SOUNDTRACK: JERU THE DAMAJA-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #16 (April 30, 2020).
I’ve always liked Jeru the Damaja’s name; I find it very satisfying. It’s amusing to me that with a name like that he raps about positive things.
He used the concert to share his inspiring philosophy of self-knowledge. Jeru drops lyrics about what it takes to achieve self-actualization in tough conditions for not just himself, but for the culture.
I don’t actually know any of his songs; this is a “medley of his classics.” Jeru’s got a great, deep voice that adds a lot of strength to his lyrics.
Like Black Thought, Jeru sits in a chair, surrounded by his gear. Unlike Black Thought, Jeru is in motion pretty consistently bobbing and waving his hand like he does care.
He starts with 50 seconds of “Can’t Stop the Prophet” after which he says “we need a superhero and we forget that the superhero resides within us.” he encourages everyone to be creative in this time because idle hands do the devil’s work. This is his lead into the 90 seconds of “Ain’t The Devil Happy.”
His prescient lyrics remain as relevant as ever as he addresses the deepening fissures of socioeconomic inequalities exposed by the coronavirus crisis.
He even updates the lyrics of “Scientifical Madness”
Mind Jah lick you with disease
So I inflict MC’s likeEbolaCorona
Or some other man made cancer
He says he doesn’t want to be inside, but he’s grateful that he has a place to be because living outside is “So Raw.” I really like the slow grooving beat of this song.
After the 90 seconds of “My Mind Spray” he says his mind is always working. He’s always wondering if this and if that. But the old saying goes “If if’s were fifth, we’d all be drunk.” In the song “If” he adds “If if was a spliff, we’d all get smoked up.”
He closes his set from his home in Berlin with a new song, “The Power,” and offers up a message we all need: “No matter who you are, the power resides in you…We can overcome anything if you put your mind to it, you just can’t get in your mind too much.” The prophet cannot be stopped.
“The Power” is a full song which was inspired by a things his mother used to say that he didn’t understand until he got older: “nothing matters except for how we treat people.”
[READ: May 6, 2020] “Shelter Seekers”
This story is written as a letter to the “scholarship liaison officer.”
The letter writer received a $4,000 Daniel White Foreign Study Scholarship via the Government of Canada. The money was to fund three months in Argentina to study how the region is “adapting its approach to housing in the interest of sustainability.”
This letter is the final report which is “unconventional in form, long overdue and in excess of the stipulated two-page limit.”
The writer left her husband for three months to undertake this challenge.
On the flight to Patagonia ($1,297) she read the Award Holder’s Guide. She imagined building clay houses and hanging out with her fellow researchers, drinking Fernet and Coke. She even considered the idea of an affair with an attractive researcher.
She met with Dr. Felix Hernandez, her host-supervisor. His self-made home was made of wood, not clay. He had a homemade solar cooker, unfinished floors and crickets for grinding into flour.
He bemoaned that the locals protested high gas prices but refused to insulate their homes. He called them “mosquito minds.” Felix fully insulated his home and his gas bill is $0.
He showed her the place she would rent ($1,500 for three months). It had a hot plate and a carcinogenic-looking pan. No Wi-Fi but she could text her husband. Dogs barked all night and she could not sleep.
By the end of the week she had not met any of the rest of the team. When she asked about them, Felix told her that the team was spread around the globe. And that he himself was traveling for the next few weeks.
In order to conduct her studies she walked around asking people what they thought of climate change. “Most people looked at me as though I had asked what they were doing to prepare for the unicorn invasion.”
She met a family who invited her to stay and see their low-impact way of life. This involved slopping pigs so big she had to beat them off with a stick just to feed them. They barked and snapped; they did not oink.
She and her husband were thinking of having a baby. She sent him name suggestions based on this family: Luz, Wilde. He replied, “You want to name our children Loose and Wild?” She then includes an aside to the officer(s) that the marriage doesn’t make it–the Scholarship was too much for it.
As upset as she was by her work, Felix was excited by it and couldn’t wait to see her turn the data into a story: as if he was waiting for her to do the world’s shittiest magic trick.
She decided to change her topic and write about Felix and his efforts to change people’s mosquito minds. She knew that the agency had to approve any change but she was afraid to ask.
She sent her husband a text explaining her decision and he texted back emojis: hearts, a pirate ghost, a volcano, a dinosaur, a penguin. She turned off her phone.
She consulted Felix’s research and calculated her own carbon impact imagining that she would be on the low end, but she was above average–everything that she had followed all her life (poverty veganism nihilism) was nullified by the travel of the scholarship. And if she had a child? That adds so much to the carbon footprint.
While musing about her life, she felt a stinging on her arm–a Chilean volcano erupted and sent burning ash onto the Argentinian side of the mountain. They hid in Felix’s shelter.
When they emerged everything was covered in ash–the world looked not so much white as blank.
Suddenly she felt free–all expectations had been washed away. The guide book said, “‘it is sometimes difficult to ascertain the beginning and end of a qualitative research project.’ This was not my experience.”
Her research led to the conclusion that the best way to minimize one’s impact on the planet is to cease to be alive. But “Save the Planet: Kill Yourelf” is probably an unacceptable conclusion for the Government of Canada.
I enjoyed the end of the story, but I would have liked to see the reaction of the liaison officers.
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