Press your ear to the pages and have a listen
There are chords and choruses in Walking on Cowrie Shells. Songs that played on the B-side of my mind as I crafted the cadences of sentences. There are songs + artists DJ-dropped directly in the mix of text, while others underscore scenes cinematically - evoking joy/pain/heartache/fury. Characters have theme music - bespoke boomboxes tailored to a distinct personality and persona, echoes of what they project to the world or protect from it. Press play.
faya di burn / gasha feat. magasco
IT TAKES A VILLAGE SOME SAY is a two-volume narrative exploring the acquisition and alienation of familial affections, told from the perspectives of transnational adoptive parents and their “straight from motherland” daughter.. Vol. II- Their Girl features a bold, many-named young woman from an impoverished birth family, seeking to secure her American come-up, by any means necessary. Her playlist is full of brash beats and braggadocio with lines like “Boy, ne joue pas” from Aya Nakamura’s “Pookie” asserting that she’s the one running game and never the one who gets played, while a track like “This Life” by Gasha feat. Magasco speaks to the conditions left behind that fuel her fiery ambitions.
For the full IT TAKES A VILLAGE SOME SAY - THEIR GIRL playlist, click here.
love me in your language / kudu
RAIN CHECK AT MOMOCON is a künstlerroman exploring the graphic novel writing aspirations of Astrid Atangana, a Cameroonian teen attending Comic Con with her frenemies, Mimi and Mbola, and her creative collaborator and secret crush, Young Yoon. This playlist reflects its teen characters' range of musical tastes from Young “Young Money” Yoon’s swaggerlicious, 88Rising mixtape of Asian hip hop joints to the BTS & Blackpink bops worthy of a K-poppy TikTok challenge , while Kudu’s “Love Me In Your Language” explicitly nods to Astrid’s “Rosetta Stone wing woman” status to help her girls pull “K-Town hotties,” it more subtly alludes to the shared artistic language with Young, doubly important to a girl who regularly mutes her voice to maintain a “good immigrant daughter” persona.
For the full RAIN CHECK AT MOMOCON playlist, click here.
double, double / Atta boafo
THE DEVIL IS A LIAR is a tale of afro-Christian spiritual reckonings seen through the lens of a mother and daughter searching for meaning in the midst of a family crisis. I often describe this narrative’s voice as “lyrical and sermonic” so fittingly its international playlist is “manna from heaven” full of hallelujah choruses - from Africa, see Atta Boafo’s “Double, Double” & Joe Praize’s “Mighty God” for instance, African-American soul-clap staples like Fred Hammond’s “Jesus Be A Fence,” to reggae praise-Jah jams like Koffee’s “Toast.”
For the full THE DEVIL IS A LIAR playlist, click here.
Hayati Inta / Natacha Atlas
NIGHT BECOMES US is a young Muslimah’s haj to post-trauma healing. The playlist features dancefloor anthems and 808 bangers native to the nightclub where she works as a ladies room attendant dispensing amenities and refereeing girl fights worthy of Klymaxx’s “A Meeting in the Ladies Room.” Scene by scene - the desert blues of Tuareg rockers Tinariwan’s “Sastanàqqàm” evokes the nomadic Bororo cousins who are emblematic of a freedom she longs for, Tokyo Vanity’s hype song “That's My Best Friend” is perfect for her WC dance-off with a friendly club-goer, and I can totally envision her twirling to Natacha Atlas’ “Hayati Inta” in the arms of her Halal cart foodie friend and would-be paramour.
For the full NIGHT BECOMES US playlist, click here.
Lonely World / Moses Sumney
SCHOOLYARD CANNIBAL is a prose-poem full of vignettes from the life of a lonesome and anonymous ‘You’ navigating the microaggressions of a culture that often equates being African with being less than. The playlist swells with gorgeous dirges, songs reflecting pathos and vulnerability backdropped by haunting melodies, like Moses Sumney’s “Lonely World” as well as anthems of alienation like Radiohead’s “Creep.”
For the full SCHOOLYARD CANNIBAL playlist, click here.
the unforgiven / metallica
In IT JUST KILLS YOU INSIDE, a spin doctor deals with his personal demons and the socio-political ramifications of a strange epidemic in Cameroon. This story’s anti-hero is a road-weary SINNERMAN who has traveled the span of this MAD WORLD with a narrative voice that is part hard-boiled, part honky-tonk from a childhood spent in Kentucky hollers tucked HIGH ON A MOUNTAIN and then years as a young marine fighting wars that scarred this un-FORTUNATE SON, made him a cynic whose choices alienated loved ones, their whereabouts unknown. As a grizzled veteran he now seeks connection, seeks family, realizing NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. OPERATOR, could you help him place a call?
For the full IT JUST KILLS YOU INSIDE playlist, click here.
Bang, bang / nancy sinatra
THE STATISTICIAN’S WIFE is an investigation of murder, adoration, and cross-cultural pollination in the life of a Boston Brahmin married to an Igbo ingenue. Its playlist is replete with the structured orchestral compositions like Clint Mansell’s “Lux Aeterna” - which feel as razor-edged and calibrated as the button-downed titular statistician. These selections are juxtaposed by the lively afrobeat rhythms of his wife’s Naija homeland like Mr. Eazi’s “Skin Tight” - an ode to the all-consuming love that surreally finds sonic semblance with The Police’s “Every Step You Take.” What happens when obsession turns toxic? I also mischievously threw in Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) as a whodunnit, maybe red herring? You decide.
For the full THE STATISTICIAN’S WIFE playlist, click here.
bend skin / tala andre marie
DANCE THE FIYA DANCE is my Austen ode with a twist - the high society is a Washington, D.C.-based Cameroonian community. Scene-by-scene - our “fish out of water” heroine follows her family to a range of social events which have varied rhythmic pulses: at a wedding reception “the DJ is playing some old school makossa and bikutsi tracks” reflected by Camer classics like Charlotte Mbango’s “Konkai Makossa” and Prince Eyango’s “You Must Calculer.” The buttle dance rhythms and Bend Skin music that are de rigueur in the elaborate #squad walk-ins that start off many a celebration, the line leader often swinging a horsetail nsang to the beat like a maestro’s baton.
For the full DANCE THE FIYA DANCE playlist, click here.
your lips / olu dara
THE LIVING INFINITE is the bittersweet love saga of a Mami Wata and her mortal husband. Their playful and erotic relationship unfurls along coastal cities from Douala, Cameroon to New Orleans, LA so the story’s playlist is full of zouk love, Quiet Storm slow jams, jazz and juke music like Kassav’s “Kolé Séré,” Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love,” and Rebirth Brass Bands’ “I Feel Like Funkin’ It Up.” I imagine hubby smilingly cajoling his wife when she gets riled up – which given a Mami Wata’s temperament would be often - by crooning lines like “your lips are Louisiana plums” from Olu Dara’s “Your Lips.”
For the full THE LIVING INFINITE playlist, click here.
baby come to me / regina belle
KINKS is a fable of identity politics, hair grease, and a complicated love full of passions and kinks. Its songs are sinisterly sexy like Sade’s seminal classic, “Smooth Operator,” or full of the fevered longing in Regina Belle’s “Baby Come to Me.” The longed-for lover is a firebrand of a man a la Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” who courts the heroine through a “cultural safari” of Blackness - drum beats from one of its waystations pound and thump in this playlist.
For the full KINKS playlist, click here.