Sunday, October 28, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
Our journey into the music world
Then, our fans used to call us, Paul and Peter. He influenced our musical career. We were challenged by Michael Jackson’s huge achievements in the world of music. We said to ourselves, if Michael Jackson could do all of these, we could equally do better. So, we tried our best and by the grace of God and our fans, we have realise our dreams.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
MI records Ashes in memory of Aluu4- Song + Lyrics
“4 young men died at the hands of a lynch mob on the 5th of October 2012. Whether or not their deaths will mean anything, or fade out of our minds as just another meaningless tragedy, is up to us and what we do from here on. I hope this song captures that message. Nothing would be worse than for a death to mean nothing" - MI Abaga.
Listen to the song HERE and Read More to see the lyrics.
Lyrics
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Family life
Seeing the photo each morning makes me smile as I remember playing with my cousin Ronald. I want his tricycle. I also want his black cowboy hat, the jacket with its sheriff's badge, and the studded black holster with a gun. Recognising my covetous stare, Ronald remains in the saddle of his new red Triang tricycle and aims his gun at me. "Bang!" The caps explode on cue. Looking over his shoulder, he grins, riding past as I watch from under my sunbonnet. Mother wants to take his photo. "Stand together," Mother orders.
Apprehensive at being parted from his tricycle, Ronald looks at me, gun in hand. We stand in the heat, a cowboy and his cousin, fidgeting in the sun. I almost combust with excitement at Auntie Kay's suggestion: "Ronald, let Jacqueline sit on the bike for a photo." Biting his lip, he stands behind me, one hand touching his tricycle possessively. I sit astride the glorious thing. "Smile," Mother instructs. I'm already smiling.
As teenagers, Ronald and I often see each other at the Saturday hop. For one dance, we'll jostle our way on to the floor, twisting and twirling to the sounds of the 60s. Tonight, he's with Sandra, a new girlfriend. Looking sharper than ever, he's wearing a black suit, black shirt and a silver-tipped bootlace neck-tie held in place by a white skull with vacant eyes. "Howdy, partner. Fab neck-tie. Makes you look like a rootin' tootin' cowboy," I laugh, remembering his cowboy outfit.
He introduces Sandra and we chatter happily until the music starts. At the end of the evening, Ronald presses something into my hand. "A present," he grins. Wearing the neck-tie, I blow a kiss in his direction, laughing.
Later, I'm selling records to help finance my move to London and Ronald sifts through my collection. He's learned to play guitar and is in a band. "We've even got bookings," he smiles modestly. "Sandra will have to watch out for the groupies," I joke. His genial expression changes. "Because she's Protestant, Mother objects, but I'm still seeing her."
He hands over the cash for his records, wishing me luck. "We might end up in London, with you," he smiles wryly. We exchange goodbyes and promise to write.
Battling with our own problems, we never write during the next two years.
My two-year-old daughter and I happen to be in Dublin with my terminally ill mother when she hears the news.
"Dead? How can Ronald be bloody dead? He's 22," I rage.
"Last night … on stage … his guitar … electrocuted ... in front of Sandra," Mother weeps.
She demurs at my intention to see Ronald. "I have to say goodbye to him and I don't care what he looks like. He's still Ronald," I reason.
In the mortuary, Ronald is dressed in a shroud. I ignore his bluish appearance. Remembering him dressed in his black suit and shirt, the silver-tipped bootlace necktie with the grinning skull and vacant eyes, I smile. He's still Ronald, my rootin' tootin' cowboy cousin. Jackie Kirby
Sailing by Rod Stewart
"I am sailing, I am sailing/home again 'cross the sea"
Dams, caves, dingoes, the bush, giant snakes, sun and sand so hot you couldn't stand on it or it would burn your bare feet – that was all I'd known for most of my childhood growing up in Central Africa. I hardly put a pair of shoes on between the ages of four and 10. My sisters and I were bought up as bush babies, travelling around the copper belt in Central Africa with our newly divorced mother – my parents separated not long after we arrived in Zambia in 1970. It was a wild, free, sun-bleached childhood.
