Album Review: The Royalty - Lovers

From the first, Lovers shows exactly what kind of album it intends to be. Influences from sixties to indie rock are layered over shoegazy pop. I can get behind this: attentive production, well constructed and balanced songs and a catchiness that had me whistling bits of the album all week.

The album opens with "Bartender" a gorgeous song about breaking up . I can see people branding Nicole Boudreau as some sort of indie rock Adele by track #2, "How I Like 'Em" but it's lazy comparison. It doesn't capture the musicianship on display here and it definitely doesn't capture sometimes sultry sometimes summery quality of Nicole Boudreau's voice."Please Lie" is probably the first track I really adored. I don't like "I Want You" at all , in its best moments it reminds me of early Metric with more dynamic vocals, but it's otherwise kind of boring save for the instrumental bit. Which brings me to another track I don't like as much, "Bottle Breaker". It seems like a bit of a throwaway song among a bunch of tracks with unique stylistic elements.

Thankfully it picks right back up by the time "Mr Hyde" in which we have some pop-punk like riffs I adore. What prevents this album from collapsing under its own sickly sweet pop stickiness is an affinity for complex melodies, as you can see in "Other Boys." "Say the Word" makes brilliant use of choir, something I'm a complete sucker for. By the time we've reached "Every Little Bit" I've been sold on this band. It's a serious contender for my song of the summer.

Slowing things down a little with "Witchcraft", a track I'd love to see re-recorded in a stripped down acoustic one-take session. I personally would've ended the album on "Saint Bowie" rather the ballad style "Won't Be Long" but it's not for lack of love of it. It's a show-ending chiller rather than an end of album thriller.

Overall Lovers suffers from a little imbalance, as songs in the middle of the album seem much tighter. This is to be expected, and The Royalty is a great band with lots of promise and a quality album in Lovers. Does it have mainstream appeal? I can't be sure, but here's an album and a band that surely deserve it.

Favourite tracks: Mr Hyde, Every Little Bit, Saint Bowie
Rating: 7.5/10

On Language(s): Yoruba

In Part I, I talked about the English language and when using it clearly, it is an absolutely breathtaking language to communicate complex ideas--the idea being to be understood. Part II on French dealt a little bit more with the personal relationship with the use of language as a social tool. Yoruba, is a completely different story.

I've struggled with it. A language of approximately 20 million speakers and yet I'm not entirely sure if I count. My mother alternates rapidfire between English and Yoruba, only ever slowing down to explain seldom used words "Buru means stubborn. Like you." I understand it well enough. I speak it haltingly around people I don't know but get by otherwise.

Reading is another matter. I have never understood the accent system and most computers aren't equipped with it, so a word that has five different meanings with each accent becomes a question of context. The average Lagos third grader stutters less than I do when I read out loud. My accent is somewhat marred by being too "American" I've been told.

Still there's pleasure in getting by, in the creative insults and novel ways of phrasing things. There's something nice about being able to joke in another language, especially when humour relies on something different than you're used to. I can be proud of sharing in the stories of my Nigerian culture in our own language.

On Language(s): French

As I've said before I grew up in Montreal. I always cite Roche Carrier's article “C'est pas comme a Paris mais...” when speaking about the differences between French from France and Quebecois French. It's a really great piece about the widespread but false idea that Quebecois French is not real French, It manages to be funny and touching all at once, typical Carrier style. I've never found a good enough English translation and you'd lose a lot of the beauty in doing so. What about my personal relationship and French?

I think when you begin to know a language well enough, you'll have an image of words in your head, instead of translating concepts into your first language. So when I use the word souliers instead of chassures for shoes, it's because I have a memory of my father saying “Mets tes souliers, s'il te plait” almost every time we went out while chassures I end up translating. I prefer “magasinage” over the Parisian appropriation of “shopping” and I like to do it on the “fin de semaine” not the “weekend”. It's a word preference, and the preference itself isn't incorrect.

