Notes on A Bad Playlist

I made a bad playlist yesterday. It started with Rema’s Divine - Douglas asked me if I liked the song because it was about a breadwinner, I hadn’t even thought about that - and it ended with ‘Delresto (Echoes) -  Beyonce and Travis Scott's joint song off Travis’ new album, Utopia. It is one hour and twenty seconds long - I think that is a fine length for a playlist - and it has over twenty-three songs. It’s a bad playlist. I think the songs are all great and I can’t recommend them enough on their own but the playlist is horrible. Douglas describes it as ‘just cacophony’. I agree. But I love this playlist. There is a place where it turns from Toni Braxton’s duet with Babyface ‘Rollercoaster’ on which the duo go back and forth singing ‘When love is like a rollercoaster, always up and down’ and into Jorja Smith’s Try Me [I’ve changed? There’s only been one thing that I’ve changed.’]. You can find my August in between there.

I don’t know why I am writing this or why you are reading it but I feel if there was ever a month this year I should write a newsletter, this month that has been so transformative feels like the best one.

August was one of those months that was transformative in real-time and even more so retrospectively. A whirlwind month that pushed me between the extremes of emotions and circumstances. From the mundane days to the weird weekends to the emotional ones. The day I started playing Usher’s Tell Me I was starting tennis lessons. Already that song sounds like white T-shirts, jokes about ‘giving Serena Williams’ on Twitter and notes on where to place your index finger when you hold a tennis racket. I first heard the Latto remix of Davido and Musa Keys’ Unavailable when I was in an Uber on my way back from Douglas’ Just Worship night headed to my apartments to make chicken and egg stir-fried rice and watch an episode of Sex and the City while everyone else watched Big Brother Naija. There is something to be said about the ways so many songs inadvertently capture such moments in time without meaning to do so. How they can bring us back to where we were the first time we heard them if they are played just right? I think that is why I like this playlist. There is so much of August that I want to remember. I want to remember the desperation for youthful joy gnawing in the back of my head the first time I clicked play on Jessie Ware's Save A Kiss, a fun throbbing song that when you close your eyes transports you in the heat of a thick rave. I want to remember the appreciation for a simple routine, for the simple life that I was mulling over the first time I realized how much I loved Delresto (Echoes). I want to remember listening to Nuhtime/Tek Time when I realized that what I needed was hope.

I have been listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell and Marvin Gaye today. I don’t know if this will shape my September but I guess we will see.