After years of travelling and adventure, we ended up in Durban, living close to the beach. But after years of idyllic living in the bush in small towns, apartheid South Africa was a bit more dangerous and my mum decided that we'd move back to the UK.
Around Christmas 1975, I remember standing on the balcony of our Durban flat with a transistor radio balanced on the low wall, Rod Stewart's Sailing wafting out, and I remember feeling the heat and tasting the salt of the sea air. "I am sailing, I am sailing, home again, 'cross the sea. I am sailing, stormy waters, to be near you, to be free," in his raspy, anguished tones. It was ominous.
Weeks later, in January, we flew, rather than sailed across the sea, and arrived at a snowy Heathrow airport with no coats.
School, concrete, spaghetti junction – a deprived, poor childhood in urban Birmingham awaited. No more barefoot adventures, no more freedom. It seemed like no more childhood.
Every time I hear that song I want to cry and cry. Sailing represents the end of a magical childhood, and the beginning of a much bleaker, greyer, more austere chapter of my life. Sally Goble
Ingredients
1 packet ready-made pastry (flaky is best)
8 to 10 rashers of thickish, streaky bacon
6 to 8 eggs
3 or 4 largish potatoes, thinly sliced
1 carton of cream – single or double
Line the bottom of a pie dish with bacon and crack the eggs on top of it, spreading them evenly across. Gently layer sliced potatoes over the eggs and cover with a thin layer of cream. Season to taste and top the lot with a pastry lid, pierced in the centre. Bake in a preheated oven – 10 mins at 220C, followed by 20 to 30 mins at 180C – until the potatoes give to a sharp knife. Delicious hot or cold, especially in furtive slices carved off when passing the fridge.
An intelligent, no-nonsense Yorkshire-woman with strong socialist and feminist beliefs, my father's sister Dorothy emigrated to New Zealand as a "£10 pom" to escape 50s Britain, where boys got first look in on every aspect of society. Bright enough to have been a doctor, she'd instead gone into nursing, a career in which she flourished and eventually offered the possibility of a new life in any commonwealth country she liked. Choosing New Zealand over Canada, she told her parents she'd be gone for two years. Fifty years later, she was still there and fiercely proud to be a Kiwi.
My husband and I arrived in New Zealand in time to celebrate Dorothy's 40th wedding anniversary to Dixie – an engineer-cum-sheep farmer she'd met on the six-week sea voyage over. As my father and Dorothy had rarely kept in touch, she was pretty much a stranger to me when we met that first time in July 1995. "She's feisty," my backpacking brother told me. "Whatever you do, don't call her Dot," warned her daughter Rachael. "She detests it."
To everyone's surprise, we found neither to be true. "We don't argue, we debate, don't we?" she said to my husband, standing beside him and drying pots as he washed them. She greatly enjoyed examining our viewpoints and challenging entrenched beliefs – "Now you know that's not true, don't you?" – all with good-humoured affection and, usually, a slab of cake.
She was generous with her time, her experience, her possessions, her home, which we visited as much as we could during our holiday, more often than not sitting with them both at the kitchen table, discussing every aspect of life and eating Dorothy's delicious, home-cooked food, including egg and bacon pie. It was a tasty, satisfying dish from her wartime childhood, which came to stand as a reminder of everything Dorothy meant to us. For some years after she'd make one specially for those precious times we managed to return to her kitchen table, all the way down at the bottom of the world. Alison Mott
We will pay £25 for every Letter to, Playlist, Snapshot or We love to eat we publish. Write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email family@guardian.co.uk. Please include your address and phone number
Waging Heavy Peace by Neil Young – review
Despite being surrounded from an early age by the usual trappings of advanced rock'n'roll hedonism, particularly after his album Harvest became the best seller of 1972, Neil Young has never been your average rock star, and this not your average rock star autobiography. There is a little bit of weed and cocaine – quite a lot, actually, but not flaunted, as it were, under the reader's nose – and some discussion of guitars and the occasional backstage tantrum, but rather more about his son Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and is quadriplegic, and his own childhood polio and the brain aneurism that attacked him in 2005.
