I walk up to the kitchen window to observe the expansive blue sky. In my headphones I’m listening to a song that sounds like it’s pulled straight out of a soundtrack. This feels like the end. Or at least the end of one chapter. I’ve been here for two whole months and for a moment I didn’t know if I was going to be trapped here or not. I fly tomorrow and what I’ll bring back home with me I’m not sure but I’m confident it’s something.
I have a hope for the future. For a moment it was touch and go. These last couple of months haven’t been easy. I found myself praying a lot. Making myself to be a victim. Then I realized just how fortunate I am. Something clicked in my head. Now I feel like I have a mission. It won’t be without its tears but that’s life I guess. Whether I wait around forever for someone to “save” me is up to me entirely.
I like music because it makes me feel like a hero. Will I be the hero in my own story? I guess we’ll have to see.
Over the course of this week I had the pleasure of getting to know a rapper by the name of KOTA The Friend. It all started as I was on a quest to search for new, cutting edge lyrical rap.
Let’s just say Kota was a breath of fresh air. Everything from his delivery to his lyrics, wordplay and aesthetic.
Kota has a series of videos up on his YouTube channel. They all have a similar format but that’s what makes it so digestible. All you see is a regular looking dude with an amazing background spitting nothing but bars. There are usually some yellow subtitles at the bottom so you can follow along.
Let me tell you this dude is clever. He touches on topics from baby mommas, being a father, his hometown to mental health issues. Dude is honestly versatile and a breath of fresh air for Hip-Hop. His raps are often delivered by this calm, non-threatening tone that makes each bar connect and you never miss a beat.
Still, you can tell that he is delivering with such honesty and sincerity you can’t help but to feel it. A part from his song ‘For Colored Boys’ I personally enjoy goes like this:
And do not be afraid of change It could be a segue way To a better something But have patience And always make time for family and celebration And every good thing in life requires dedication Like career, wife, kids, and it’s spiritual The point of our existence isn’t physical
I think I may have found a new favorite rapper of mine. I’ll post some recommended songs below so you can check him out:
There once was a boy who lived with his mother and two half siblings in a place known as The Land of Broken Glass. This dystopian land was riddled with heaps of garbage as big as some mountains and waste laid as far as the eye could see.
The family scoured the land for edibles or even something useful for their survival. The one thing they never had was a mirror. One day the boy asked his mother why he’d never seen his reflection.
“I want to see my reflection mother, please show me my reflection,” he said.
“You want to see your reflection?”
She picked up a piece of broken glass and showed it to the boy but he had none!
“See, you are so ugly that the mirror won’t even show your reflection,” she laughed.
The boy grew sour inside when she said this. Days passed of them wandering the land, making contact with absolutely no one when the boy stood up.
“Mother, all we do is worry about surviving. We never have any fun. We never enjoy ourselves. And if I’m so ugly like you say maybe you are all better off without me!”
“Good luck out there then, you’re gonna need it!” She laughed.
The boy walked off into the unknown. He wandered for miles and miles. There came a point where he was really tired and so he collapsed on the ground.
When he woke up he was inside a building but the sun shone through a hole in the ceiling.
“Oh, you’re awake,” he heard a voice coming from inside the building.
He propped himself up to see who was speaking to him and it was a girl. She wore rags and she was barefoot.
“W-who are you? And why aren’t you wearing any shoes? You’ll cut yourself!” The boy exclaimed.
“Because I don’t have any,” she retorted.
“Who are you?” He asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t have a name.”
The girl had no identity and neither did the boy. Neither of them had a name. After that the boy and the girl spent days scouring the earth together for bits of food or shiny objects and bringing it back to their habitat.
Without the girl knowing the boy nabbed a book and a piece of glass. At times when she was asleep the boy would look into the glass but not see his reflection and other times he would engross himself in the book.
The next day when the boy woke he saw the girl tending to a wound.
“When did you do that to yourself?”
She turned innocently towards him.
“While we were out in the fields…”
“I’ve been reading this book and there’s a character in there. Her name is Ellen and she’s a lot like you. So I think your name should be Ellen.”
The girl blushed and tried to contain her smile.
“Ellen?”
The boy just nodded.
“Okay.”
