For the love of music

Sep 16, 2022 | ,

This is the first draft of an essay published in Listen To Your Footsteps. I did make some edits for the final version. I have loved music for as long as I can remember. My father had a record (vinyl) collection that he regularly added to on his travels around the world. I now own that collection and there are few things that give me as much joy as listening to the soundtrack of my childhood. It was a rule that every Sunday morning, I wash the cars. As revenge, I would pull the speakers from the hifi as close to the door as I could and blast my selected artist or genre so I could hear it...

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Music writing is not easy

Aug 2, 2022 | ,

I wrote this for a print magazine but it was rejected and I wrote something else for them so figured why not share it here. Writing a column is a funny old thing. In the days when print was the be-all and end-all, being asked to write a column was akin to being given the holy grail. Or at least a map of sorts, a la Da Vinci code. Print space was and continues to be at a premium. And, while I have been fortunate enough to scribble many a column over the years, being asked to write this one has had me at sixes and sevens. The ‘column-writing muscle’ hasn’t been exercised in a minute. After an...

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Questlove in times of Covid-19

Apr 21, 2020 |

With all the content that is online - on the hour, every hour - I have been struggling to keep up, especially on Instagram. Since D-Nice launched his Homeschool at Club Quarantine on March 21st, there has been explosion of musical experiences online. With the time differences between the south of Africa and the US, I have missed most of these. I just don’t have the energy that some friends have to sit up until the early hours of the morning… which also means I missed the Teddy Riley versus Babyface fiasco. I just caught the memes. After the success of D-Nice's IG livestream party - which...

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Life Soundtrack: Blk Sonshine ‘s Building

Jun 12, 2019 | ,

A friend was heading out for the night to the legendary Club 206 in Orange Grove to see 'some new group called Blk Sonshine'' and wanted to know if I would like to join him. I tagged along not knowing that this would be the start of a journey into the world of poetry and the Arts. I had been writing poetry for most of my life but it was more for therapy and never made it beyond my notebooks and the few friends I would let read. Blk Sonshine 's Birth Blk Sonshine was Malawian-American singer/songwriter Masauko and Soweto-born composer and librettist Neo Muyanga. Masauko was visiting South...

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Life Soundtrack: Roots Manuva’s Colossal Insights

Dec 30, 2018 |

It was late November in 2006 when I 'discovered' Roots Manuva. MySpace was the dominant social platform, laying the foundation for everything else that followed. I had two pages - which I haven't been able to access for a decade because I have forgotten the passwords and don't have the email addresses I set them up with any longer. But, they are still out there: kojobaffoe and kojothepoet. I also had two blogs on Blogger.com: infinitepursuit and imperfectpoetry. The beauty of the Internet at that time was its ability to open up the world of poetry, which I was heavily involved in, in terms...

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Fulfilling Promises With Visa Checkout

Nov 28, 2017 | ,

In the song Trenchtown Rock, from the 1975 Live! album recorded at a 1975 concent in London by Bob Marley and the Wailers, Bob Marley opens with the following lyrics: One good thing about music, when it hits, you feel no pain, One good thing about music, when it hits, you feel no pain, So hit me with music, hit me with music now… Friedrich Nietszche once said, “Without music, life would be a mistake” while Louis Armstrong said, “Music is life itself. What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is.” Music. It has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It...

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