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. (more…)
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