoe and she is going to blackmail him. The blackmail consists of meeting her in the park with a camera.
In the next chapter we see that they are aggressively kissing and she is taking pictures. This is all an elaborate plan to humiliate her ex-boyfriend Mark Pritchard. Oliver knows Mark a little and thinks he would probably get along with.
After thinking about Zoe’s diary and how she was humiliated when Chips read it aloud to everyone, he decides to write his own. At first it’s something of a joke, but then he gets serious about it, including things like “all the people I’ve ever kissed (with fascinating details).” But he ends the entry with “This is not a diary.”
He starts hanging around wit her and becomes aware of her eczema. He concludes that it is a rash from her dog, so he decides to get rid of the dog for her. It doesn’t work, although the dog eventually does die in a rather gruesome and detailed way.
Their relationship moves very quickly and he prepares to have his first sexual experience before he turns 16. But he is thoughtful, “I want her first sexual experience to be perfect.” His parents go out and so he makes Jordana dinner. She is a bit put off by all of the attention, but they do consummate the night in rather graphic detail.
Part Two has Oliver finding his father’s antidepressants and realizing that he is in a major down cycle. So he does a lot of really nice things to try to make his father happy,
That’s when he learns that an old friend of his mother, Graham, is moving away to Port Eynon and wants to have lunch with her. Oliver is appalled by his father’s disinterest in what is clearly a man moving in on his wife. Dad makes some snarky comments about Graham, “Don’t tell me he’s actually got a job.” And Oliver makes it his mission to follow his mother and see if he can break up this tryst with Graham.
Meanwhile Jordana tells him that her mother has cancer. He is disappointed to see that she had changed in two ways: she’s more sympathetic and she values her own life more. This is disappointing to him.
Knowing this, he decides that he will back away from her and give her space while her mum is ailing (exactly what she doesn’t want) and use his time to focus on Graham. Graham volunteers at a meditation retreat in Powys and has invited Oliver’s mom up there for a week. Oliver’s dad has no problem with that and Oliver is distraught. So he plans to go up there and disrupt this obvious orgy. There’s a whole sequence where he is camping on the grounds and accidentally meets Graham that is quite funny,
This observation from Oliver is also pretty great.
Monks do not believe in locked doors. Nor do they believe in possessions. The two may be linked.
He is concerned that his mother is having sex with Graham and he decides to go on tampon watch. There are currently 8 in the box.
After a week of silence, he meets Jordana again. She is angry with him. She doesn’t want to see him, but he acts oblivious and like nothing is wrong.
He invites Jordana to the beach for an overnight. The reason? His mother is surfing there with Graham. He figures he can save his parent’s relationship and strengthen his own. But Jordana is done with him and spends no time with him at all. And worse yet, he sees that Graham and his mum are sharing a tent.
As the realization of his failures hits him, he seeks revenge on Graham. The revenge is pretty good. Although he is caught quite drunk.
The final Part sees Oliver reuniting with Zoe. He was curious about her and found out that she was working at the local theater. He sat through a long performance about Nazis and at the end of the show he waited around to see her and to see how she was doing.
But when he sees her, she is no longer fat. She is thin and quite attractive. When she sees Oliver, she remembers him immediately and says he must come back to the matinee tomorrow so they can talk. Zoe has a lot more than talking on her mind and Oliver has to convince himself that it would be okay to fool around with this girl he once was disgusted by.
The ending is a bit unsatisfying but I guess such is the way of bildungsroman. At least Oliver is an interesting and fascinating (if at times unlikable) character and that makes this story enjoyable.
It was only after logging this book into Goodreads, that I realized that I had actually seen the movie that this book was based on: Submarine directed by Richard Ayoade
What I enjoyed most about the book was Oliver’s observations:
- [On pocket-sized Encyclopaedias] “It would only fit in a pocket that was specially designed.”
- [On condoms] “The smell nothing like a positive first sexual experience.”
- Every human eats six spiders a year while asleep.
- Car journeys are the frowning parentheses at the start and end of any good holiday.
- “I like the way beetroot turns your wee pinkish red; I like to pretend that I have internal bleeding.”
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