I wanna be your sugar and your daddy.
Last year, all of my dreams came true and didn’t at the same time. Anyway, here are some photos of how you have to dress (inside our out) if you wanna make out with me in 2022. My therapist says I deserve to have higher standards, and I think he meant in terms of emotional intelligence, so bros are out and blouses are now the bar.
No more denying ourselves the pleasure of being alive. Be it the songs of the birds in the trees or the first droplet of rain that falls upon your nose. Be it a smile for a reason or a cry for a reason. Be it a day in which everything falls into place, or a day in which it all seems to fall out of place. There’s always something to enjoy, because we’re alive, and perhaps part of our human journey is to learn how not to sabotage our existence with feelings of being unworthy of the miracle of life and the exhilaration of fully experiencing it. 💛
You’ve just gotta
Get in-
Side ya
Mind and
Find the
Voices
That ain’t
Kind and
Tell ‘em
Every-
Thing is
Gonna
Be alright
Who’s to say
That our imaginations aren’t real?
Perhaps nothing’s more real
Than what we think
And how we feel
Perhaps nothing’s more magic
Than a thought inside a mind
You’re casting spells right now
Who for?
What for?
What sort?
What kind?
I love you.
Let’s be stronger than our fathers
Free ourselves and please our mothers
Can’t you see we can’t be governed
If we choose love?
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When @jonbatiste popped onto my screen this morning, smiling, my ancestors just knew he was going to deliver some beautiful news. I couldn’t be happier that the first time my soul’s work/play has been recognized by the @recordingacademy is on @angeliquekidjo’s album, “Mother Nature.” This album is so close to my being, because of what and who it stands for, and I’m honored to have written and vocal produced on four songs, to have engineered on three, and to be a featured artist on two.
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Love to everybody who was nominated today, to everybody onstage and behind the scenes who wasn’t (because good is good, music is music, and worth is worth with or without awards), to Angelique, Eli, and all people and fellow Africans involved in the making and sharing of “Mother Nature,” including my song brother @synematik. We are more than global music — we are music for the globe. 💛 🇿🇼
Life’s taken me many fine places
And I never know how to share it
I like to keep good memories for me
Especially my joy, when I wear it
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Life’s taken me many fine places
And I rarely stop to record it
Put me outside with a friend and the trees
And when my phone rings, I’ll ignore it
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Life’s taken me many fine places
But most of them, I didn’t pay for
How can I boast, is it my life to post
If it’s owned by the boss of my labor?
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Life’s taken me many fine places
But photos cannot do them justice
The laughing, the crying, the joy between grief
The stars in the sky and the sunsets
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Life’s taken me many fine places
But most, I won’t share in the open
I know what it’s like to be somewhere not “fine”
Go online, and then end up more broken
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Yes, I’ve seen a lot of nice places
I’ll show you, but first clarify:
Life’s taken me many fine places
But fine places are not my life
Tell me what you cry for
Tell me what you’d die for
Tell me what you’d lie for
I’ll tell you the truth
Whatever you’re fond of
Whatever you want, love
Whatever you’re looking for
Is looking for you too
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Swipe for a message of hope and certainty for your day and dreams, my sweet friend. 📷: @oprahtheactress
LA friends — there’s been a time change for tomorrow’s show (10/5) with @chiiild at @moroccanlounge! I’m equally excited and nervous to see you because nothing feels weirder than a bunch of people you know watching you do something. At the same time, nothing feels safer and warmer. I can’t wait to have a moment and make a memory together. Wednesday’s show will carry on at its original sinful hour. 💛
Making art is one of the greatest joys of my life. Sharing it with you is one of the greatest honors. And starting on Monday, I’m sure I’ll be able to put beautiful words to what it’s like to sing my songs in a room with you! Through it all, I want you to know that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing and pretty much nobody does. But what a sad and colorless world it would be — void of art, and love and even our very existence — if we weren’t willing to dive headfirst into things we don’t understand, and figure them out as we go. I love that most answers come with new questions. Constantly not knowing, and therefore being constantly curious and hungry for growth. This is a clip of the “I’m not a mother, but I have children” video. It’s about infinite rebirth, which one might do in a single lifetime or perhaps even in many.
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Director: me
Edited by: me
Additional editing (intro): @oprahtheactress
Set and costume design by: me
Shot in my bathtub by: @oprahtheactress
Shot in @marcszafran’s swimming pool by @carlocorbellini
Produced by: me (tub scenes, pools scenes) and @carlocorbellini (pool scenes)
Special thanks to @kk.rylend
It’s only a matter of days before we get to see each other! Come feed your soul, and so that your smile can help me through the nerves of my first proper solo shows ever opening for @chiiild! I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll never know what I’m doing. But fuck it, let’s do it! Link to tix in my bio.