Young is a natural obsessive and a bit cantankerous, which makes an interesting combination. Unlike Bob Dylan, whose Chronicles: Volume One seemed intent on telling the real story, albeit with embellishments and occlusions, he seems uncertain of the core purpose of the project. Young stopped drinking and smoking shortly before starting to write, and it may be that the book represents a sort of displacement therapy. But those drawn over the last half-century to his high, strained voice and doggedly affecting ballads will find plenty here to flesh out their portrait of a man who prefers amplifiers with valves and cars with carburettors, and resents the way today's music is marketed "like a cool pastime or a toy, not a message to the soul".
Having grown up watching his father, a prominent journalist and broadcaster in Canada, tapping out columns for Toronto's Globe and Mail on a typewriter, he has declined to avail himself of a ghostwriter's services. His distinctly unplugged prose can plod along in an artless, ruminative sort of way, or it can – very occasionally – take wing. The style turns out to be as unpredictable a combination of awkwardness and grace as his music, lurching from sudden insights – "the muse has no conscience", he notes, meditating on his readiness to do the dirty work of firing colleagues who fail to meet his standards – to the occasional aside of such startling banality that the reader pauses, searching in vain for a redeeming irony: "California really is beautiful if you've never been there. It's worth a visit for sure." There are lots of exclamation marks, and even an "OMG", which sounds odd coming from the pen of a 66-year-old man.
He begins by describing the act of unwrapping a present from his wife, a rare piece of vintage switchgear for the elaborate model train set he keeps at his principal home, the Broken Arrow Ranch, in northern California (there are other homes in Hawaii and Malibu). He built the train set many years ago with Ben, who is now in his mid-30s. Many of the associated items – locomotives, carriages, accessories – are kept in display cases, whose windows Young carefully polishes.
A couple of pages later he is telling us about a pivotal moment in his life: his purchase of a 1953 Buick Skylark, a car he had desired since his childhood, after seeing one belonging to a friend of his father. "It was brand-new and made a large impression on me," he writes, "with its beautifully designed grille, tail-lights and an overall shape that featured a kind of bump or ripple in the lines at about the midpoint, accentuated by a chrome strip that mirrored it." The coveted Skylark became the centrepiece of a collection that eventually expanded to about 35 cars of character, many of which we meet at some point in his tale, as when he is taking his wife on a first date (baby-blue '49 Cadillac convertible), vainly searching for the location of the TV show 77 Sunset Strip on a first trip to Los Angeles from his Canadian home ('53 Pontiac hearse), or cruising the Hollywood Hills between recording sessions for his first solo album ('34 Mulliner-bodied Bentley coupe).
Soon he moves on to the two matters that seem to have become an even more pressing obsession, and on behalf of which the book occasionally turns into a propaganda vehicle. The first is an audio reproduction system called PureTone, with which he hopes to rescue the recording industry from the digitally compressed sound of the iPod. "Today, music is presented as an entertainment medium, like a game, without the full audio quality," he writes. The second is the Lincvolt, an old Lincoln Continental adapted to run on electricity and ethanol with the intention of demonstrating to auto industry sceptics that if such a beast can be turned into an ecologically neutral device, then anything is possible. The Lincvolt's job is to rescue the planet.
"I put in the money to do it myself," he says of his projects, "and do whatever I need to do to get the money, promise that I will deliver a record and get advances, anything I can do to get the cash to make something happen the way I envision it. So I get into a lot of trouble, although I also get a lot of things done."
His relationship with the digital age provokes his most interesting meditation on his first-hand experience of changes in a musician's relationship with his work and his audience. "Any experiment I try onstage is thrown up on YouTube, where people who think they know what I should be doing start shooting holes in it before it's even finished," he writes. "This is the single most daunting challenge the internet has provided, along with all the good things. The stage used to be my lab, where I could experiment in front of a live audience and see how it reacted and – more important – how I felt while I was doing it … Now I try to work things out in private while I develop ideas. That way I have a chance to present the first time to a large audience. Unfortunately, that is not as adventuresome for me."
