15.08.2021
If you're still wading through Monday's piece dedicated to National Women's Day, that would be understandable. As lengthy as it is, we hope it offers some nuance and insight 💡
Today's Weekender (or Sunday Read, in this case) pays tribute to five artists who live on through their art, reframes the usefulness of fear, and explores the limits of blind optimism 🤡
This past week, we lost five young artists in a tragic car accident. Killer Kau (Sakhile Hlatshwayo), Mpura (Mongezi Stuurman), The Voice (Khanya Hadebe), DJ Thando Tot and manager, TD were rising stars in the South African genre of amaPiano – one of the world's fastest growing and contagious genres since Afrobeats.
https://twitter.com/duckiethot/status/1406067980174127109?s=20
amaPiano emerged back in 2012, drawing on Deep House, Electronic, Jazz, Hip Hop, Kwaito, Gqom and R'nB genres. Part of what makes amaPiano so complex to pin down is a combination of 3 key things: layering – of sounds, beats and builds produced as samples that can be built upon, an artist's individual finesse, and jazz-like collaboration that goes into each song.
Killer Kau, Mpura, The Voice and Thando T were emerging masters of this genre, and their loss ripples deeply through fans, artists and producers around the world. There is something about both the loss of youth and of artists that feels unjust. Let us know their names, and let us honor their talent and hard work, and let us give our music industry its flowers.
They live on through their art.
Here's a playlist off Umsebenzi Wethu – one of the songs that Mpura featured on and one of the biggest amaPiano songs to break into the mainstream in the last year 👇🏽
https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/37i9dQZF1E8PQFewQLDAqo
So writes Greek philosopher, Seneca, in his essay, *On The Shortness of Life.* In a world that pushes us in the direction of "proper" careers, Seneca urges us to guard ourselves against wasting time.
He writes:
*It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing...
So what is the reason for this? You are living as if you are destined to live forever...How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years!*
Something tells me that Seneca would have been a big deal on TikTok if he was alive today, questioning the rules and pushing us to do the same. Get the book here 📗
Seneca's teachings lend themselves well to thinking not just about our own lives, but about the lives of the ideas we bring into the world. The principle of not living life according to pre-defined scripts is not to encourage us to live completely inconsiderate or selfish lives – or to ignore the wisdom of those who have come before us. (Don't be that guy.) It is to remind us to pay attention to our innate talents and life experiences too – to draw those as our personal source of capital to guide our lives.