People who act as if there is only one correct way to speak French forget two things. One, there are regional differences in every language without exception. You'd be hard pressed to act as if a Brit wouldn't find aspects of Canadian English difficult to understand or just plain different. And yet no one is running around telling Canadians they don't speak real English. (If you happen to encounter these people, they are of the worst kind of human beings and you ought to stay far away from them. Language was never invented to bully other people).

Two, language is social. For clarity's sake I (try to) write standard French in academic or business settings. When telling a story to a friend though, I express myself with hand gestures, expletives and yes, slang. I don't believe that it makes a French any less or more. It's one thing to prefer one over the other, it's another to act as if language isn't at all personal.

The thing I love about my languages is that the way you speak reflects a lot of your personal history. You pick up phrases from different people and situations. My spoken french is a reflection of the fact that I didn't speak French for the first year I was in Toronto because I was teased about my accent and tried to get rid of it. My french is also a mix of Quebec private school, anglo-Montreal childhood street french, my favourite literature, hockey commentary/news/cartoons and the laissez-faire attitude of some Ontario teachers. And I'm okay with that.

Next: Yoruba (tomorrow)

On Language(s): English

I speak approximately three languages. In terms of actual skill, English is my first language. My French is questionable at times because I speak it much better than I write it, but my reading is almost flawless. The third is Yoruba, despite my inability to decipher the accent system and penchant for sprinkling English and Pidgin in where my vocabulary is lacking. I've always wanted to explore my personal relationship with language and here it goes.

On English
I've been accused a fair few times of being a grammar pedant. It's almost a fair assessment. I prefer style over being a stickler for rules but have little tolerance for people who have neither. The only reasons I uphold grammar rules is when to ignore them means:

1. You risk confusing your audience as it makes things unclear
example, an ad for a mandarin school “Learn more than language.”

By leaving out the article, it sounds like this school will either teach you how to speak at all or teach you extra things about Chinese culture or perhaps teach you colloquial usage of the language or maybe even teach you about the intrinsic value of Mandarin. I don't know. It would be easily clarified by 'a' or 'the'.

2. You've made a convoluted sentence that is distracting or nonsensical.
Example: an Elections Ontario poster “Easy that makes other easy look hard easy”

Quite simply, I don't know what that means. Maybe it does its job as an ad because I spent far more time thinking about it than I might have otherwise, but none of those thoughts were about voting.

3. It is clear evidence you are being lazy.
Example: “Your alive.”

My alive what? Surely, sentences still require a subject and predicate. Also, this is a silly error because people don't care enough to proofread.

However, English is not everyone's first language so I'm a lot more lenient about these kinds of things then. It's a learning process; I've just recently figured out the difference between less and fewer. It's about being open and willing to learn. It's about really wanting to focus on people's ideas rather than having to decipher them. It's about using English as a versatile but effective tool.

Next: On French (tomorrow)

You're the song I wrote that I will always love

A musician who I used to admire once wrote something along the lines of: "there is nothing more important then the way a song will make you feel." It's something I've kept next to my heart. It's gotten to the point where I've written so many times before about music it sometimes seems as if there is nothing left to say. I'm glad I was proven wrong yesterday.

I went to two concerts Saturday night. The first was a Ten Second Epic/The Dangerous Summer/Brighter Brightest concert at Sneaky Dee's. It's been a while since I'd been to a pop-punk show but nothing really changed except that I am older and maybe a little bitter for it. Red legal wristband and a bottle of beer in hand, I was feeling a little out of place even with my friend Leah there.

Various thoughts were going through my head: "Has it stopped being tacky to wear a band's t-shirt to their concert?" "Who forgot to teach these kids never to sit on a speaker?" It went on throughout the first band. Then Brighter, Brightest performed and they were so good live, I stopped paying attention to what was going on around me. They played their hearts out and it was impossible not to want to enjoy that kind of energy. During their last song "Right For Me "I caught myself softly singing along to the chorus without realizing it. It's been a while since I've had chills like that.

