I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ODDISEE-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #83 (September 22, 2020).

I feel like I just watched (and enjoyed) Oddissee’s Tiny Desk Concert recently, but apparently it was back in 2015.

In 2015, Oddisee visited the Tiny Desk with a drummer and a keyboardist. For his Tiny Desk (home) concert, he assembled his full band, Good Company, for the first time since the global pandemic cancelled their tour last spring. They rehearsed the day before this capture at Assorted Studios in York, Penn., the midway point between the members’ hometowns of Philadelphia, New York City and Washington D.C. They picked this facility because it felt more like a living room than a studio. And to make it feel as cozy as possible, they brought memorabilia from their own homes. Bass player Dennis Turner brought family photos, Ralph Real (on the Fender Rhodes) brought his son’s toy drum set, and Oddisee brought tribal statues from Sudan.

Oddisee has eleven albums out (!), but all of the songs here come from his new EP Odd Cure which was

“a record I didn’t want to write but needed to,” Oddisee said in July. He wrote it in eight weeks, between March and May, while in self-isolation. He had just returned from a performance in Thailand and wanted to protect his family. Oddisee says these songs were inspired by the deluge of news, social media, misinformation and conspiracy theories generated during the first weeks of the pandemic. Relevant and inspiring, his music and its message addresses the uncertainty and anxiety we all live with today.

“The Cure” has some great funky bass from Dennis Turner and some excellent twinkling on the Rhodes keyboard from Ralph Real.  Before the verses start, drummer Jon Laine gets the drums to make a really neat sound and then plays a wonderfully complex rhythm–complete with rim shots.  Oddisee raps speedily and clearly.  Half way through the song a little window opens up and Olivier St. Louis (all the way from Berlin) plays some cool guitar soloing.  But the star of this song is definitely Turner, with some amazing bass work throughout the song.  The song also has a really funky chorus.

“Shoot Your Shot” is full of slow thumping before the funkiness starts.  An integral part of the band is DJ Unown playing the MPC.  I really don’t know exactly what sounds he’s making, but I can see him playing all throughout the songs and I’m sure the music would lose something without him.  The middle takes off with another wicked solo from St. Louis.

“I Thought You Were Fate” is a slower song that opens with guitar from Sainte Ezekiel.  This song has a slower r&b crooning chorus.  But I love the way it speeds up after the  chorus and shifts the song into higher gear.  Ezekiel get a jazzy solo mid song.

“Still Strange” shifts the tempo much slower and features a lead vocal (via Oddisee’s phone) of Priya Ragu.  Sainte Ezekiel plays some beautiful understated guitar throughout.

“Go To Mars” returns the funk and Oddisee raps in a very cool style of short, abrupt lines.   It’s got a really fun chorus of longing: “I wanna go to Mars; live among the stars ; be the one who got away from it all.”

There very little social distancing here–Oddisee even has the guys scooch over (although I think Turner is wearing a mask).

[READ: September 24, 2020] Introduction

During the COVID Quarantine, venerable publisher Hingston & Olsen created, under the editorship of Rebecca Romney, a gorgeous box of 12 stories.  It has a die-cut opening to allow the top book’s central image to show through (each book’s center is different).  You can get a copy here.

This is a collection of science fiction stories written from 1836 to 1998.  Each story imagines the future–some further into the future than others.

As it says on the back of the box

Their future.  Our present.  From social reforms to climate change, video chat to the new face of fascism, Projections is a collection of 12 sci-fi stories that anticipated life in the present day.

I don’t know anything about Rebecca Romney, but I love her introduction to this collection and I want to look into her work a little more.

She writes

It isn’t a science-fiction writer’s job to predict the future.  But sometimes they wind up doing it anyway.  Yes, science-fiction writers imagine a future world.  However that must not be confused with a sincere attempt to guess the path of our real future.  Imagining a future means playing a game of logic

Yesterday’s post from Aira, joked about H.G. Wells making failed predictions about the future.

But Romney writes:

For many non s-f reader, “failed” predictions can produce an irrational dissonance that dispels the magic of the story. But true predictions are not the point.  Instead of allowing wrong predictions to jar them out of the experience, veteran s-f readers embrace the messiness of the overall thought experiment.

She observes that she can’t even predict a few weeks into the future.  When she started working on this collection, a global pandemic never crossed her mind.  The pandemic actually had her switching out one story for a different one by the same author.

She writes a bit about each story giving fascinating context for the stories.

Many of the writers in this collection are women. They wondered things like what if women were granted the same access to scientific education?  Or if racial bias were stripped out of the news, then what would the world look like.

She says she picked these stories because they predict not just the technology of the future but what it feels like living in 2020.  Including the continued harshness toward women.

With the rise of social media, I quickly learned that as a woman, the more I asserted my desire to speak and be treated as a human being, the more trolls attempted to shout me down, flood my feeds with vitriol, and undermine my experience or authority … Social media is not my natural habitat.  But I have stubbornly maintained a presence on these platforms so that there is always an accessible place where I can define my own narrative.

Women, especially Black women and Indigenous women, face a deluge of people trying to silence them whenever they speak publicly online. In a world in which I ‘ve received rape threats simple for talking about a Peter Pan first edition on television … I recognized [this] truth: that a woman’s words can be powerful but they can just as often be viewed as dangerous.

Romney ends her introduction taking about a story by Octavia E. Butler. In the story

an African -America woman born with “hyperempathy” must navigate the 2020as and 2030s in a hellscape formed by climate change disasters.

In the excerpt included here

the reader is introduced to a rising demagogue whose slogan in “make America great again.”  Did that send chills down your spine?

Yes it did.  With our election just over a month away and with all facets of democracy being trampled and abused, this collection comes at a much needed time.

I can only hope the utopian ideals that some of these stories imagine can break through the reality that we see before us.

The 12 individually bound booklets are packaged together in a custom box with a die-cut window and include:

• Mary Griffith, Three Hundred Years Hence (excerpt)

• Mark Twain, “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904”

• Edward A. Johnson, Light Ahead for the Negro (excerpt)

• Begum Rokeya, “Sultana’s Dream”

• Murray Leinster, “A Logic Named Joe”

• Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (excerpt)

• Doris Pitkin Buck, “Birth of a Gardener”

• J. G. Ballard, “The Intensive Care Unit”

• Pablo Capanna, “Acronia” (translated by Andrea Bell)

• James Blish, We All Die Naked (excerpt)

• L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.”

• Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents (excerpt)