“Well now you have a name but I still don’t have a reflection. How can others see who I am if I can’t see myself?”
The girl merely sympathized with him.
Some time passed and the girl told the boy she had a surprise for him. The boy was much curious. When he came to find out, the girl had assembled an old broken mirror from parts she found out in the heaps.
“I think your mother put a curse on you. There’s an old myth that if someone can’t see their reflection that a loved one can restore them back to normal. Here, look inside the mirror.”
The boy peeked inside the mirror and indeed he saw his reflection. He passed his hands through his hair and touched on his face.
“That’s me?” He asked.
The girl nodded. After that he just sat there staring at it.
“Not what you expected?”
“It’s just my mother always said I was ugly. I think she was right.”
The girl grabbed his hand with one swoop and looked into his eyes.
“Don’t you ever say that. I’d been on my own days on days and something told me one day to walk your way and I found you lying in the sun. So I carried you back here. I think you were the sign I’d been looking for and when you gave me my name and told me about your situation, I couldn’t help but think this was meant to be… I love you.”
“I just met you not too long ago.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “You are my blessing.”
She hugged the boy and the boy began to tear until he just wept and the girl pulled away from him.
“Don’t cry. For better or for worse you have a home now.”
The two lived together from then on happily despite having very little, eventually even having children. Who would also scour the earth and their children and so on.
It all started when a friend of mine posted a waltz by Dmitri Shostakovich. I thought it sounded oddly familiar. It reminded me of this track from Oldboy (2003).
I knew that Oldboy used a lot of waltz music for their original soundtrack but it never quite occurred to me why. To understand, we’ll need a little bit more context.
For starters, Oldboy is adapted from a manga for the big screen but it’s also adapted from a greek tragedy called Oedipus Rex. In the story, a king causes a chain of events in the past that regrettably ends up with him fulfilling a prophecy of murdering his father and sleeping with his mother.
We can see direct parallels from this to Oldboy’s story. Oh Dae-su sees Woo-Jin enacting incest with his own sister and that causes a spiraling of events. A cause and effect that was indicative of greek tragedies at the time. Because Oh Dae-su saw them, Woo-Jin’s sister committed suicide. Because of this suicide, Woo-Jin seeks revenge on Oh Dae-su which leads to him being imprisoned for 15 years.
Oh Dae-su is unaware of his captors and in the beginning racks his brain as to who may have imprisoned him and who seeks to do him harm. Woo-Jin warps Oh Dae-su’s mind and when he is released, be it no accident, he searches high and low for his family but he can’t find them. By no accident he meets Mi-Do, who happens to be none other than his daughter (unbeknownst to him). He ends up falling in love and sleeping with her, fulfilling an elaborate plan or a “prophecy” concocted by Woo-Jin.
This is where the part about the waltz comes in. The waltz is a form of traditional classical music that traditionally was meant to be danced to. Later other forms would be birthed but waltz literally means “to turn” in German. Back to the subject of the greek tragedy, it’s almost like Oh Dae-su is dancing with fate. Fate being a common theme in Greek plays.
Waltz music was big during the romantic era and was primarily a couples dance. It was a forbidden dance in the 1800s and was only danced by the few, the bold and the brave in the beginning.
The dance Oh Dae-su is dancing with Mi-Do, his daughter, is incest. Therefore it’s a forbidden dance much like the waltz was in its early days.
Greek tragedies have another theme of “show, don’t tell” and other good directors know this rule is crucial for any good drama. In Oldboy, this is employed a lot.
Mi-Do embracing Oh Dae-su in the ending for Oldboy (2003)
Some scenes in Oldboy are reminiscent of programme music (a form of classical music popular in the romantic era) in the sense that a lot of scenes are carried simply by the music. Programme music was a derivative of classical music where the pieces told of a story or an event. The emotion of the music and the grandiosity of it all was the dialogue. No script needed!
At the end of Oldboy, Oh Dae-su has cut off his own tongue as repentance. He is the only one who knows the secret and has tried a myriad of hypnosis treatments to forget what he has done. Not much is said in this scene and it’s the perfect example of how to do drama right. In the end, nothing is said besides “I love you” as they embrace each other and the track “The Last Waltz” plays tying the whole theme together.
Artistic Apathy 