With everything happening in the world today due to the CoronaVirus, my life, my emotions, my projects, work , school, has literally been a lot of ups and downs. It had been very hard on me emotionally but I'm getting out of it and now I just want to do so much.
I've been thinking about painting and decorating, live-streaming and pre recorded video releases... my brain is literally on fire with ideas. It's been amazing to fully take the time and see where my mind would go.
An idea that actually came into fruition was a world playlist. One of the things I love the most about my live performances is the response from unexpected audiences when they realize they are going on a world tour of musical genres throughout my sets. My audiences become world travelers throughout the night and I tell them, "Are you ready to get your passport stamps?" (hence all the playlist are passport stamps)
To see people be so open to learning about a culture through music is one of the things that inspired me to start performing this way. You see, I love to travel and I love cultural music. I realized that the more I traveled and brought back stories on stage, the more the audience could relate as well as get the travel bug themselves.
Since I can't give my audiences and fans that experience in person through the usual ways that I get to do it, I decided that every week fans get to pick and collectively vote ( on IG @safiya.music) for a country and throughout the week I would create a custom Spotify Playlist of that specific nations various genres, instrumentation, hits, beats, as well as put musicians that I may know or who reach out to me from said Nations on the playlist to get them more exposure. Each playlist is released on tuesdays at 3pm and starts off with a minimum of 34 songs in the first week and later gets additional songs so that the playlist always gets better!
This Blog, starting this week will be updated weekly with my experiences creating the podcast, observations and analysis of some of the music and artists on the playlist , as well as interesting facts and even history that I learned during the week regarding the music and the culture of the nation. The blog will have the playlist attached as well as a Pinterest page with travel advice and ethnomusicology facts so that you guys, if curious, can go and read more about the countries music and history. I hope that these playlist inspire you to actually travel to the destinations as well as provide you a flavorful mixtape in preparation for your trip but also to check out the travel reservations shared to you on the Pinterest page.
So far we have already had four weeks of playlist : Brazil, New Zealand (Maori), Afro- Columbia, and this week: Ivory Coast. Because of this, I will Be spending this week catching up on the blogs and pinterest for you of the last four playlist.
For our first playlist we traveled to the beautiful Country of brazil.
The country of Brazil has so many beautiful and unique genres, beats... when you hear the sounds, you feel the heartbeat of Brazil. I'm giving you bossa, lofi, sertanejo, samba, labada, MPB, and much more. (Brazil will have its own Blog but until then ....)
Pinterest:
Kia Ora! One of the most beautiful things about New Zealand is its powerful Maori culture.
So why not dwelve into it, right? We start this playlist with Maisey Rika, a powerful vocalist as well as an amazing storyteller. We also go through some reggae as well as hear some Kimbra and Aaradhna.
Aaradhna's song Brown Girl is definitly a song I think everyone should listen to because it resign ants to so many brown girls all over the world. (I'll speak more to it in New Zealand's blog entry later this week)
For our 3rd tip we went to Colombia! For this Playlist we are going to explore the town of
Pelenque de San Basilio, the first free african town in the Americas. With such an amazing history, we are giving the Afro Columbians the honor in this playlist!
This weeks playlist is so lit! We went to Ivory Coast I love the guitars in Ivorian afrobeat!
It’s so sweet! Also two unique stories about this weeks playlist! 1. I actually have a friend @eva_sita whose on here! Check her out ! And I also found out this story that should’ve been a human rights story but they have a documentary on YouTube about it: The Ivorian police cut off the Rasta dreads just last year and they wrote a song about it : translation- don't touch Rasta dreadlocks
Hope you are looking forward to this new adventure we are going on! I know a lot of you voted on a podcast over a blog but I still need little more time with my current set up to execute it the way I would like, so until then I hope this blog and the Pinterest page will fulfill you until then. It's been such an experience so far, listening to hundreds of songs and albums, reading and watching music cultural documentaries. I am truly enjoying this so much and I already know that I'm traveling as soon as the world is back to normal.
So as I always say "Are you ready to get your passport stamps?"
Ways you can vote each week and submit songs are:
INSTAGRAM : @SAFIYA.MUSIC
Till our next adventure,
Safiya