I musta woke up in a dream
I musta smoked amp****mines
Tell me this ain’t reality
L$D
Anything
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Maybe my car flew off a bridge
Doctor, I need a better drip
Tell me that this is all a glitch
In the sys —
In the system
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Thinking about the state of the world with your mind is one thing. You can don your evil thinking cap and, without agreeing with it, logically draw a line from one atrocity to another. But thinking about the state of the world with your heart is another thing entirely. The more I think with my heart, the less sense everything makes. That’s what “Trippin’” — track 4 on my debut album, “I’m not a mother, but I have children,” (out now!) is about. I find it nearly impossible to understand how things like war, discrimination, climate change, homelessness, injustice and inequity exist. I find it nearly impossible to understand how governments have, and employ, so many mechanisms to harm their own people. I find it painfully, confusingly, difficult to understand how we, the people, don’t collectively understand how interconnected all life is, and what a crucial role each of us plays in saving it. We must be trippin’.
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It feels like a daunting task, but I truly believe that global change begins with examining ourselves, our relationships, and our individual positive, negative and harmfully neutral impacts on our our own and our communities’ existence. It’s okay to have been wrong, which often means to have been taught wrong, so long as we’re willing to acknowledge and grow from it. Change is realistically within all of our reaches, but perhaps the most confusing thing of all is how resistant we’ve been programmed to be to it. Passively resistant, passionately resistant, fearfully resistant, violently resistant, and those with an especially large amount of untapped power and potential to change the world for the better: the comfortably resistant for whom the system was built to work. We need your help!
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“Trippin’” written by: me
Produced by: @twofreshbeats, @iantmhlanga (🇿🇼) & myself
Mixed by: @michaelfreeman12
🎥: @oprahtheactress (full video coming soon!)
First song written in my new home! @raazalgul on guitar
The side of my face, a face made out of weird sand that I’ve kept generally intact for two-and-a-half years and through moving house, standard garden harvest texts from my father, I love indoor flower bouquets but hate the idea of them dying without fulfilling their desires to share their pollen, a 100-pound dog fetus, my favorite lamp, hemp flower (CBD) is great for people like me who love weed but hate getting high (thanks @lolalangusta & @shopstonedfox), I put my head next to his head and transmit love, life with Raynaud’s syndrome (it’s not a big deal, just annoying), remember when women used fans to hide their faces in order to flirt with their eyes? Try to think of masks like that, only less sexist because now we all get to do it and be super classically sultry (or not) in the process.
I remember the day I was born. The feeling of being pulled away from my mother and this lifetime, and then the feeling of coming back via this great force working in the opposite direction. And even though my eyes couldn’t yet see perfectly in a medical sense, I have a clear-as-day vision of watching a needle being pricked into my foot — which is what the doctors used to see if my brain could recognize pain even though I was unresponsive. Curling my toes was my way of saying, “I’m alive!”
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Thank you to the women who named, raised and saved me, to the women who named, raised and saved them, to the women who named, raised and saved them, and so on and so forth through my ancestral infinity. And much gratitude to the good men, reformed men and sperm donors in my lineage. (ESPECIALLY the reformed men who broke out of cyclical patriarchal, ancestral and systemic trauma and stereotypes to become gentle, vulnerable and loving with themselves and others.) My mother taught me that anything is possible. She went to battle with my sick, sad and rebellious sides that constantly wanted to give up and fail, and didn’t stop fighting until I believed in myself with as much consistency and conviction as she believed in me. My father speaks in poems and epics. I wouldn’t be the artist I am today if not for the childhood I spent listening to, and learning from, his captivating voice.
Let’s go to a ball and then eat hot wings and then watch movies about aliens colonizing other aliens’ land and act like that’s not what’s happening on Earth because their blood isn’t red.
It ain’t you who ever needs to harden up. It’s the world that needs to get soft. Here’s your hopeful song of the day! Lots to do to finish this one, if I finish this one, but I hope that even in its roughest state, it brings some comfort to the softness in you. Also, I’m really enjoying sharing unfinished music here — it’s so liberating!
I’ve been writing a lot of songs of hope lately — mostly as meditations for myself — and figured I’d continue to share some of the rough ideas here in case you’re in need of some hope in this exact moment too. Here is today’s song. In case you’ve forgotten, you are deserving of love! Starting with love from yourself and emanating outwards into beautiful, shared love with others. 💛
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I don’t know if I’ll release these songs, but if you wanna hear some of the songs I have released recently, check out “I’m not a mother, but I have children” — the album. 💛
