I love music! I love soul music! I love old skool music! Because music makes me happy and I am really taking the time to make this dissertation writing process one that I survive in a healthy and holistic way, I have decided to make a point to discover and sometimes rediscover the music that moves me. I'll add a song every week with some of my musings. Hope you enjoy and respond.
I encourage you all to check out Bilal's new Album, A Love Surreal (2013). I've listened to the whole album multiple times, which is something that I rarely do. The album feels like a non-linear journey through love/life.
Bilal definitely drops some poetic knowledge and it's important to be able to feel that today when it's so easy to become desensitized to what's going on around us, outside us, but also inside us.
How can we create a new world if we don't have visions of what we want? Our imaginations become stifled when we are disconnected from ourselves and each other.
The fact that Bilal's Album is called A Love Surreal cannot be taken lightly. It is the kind of love we need to day, a courageous kind.
In my favorite book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley writes: "Surrealism, I contend, offers a vision of freedom far deeper and more expansive than any of the movements discussed thus far. It is a movement that invites dreaming, urges us to improvise and invent, and recognizes the imagination as our most powerful weapon."(159).
Imagine...a caterpillar becoming a butterfly...one thing becoming another...how do we get there?
I encourage you to listen to the album, but I will feature the track Butterfly.
"The struggle makes you beautiful."
Kai's Thoughts:
When I die, do not bury me
Let me roam free
I will go to places that in this life I will never get to see
In this body and with these eyes
Restricted by these pockets
Empty, though big in debt size.
But my soul is full
Filled with contradiction
A mere reflection of the current state of things at large
Land of the free home of the greatest population
Behind bloody prison bars
But my soul knows free
And escapes like Harriet in the night
And Mumia's voice, freedom only needs one a mic
And Marlon, traversing between
What is and what ain't
Untying tounges
He has come to be one of my
Black queer patron saints
And my heart believes in free
because it is a dream that was handed down to me
When I die, you cannot bury me
I will leave something behind
It will grow outside of me and inspite of me
The dandelion arises again and again
A soul cannot be enslaved
A radical tradition indeed
From nothing and everything
We continue to witness the resillancy of
Some Black radical dreamer's seed.
It is in us.
Be thankful for our inheritance.
<3always