When the Dangerous Summer played I couldn't even pretend to detach myself. These are songs I already love and know. I sang every word as loudly as I could, sweat streaming down my face. These are songs I sing to myself all the time, from albums I've listened to on repeat for weeks at a time. One song they played "The Permanent Rain", I must've heard something like four years ago now but it's still as great as the first day I listened to it. I would have sworn I'd forgotten the lyrics but they all came out in a rush.

Afterwards while the headliner played I got to meet TDS' singer/songwriter AJ Perdomo. With all the aftershow adrenaline, I was calm but still a little bit nervous. He is in my top five writing influences after all. From the few words we exchanged I thought that he was nice and pretty humble.

Skip to the second concert which was Patti Cake/Paint/The Pinecones at the Silver Dollar. Full disclosure: the lead singer of Patti Cake is my boyfriend's sister. They are fabulous and really fun to watch. Take a listen here. I ended my night dancing to the Pinecones with my boyfriend, his sister and her band mates/friends. While laughing, I thought to myself "This is what music is about as well."

A Short Constructivist Analysis of #Kony2012

This is an excerpt for a much longer paper on the relationship between foreign policy and NGOs which will hopefully turn into my honours thesis. I used a constructivist analysis of Kony 2012 as my case study and decided to post it here, because it's rather topical and political writing is a skill I'm trying to hone.

It is apparent that the relationship between NGOs and foreign policy is clearly multilayered and complex. There is no better case study than Invisible Children's viral Kony 2012 campaign. They sought to have influence over United States' foreign policy by drawing attention to the war criminal Joseph Kony in Uganda (Kony 2012). “When citizens by the hundreds of thousands start demanding that our government do something, suddenly it becomes in the national interest of the United States government to respond to this problem,” (Kony 2012). They are asking for government intervention and foreign government at that.

From a constructivist point of view Invisible Children behaving in such a way that dictates that foreign policy is needed for issues of NGOs and thus continue to perpetuate that idea of dependence. This is not a condemnation however, by asking for the United States government's assistance is an explicit endorsement of such policy. To put it simply, foreign policy is not being imposed on them so much as they are imposing foreign policy on themselves.

Therefore, criticisms are as much of the organization as well as faulty foreign policy rationale. By calling for military intervention, the criticisms from the international community about Invisible Children constitute an argument about policy. International relations theorists, African intellectuals, former and current NGO workers and more importantly, the everyday person is now involved in this debate. This of course does not constitute global governance but in a looser sense a global community that influences rather than dictates.

From a constructivist perception of realism, the request merely shows that NGOs do not constitute an overly important part of a so-called international community. They have neither the power nor the legitimacy of a state and therefore, are negligible. It is a very realist perception to imply that the presence of 100 US military advisors outweighs the efforts of a number of NGOs that have been active in Uganda pre-hype. This is not to say this is the intent of the campaign, but an overemphasis on military implies such.It is within this constructed paradigm that Invisible Children seeks to operate. There is no better illustration on exactly how complicated the relationship between NGOs and foreign policy can be.


Sources (or much more thorough analysis)
Teju Cole's White Savior-Industrial Complex - dealing with larger implications of Kony 2012 and its effect on the narrative told about Africa.
Joshua Keating's Kony Is Not in Uganda and Other Complicated Things - a criticism of the over-simplified nature of the campaign and how it could make things worse
David Rieff's The Road to Hell Is Paved With Viral Videos - controversial but very good. Quotable: "...cheap techno-utopianism that conflates the entirely admirable wish for a better world with the belief that knowing how to move toward it is a simple matter, requiring more determination and goodwill than knowledge."
Spectra's We Are Not Invisible: 5 African Women Respond To The Kony 2012 Campaign

Untitled

skipping fingers,
skimming the surface
silly things i'd never say aloud
your freckles are constellations
i've yet to name

more than anything, i've wished
on palindromes in clock displays
worn out pennies and dandelion clouds
for something like this

so what else is there to say
about happiness that leaves
little room for much else?