Feel Love (Ihunanya dị)

Original bald-head Crooklynite, rudebwoy instructor
I came back to lay down law to the suckas
I'll crush ya, if you ain't actin' like my brother
Make one false move and with the mic, I'll bust ya
Just lay back and feel the music

…

We hold the key to our destiny
We can make it everybody
Feel the music
Just free your mind, sit back relax and unwind
To a higher plane we're goin'
Can you feel the music?

—Guru - Feel the Music (from Jazzmatazz Volume 2: The New Reality)

On man heaven's influence works not so,
        But that it first imprints the air;
So soul into the soul may flow,
           Though it to body first repair.
As our blood labors to beget
        Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
        That subtle knot which makes us man,
So must pure lovers' souls descend
        T' affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
        Else a great prince in prison lies.
To'our bodies turn we then, that so
        Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
        But yet the body is his book.
And if some lover, such as we,
        Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
        Small change, when we are to bodies gone.

—John Donne - The Ecstasy

You know that feeling when you stumble across something, but actually wished you'd thrown down an eddie beforehand? That was me encountering the metaverse-mentalic-Tron-trippy-psychedelapidated new video treatment given to Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" for the song's 45th anniversary.

Yeah, you try describing those visuals to someone. Never really my favorite Donna Summer song until I grew up and learned to appreciate it, I've had several rounds of learning what musically contradictory epicycles it holds. Apparently simple in structure, I learned as a DJ how devilishly hard it is to cleanly mix in and out. One of those where you just fade out the previous track so you can scream on the partyers for a bit before the drop. Hopefully some fool did double-park their jeep.

And that bassline? I never played bass and so was like "yeah what of it?" until I learned from bassists that even though the original was dumb-programmed synth-bass (Giorgio Moroder tinkering on Moog), replicating it live became a sort of holy grail of bassist technical wizardry. Cats would basically dislocate their fingers to finally get it down. Flea of Red Hot Chili peppers, definitely one of the great bassists in the pantheon, was known to stun concert-goers with his rendition, though I won't link to to it because the attempted singing cover of Summer's voice is…yeah, well you don't need to be hearing that.

Actually, that gives me a DJ idea. I need to loop the Flea-playing-bass bit off a decent recording, cut just before John Frusciante (I think it is) starts yowling. Bet I could smack up a dance floor with that!

I don't know that you can get closer than Donna summer in this song, and in Love to Love you Baby, did to expressing love as an out-of-body experience. John Donne, Dean of St Pauls make an esoteric charismatic theological phenomenological treatise of this idea—souls as the atoms, irreducible quantizations of the platonic, from which love could only descend into our mortal bodies to, if pure, remain as unchanged as possible (but presumably, like Carnot's ideal heat engine in thermodynamics, never 100% unchanged). Carnal Carnot, huh?

Having obsessed over the poems as a teenager, I can never quite get over my sense of "The Ecstasy" as a sterner, less engaging reformulation of "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning". Yes, I know how superficial and assessment that is, so I might as well really shallow it up and suggest that Donna Summer, in the cyborg ecstasy incarnation of her Moroder years, brought Donne's ideal to life in a way his brain could scarcely have contained. Although she did also mean the sex part, oh yes! "Eyes, lips, and hands", no less. I knew I couldn't be the only person who felt thus, and sure enough, when I googled that metaphor as it popped into my head, of Donna Summer as cyborg cum cosmic ideal, I found this equally blood-skulled article, "Another Cyborg, Another Groove: Donna Summers “I Feel Love” and Afrofuturism", by Tilman Baumgärtel. Well met, Herr Professor! This dude grooves Loomiverse.

These streets are our oooooowwwn!

I know I probably just come off sounding all woke-tastic every time I mention what the Arsenal Women's team means to me, but you can choose to believe or not that in a great couple of weeks for we Gooners, it's not the signing of Kai Havertz, the renewal of William Saliba nor the imminent arrivals of Declan Rice and Jurien Timber that have really got my blood pumping. Nah, fam, it's the arrival of this character.

I've watched this punk ass find 'nuff ways to score against us, and now she's in the red and white 'bout to dish out the pain to our rivals. Yeah, I'll have that. She's always had that swag that makes a player stand out; add her to a team with the likes of Kim Little, Katie McCabe, Viv Miedema, Victoria Perlova and Lotte Wubben-Moy, and I think we have the in-your-face bad attitude 'cause we know we good crew of the WSL on lock. Imagine if Danielle van de Donk ever came back? They'd have to make a Hollywood movie!

I feel music

Moments In Motion by Maka is one of the fresher albums I've heard from the booming Naija music scene lately. She has a great voice, unsullied here by autotune (thankfully that trend seems to be easing off in general), and the song-writing is boundlessly clever. Her producer, Teck-Zilla, is the rare bobo daring to go beyond chasing the cash-grab sound of the moment. "Jokes for Days" has me in stitches once she hikes up her wrapper: "Your head like coconut; you no dey hear word;… your own don tire me oh!" all over a breezy flip of Aretha's "One Step Ahead".

Bonus African music recommendations: the new album, Tusona: Tracings in the Sand from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe band Mokoomba, bringing a modern flavor to the deep Sungura traditions. The album even includes a few very dancefloow ready remixes, useful for spreading the vibe. Plus some new old music, Yebo! Rare Mzansi Party Beats from Apartheid's Dying Years, a compilation album by John Armstrong. I can't be 100% sure, but I think I remember one or two of these tracks from parties in Nigeria shortly before I emigrated, especially the Tools & Figs track "Blackout".

New York's DJ Green Lantern, well known for his classic mix tapes, released a really nice project to just throw on and have a classic, all-LP listen. Jazz Dream is aptly titled, a long-form tribute to the large slice of Jazz DNA carried on by Hip-Hop. In "Step Into a World, pt 1" guest vocalist Amber Navran offers a warm, ethereal take on the Blondie track that first exported Rap to the hep crowd outside The Big Apple, complete with the organ riff additions BDP first made when they interpolated the song. There are too many such gems in this project to mention, but I do have to mention the oh so clever sampling of Cortex in "For the Love Love".

More strictly Hip-Hop-wise I'm bringing a sort of double tribute. New Jersey rapper and Artifacts alum Tame One teamed up with producer Parallel Thought, paying tribute to Wu Tang's wild child in their 2008 project Da Ol' Jersey Bastard. Unfortunately Tame One died of heart failure in December. I feel this keenly,  through my own family's history with this particular vector of death to young men. The newly released "Definitive Edition" of the album is a transitive closure of tribute. I'll extend that to the late, great Sean Price, with the guest spot on "Haha Da Rah Rah". Pour out for the departed.

Where there is no love feeling

While I'm on sobering notes, about three years protests were in full force against police brutality disproportionately targeting black people, and Colorado Public Radio had me on a segment talking about Easy Words, the poem on the topic I'd written and set to music.

France's protests over the shooting by police of Nahel Merzouk remind us how far we are from resolution of such injustice. Now we have President Macron saying the problem is that the young rioters have just been playing too many video games and spending too much time on TikTok. I guess it's not quite Sarkozy's blanket labelling of French youth as "racaille" and "voyous", but it's the typical dismissal from Elysium on high of people fed up with what's happening in the streets. The relevant social realities in France are incredibly complex, and without more serious reflection on the part of those in power, I don't see what's in motion to prevent our being here again in another three years or less.

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❧ Égwú 🪘 Ókwú ✍🏿 Ígwè 📡 Ńdụ̀ ❣️