When I dip, you dip, we DEEP :)

It's already been five years since I wrote this very brief history of myself - recounting where I was almost exactly 5, 10, and 15 years ago.  And this other history going back 20 years and 25. 

April 2013 blog posts  

And I'd written at the end: When people ask "where do you see yourself five years from now?" - how the hell should I know?  
Well, here I am.  I live in a bit of a hotel room residence (which is just as nice as my former cave, only different) on (I kid you not) a tropical island (which is just as perfectly tropical as former city, only different and with the beach free and much closer), enjoying it mostly and likely to leave soon but whatever. 

I'll fill in details later, now I've gotta run off to my silly job although about zero net work happens at it yaa' Allah. 

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That so-called hiatus

You may have heard all of Jesse Jagz's album music

 ::see::

The Jesse Jagz oeuvre in four home-made albums

 from the effusively brilliant Jag of All Tradez (2010)
through a big fight with his label and a hiatus,
to the classic since 2013 Jagz Nation Volume 1 (Thy Nation Come) and
the very elegant 2014 surprise Jagz Nation Vol. 2 (Royal Niger Company)
and now,
the patchy (or shall we call it modern, it's just that I don't understand it yet) 2017 offering called Odysseus.

While he was preparing himself (or preparing us) for Odysseus (and the first track on that album is massive, very Jesse, greatness, reaching for--, inspiring), he did a lot of cool drops.  They mostly didn't appear on the subsequent album and in every case they did not (yet) get the publicity that all of Jesse's work deserves.

So here, in one place, is the stuff he put out in 2016 and early 2017:

Music + Video :
Best in You (May 2017) , Nigerian Gangsta (May 2016), Body Hot (July 2016 - Praiz ft. Jesse Jagz and Stonebwoy) ,  Jaga Love (Jan 2016 - Jesse Jagz ft. Ice Prince)

Music, No Video :
Midnight Vibes ft. AO, Boom, Your Loving.



Collabos and Freestyles :
New World (Nas remix March 2017), Hoto (Remix March 2016, by Classiq ft. Vector and Jesse Jagz), Reputation (April 2016) and Shook Ones (with Vector in June 2017). 

You want to hear something from BEFORE the so-called first album?  Listen to Grammy Night. 
My work is trying to do that 'work thing', trying to make me feel like crap.  So I remember Jesse to remember myself.

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Edward Said: Humanism, at least

Peace will never come, writes journalist Hussain Abdul-Hussain in 2010, as he rushes to an answer:

"For peace to strike root, every state in the Middle East should become blind to the ethnicity and faith of its citizens. When people start having equal rights, they will forget their need to gang up in tribes that require defined territory to defend for their livelihood.
 In Israel, a state-run agency owns all the land. In Lebanon, the Maronite Christian church recently created a fund to buy any land Christians might want to sell in order to prevent Muslim encroachment.
 These Jewish and Christian trust funds, their fight to survive as minorities in a predominantly Muslim Middle East, and the dominant bloody ethno-religious politics will always prevent the different groups from mixing and melting into states where citizens enjoy equal rights.
 Absent modern secular states, like in the US or Europe, peace will never come. Like roses that cannot grow among thorns, modern states in the Middle East cannot coexist next to Islamic theocracies, whether they call themselves “republics” or “kingdoms.” It is either all modern states, or none.
 In the Middle East, peace will come only comprehensively, and unfortunately we’re not even on the right track yet."

I feel desperate to answer too.  But it may take time, and take listening, reading - Edward Said and Orhan Pamuk and dance and pop - to see the right things.

Here is another article, one without answers, from 2003.  I am still reading it and I recommend it completely.  By the way, the author Rest In Peace, his name bothers me - I always want to put the dots above the 'i' as it is Saïd, Sa'id, not English say, saying, said.   
"Western scholars helped justify the war in Iraq, says Edward Said, with their orientalist ideas about the 'Arab mind'.  Twenty-five years after the publication of his post-colonial classic, the author of Orientalism argues that humanist understanding is now more urgently required than ever before." 
- in Guardian UK Books / Myth and Misinterpretation of 'the Orient' / A Window on the World / adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Orientalism

The other day I went "under the sea" for the first time in my life - you know, underwater aquarium - that experience.


Just before going under, another tourist (from a different group) had a drone.  I hadn't seen one outside of like engineering lab projects or the silly ones filming and stuff at Lagos outdoor parties or on TV.  I did really hate my 10 seconds of seeing (or being seen by) this drone.  Very strongly in my stomach hated this thing, would have drowned it.

There was a very young, cheerful, and handsome couple (from my own group) that I talked to also, in English and dots of Arabic.  Then we went in and saw the fish and stuff swimming and doing their undersea village life or whatever and talked about peace and (on the other hand) the hell and predation that we don't see.

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