None of this has much to do with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, the three musicians with whom, in the early 1970s, he toured and recorded as part of what was probably the most popular (and high-earning) band of its time. They are dealt with in a handful of pages that end with a crisp explanation of a break-up largely rooted in his discontent: "But then came the fame, the drugs, the money, houses, cars and admirers; then the solo albums … In the end, it became a celebration of ourselves, and there was no way to keep that going."
For all Young's engagement with serious issues, Waging Heavy Peace is not without its reminders that he achieved his celebrity during an easily satirised time of excessive reward and immoderate self-indulgence. When an aide calls to break the news that his beloved customised tour bus, known as Pocahontas, has caught fire and burnt out, he has its remains conveyed to his ranch and buried in a eucalyptus grove.
World music: the globe-shaped vinyl record by Yuri Suzuki
"DJs are always arguing about which medium is better, vinyl or laptop," says designer Yuri Suzuki when I meet him in his studio in Hackney, a small room full of electrical parts, tools and shelves groaning under a weighty vinyl collection. "I wanted to make a point about music being something physical."
His latest work to make this point takes the form of a glossy black globe, clamped in a metal vice. It looks like a ball of dark matter, an oily orb held in suspended animation, something mined from the depths of space awaiting testing.
Suzuki presses a button and the orb begins to spin, emitting a crackly sequence of noises, as if the globe is channelling some garbled communication from a distant galaxy.
This is The Sound of the Earth, a spherical vinyl record. It is played by a stylus that runs longitudinally down the side of the globe, tracking a continuous groove that spirals around the circumference from pole to pole. On its journey, as it scans across the continents subtly inscribed on the black surface, it plays a surreal mashup of field recordings taken by Suzuki on his travels, along with fragments of national anthems and folk music from around the world.
"I'm always travelling," says Suzuki – just back from Sweden before jetting off to Belgium, followed by Oslo, Lausanne and Tokyo. "I take a dictaphone wherever I go, and this project was a way of bringing all these sounds together."
A film about The Sound of the Earth by Alice MastersHe has been working on the idea for the last three years, developing software that allows him to map the sounds on to the 3D surface, and recently devised a spherical track cutting machine with the help of engineers in Tokyo.
The project follows on from a series of works that play with the physical properties of music, an interest that came out of an accident with his laptop.
"A few years ago my hard drive crashed and I lost my entire 500Gb music collection," he grins, looking surprisingly liberated by the idea. "From then on, music held in physical objects seemed safer."
His graduation project from the Royal College of Art comprised a series of studies that looked at different ways of playing conventional records. Sound Chaser was a Scalextric track made from pieces of old vinyl, around which little stylus cars could run. His Finger Player allowed you to play records through a stylus strapped to your finger, letting users feel the sounds they were playing.
Since graduating in 2008, he has gone on to build everything from animation machines to dancing robots, as well as a room-sized contraption that put together a cooked breakfast from scratch.
"Each project is trying to educate people about the way things work," says Suzuki, although it seems that performance outweighs pedagogy in much of his work. As part of his current residency at the Design Museum, he has been developing an electronics kit for children in the form of an interlocking puzzle that explains the principles behind circuit boards, as well as a radio whose electronics are based on the layout of the London tube map.
So what's next?
"I get approached by really strange clients all the time, wanting really crazy things," he says, somewhat nervously. "Sometimes I wish I could fix on one direction."
I hope he doesn't. The power of Yuri Suzuki's work lies in his promiscuous appetite to cross disciplines – from electronics to film-making, performance art to education – using these multiple media to bring us his uniquely sideways view of the world.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Prophet TB Joshua: Doubts Over Miracles, Prophecies, Source Of Power And Other Activities
Again, Prophet TB Joshua was in the news recently for another controversy. This minister and his organisation; The Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) remain the most controversial Christian personalities in the world today. There are doubts over their emergence, miracles, prophecies, source of power and other activities.
