During my tenure here I’ve refrained from indulging in wild “blogger antics,” and diary-style journaling, preferring to focus on the music and my relationship with it. Today that’s gonna change. I want to write about music, but other than whatever Emeyesi plays in his car (a playlist comprised almost solely of Common’s Finding Forever and Sankofa’s The Tortoise Hustle) I haven’t listened to much of it lately. Besides, a month-long absence warrants an explanation, and providing that requires me to get a little personal.
As some of you know, my health faltered in July until a day in early August when I wound up in a hospital ER suffering from a gnarly infection. But what most of you don’t know is that by some cruel twist of fate my mother Deborah, a woman who was both my best friend and my only family, ended up in the same ER on the same day, afflicted with an undiagnosed malady. After getting sliced up, scooped out, taped down and sent on my way I spent every day at her bedside until the doctors concluded she’d had a stroke. She would lose her life about a week after this devastating diagnosis was handed down.
My mother was the most important person in the world to me. She was my teacher, instilling in me a life-long love of learning, without which I couldn’t write a blog like this. She was the one who brought home the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rappers Delight” 12” when I was just a toddler, sparking another life-long love, of music in general, and Hip-Hop specifically. She taught me how to dance, telling me about moves she’d seen kids in New York busting, urging me to replicate them before I had any inkling what “breakdancing” was. She introduced me to the world of record collecting via her obsession with all things Prince, including limited edition picture-discs, 12”-only b-sides, demos and bootlegs. She put up with me damaging her turntable learning to scratch, and with listening to me cut up obscenity-laced Hip-Hop records at all hours of the night once I’d got proper turntables and a mixer. She never questioned why I’d spend every single dollar I had on vinyl. Unlike some parents she loved Hip-Hop, and attended shows herself (and was particularly excited about meeting Public Enemy in ‘94) through the late ’90s. She didn’t balk when I grew what would become calf-length dreadlocks and a crazy Jew-beard. She remarked for years that I should be on the radio, and was proud beyond words when I finally was. She was my biggest supporter, reading my blogs here at Okayplayer (to the point where she was schooling me about the likes of Talib Kweli and Erykah Badu) and Imageyenation every day without fail. She was also the one who suggested the name “Logarhythms” which, after consulting with the Okayplayer braintrust, provided the inspiration for this blog’s final title, Blogarhythms.
My mother was the inspiration for almost everything I’ve ever done, and she will continue to inspire me until the day I join the essence myself.
-El Keter