In fact, every action of this prophet or any news from his synagogue is always received with suspicion by the Christian community, the media and even unbelievers. So, few weeks ago, when Adelaide Tawiah; the wife of the Ghanaian former premier league goalkeeper Richard kingson was reported to have confessed on a television programme organised by Joshua that she was a witch and was responsible for spiritually sabotaging her husband’s football carrier and also rendering him impotent, I knew it was going to be another ‘rain of bashes’ for the Arigidi-Akoko born self-styled preacher. Kingson who has previously played in the Premier League for Birmingham , Wigan and Blackpool, has failed to find a new club since being released from Bloomfield Road last year and has also lost his place in the Ghana national team.
The couple went to be prayed for and as the prophet was casting out the ‘evil spirit’ from Mrs Kingson, she fell down and began to confess, “I messed up Richard’s life ever since we got married. I used my evil powers to trouble his career, I’ve been working on him spiritually to the point he could not perform in bed,” Imagine that! On television! Before her husband and the congregation! Before the whole world! She has since denied being a witch or responsible for her husband’s misfortunes. She said she was spiritually manipulated by TB to make those confessions. She says she has been very supportive of her husband’s carrier and never worked against him. Kingson has also denied that his wife is a witch. But all these are coming late because the damage has already been done.
Remember this is the same woman who saved Kingson from shame in 2006 when she advised him not to take a $300,000 bribe to let in two goals during a match against the Czech Republic at the 2006 World Cup in Germany . This tempting amount was against the paltry sum of $8,000 that was the winning bonus for the match. She told her husband not to involve in such dirty deal because her love for him is not for money. She has also stressed that her husband knows how inspirational she has been to his goalkeeping career.
Prophet Temitope Balogun Joshua, fondly called TB Joshua is not new controversies. Remember, when Chris Oyakhilome visited him sometime ago. That singular action caused so much uproar in the Nigeria Christian circles and the media promptly feasted on it. The ‘vibrations’ from that crisis dictated the headlines for the major newspapers and magazines for so many weeks. The Nigerian Christians were confused.
Though they had permanently placed TB as a false prophet, but they didn’t know what to do with Chris Oyakhilome; who later claimed that he shares the same father-in-the- lord with TB, and was going to the synagogue to learn healing from the prophet. This shook the whole nation. Many ministers of the gospel reacted. People like Chris Okotie chided Oyakhilome and also began to dissect TB’s operations; describing him as a high occult manipulator. Trust him to use known and unknown words to drive home this point. It was virtually media a war between them. I still remember some of those headlines: ‘The War of the Chrises’, ‘Crisis of the Chrises’, ‘Oyakhilome Replies Okotie’, etc.
It was later that we were made to know that the publicity given to the Oyakhilome’s visits to the Synagogue was arranged by TB and his media assistants. The same people that did the ‘work’ are now saying so. Have you watched the video produced by one Bisi and Agomoh? Bisi said she was the head of TB’s media team and Agomoh, the former Deputy to the prophet. The pictures and the confession in this video are simply shocking, revealing, unbelievable and unprintable.
Nigerian Fake Pastors and Church Businesses Exposed- Video
They graphically, in details, with clips, pictures narrated how this man abuses women; whites, blacks, minors, choir members, sisters of same parents, wives of his workers and pastors, etc. Even Bisi confessed she was also mercilessly, thoroughly abused, used, manipulated and rendered useless by this man. She showed her pictures when she came newly to the synagogue and the ones while leaving to show how she was virtually turned into a ghost through sexual abuse and spiritual manipulation.
They also revealed how the so-called miracles and healings take place in the synagogue, how people are hired to do fake confessions, the media manipulations, how they arrange words of knowledge and wisdom, the source of the man’s power and influence, his hatred for true ministers of the gospel; how he marches on their pictures making powerful incantations against them.
They also talked about his hit squads, rituals, deceits, hatred for whites, love for money, etc. I mean on video. It is a must-watch. And remember these are his erstwhile confidants. Insiders! You will get very very angry in the spirit after watching the video. I watched it objectively, comparing it with other facts that I have. And if these things are fake, why have the producers not been sued for defamation up till now?? But are these men truly fake prophets or anti-Christ?
How do you know a fake prophet or a fake place of worship?? We will continue next week, God bless!
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