On Glow, A Pre-Christmas Earwarm
How we consume media in 2060? Let's consider an earwarm: an immersive VR performance of a music album.
Jay Ejim
Kiri City,
Itse-Ukoro,
Confederated Riverine States
Friday, December 6th, 2060
I receive an invitation to Ribad’s new earwarm while lunching at the popular rest stop, Gastronomous, on Thursday. A new entrant to the music scene, Ribad is that artist who, however, he performs, whatever he performs, always kicks your auditory palette. I looked forward to what he has for us this time.
Friday evening has us seated in the Amphi, overlooking the Obekpa Pier, the Bembe-Costa Nueva Beltway, and the Atlantic. I scan the crowd of attendees. It is as expected: rich kids looking for a weekend thrill who paid heftily for the tickets, informal social supernovas who are counted on to agitate the performance to currency on the tethernet, culture critics like me, and odd lucky picks you can pick out from a mile away by how agog they are. An earwarm is such a brilliant concept, a new way of delivering media that fully integrates a live audience and makes it part of a re-liveable experience. Put together a body of music, invite for a live AR/VR performance session, blow your audience out of the water with a good show, replicate in various venues, publish on the tethernet, and give third parties limited adaptation and publishing rights. Pray it gains currency. After the first success, rinse and repeat.
On Glow begins right on time. We are given access to the VR environment at 6:15 pm, and our social avatars are registered. Ribad and Memo step on stage. MeMo is the stage name of Meniru Mo-Zi. Born of a Chinese father naturalized in Atlantico, and a Neyoma mother, MeMo is, in addition to being a model product of international relations, a phenom of a virtual environment engineer. I’ve never seen a bad MeMo AR/VR work. He is likely the best affordable engineer in all of CRS. If you have money to throw around, there’s Ray-Unreal, Fantasy Mike, and A. Ighodaro, but MeMo packs as much wallop as any of these on a budget. MeMo is streets.
Ribad introduces himself and MeMo minimally, a wee cheeky. I’ll give him props for confidence. The show opens...
...with Farabale, a throwback to the Afro-jazz of the late 20s, and Ribad’s characteristic laid-back syrupy drawl, harmonized to a soft but lively rhythm, set the tone for the evening. Grapeviner’s Ochuko Green calls him “the okra-voiced crooner,” and it is evident why here. Even in his hypnotic delivery and downplayed passion, there’s a casual but thick sensuality to Ribad’s singing. He does have fiery moments, though, when he shows something wild and, quite frankly, winning.
Ribad’s humor is clear in songs like Tango, where he pursues a love interest through a crowd. She is brightly colored, slipping through a crowd of gray, featureless figures, and we follow Ribad’s avatar as he gives chase and weaves through the crowd. They whip past him like hanging sheets, with a whap-whap sound that meters the song. He wants to tear them apart like Samson, he sings, but he holds himself back so that they do not pounce on him, tear out his dreadlocks, and tie him up with it. Ribad’s charming personality is a blend of boyish bravado and vulnerable naivete.
The jewel in the crown of On Glow is his collaboration with Boro Coast’s Qizzy, on Don’t Mind Me. Qizzy is that international superstar Midas, with a touch that glams up a thing on contact. I do not know how Ribad made her contact (or what it cost him), but he is favored for that one.
Catch Ribad on this:
Don’t mind me,
I'm just a guy
Who hasn't texted back for hours
Because he's thinking up a special name
Just for you.
Don't mind me,
I'm just a guy
Who looks at you when you aren't looking
But across the distance when you are.
And Qizzy’s avatar, dancing amid various nested pink petals endlessly blooming one out of the other (yeah, it is as suggestive as it sounds), gave a response after every three stanzas. A pert, energetic dancer, twenty-two and certainly older than Ribad, her rich, raspy voice is at once playful and seductive. The thrilling bit about Qizzy’s part is that you cannot tell if she is responding to Ribad’s shy advances positively (by responding “Don’t Mind Me”) or not and is only jerking him around (by splitting the stanza after “Don’t”). Allow me to rave: Qizzy is that born artist. Generally, through the earwarm performance and his artistic persona, Ribad gives off the late-teen romantic who, even if on his third love, is still puppy-loving and can’t help it. Qizzy plays off this as the older and wiser next-door crush, with a mean streak and small skoin skoin, forever giving him blue balls and midnight blues. That’s chem.
Some of the songs Ribad performs for us, others he lets us participate in, individually or as a group. And it is in the seamless transitions between that MeMo shows his mettle. Every song had its AR/VR surround tailored not only for effect and mood but for pique—that quality in AR/VR engineering that denotes an engineer’s empathy and sensitivity to his audience’s feelings, and an openness to interactive play. This is why, money considerations aside, MeMo is likely more than a match for his elite peers.
MeMo visuals are a perfect fit for Ribad’s storytelling. The components of the performance are so finely meshed that I forget at moments that I am in a made-up reality. I haven’t had as much immersive thrill since Ojah-Dilly’s April earwarm Spaceship, engineered by Oh My! Studios, where we touched extraterrestrial fauna through the portals of his VR rocketship—a positively electric performance. During the jaunty Get Lost play, the sense of being in a race car skidding and slaloming along a track gets me giddy and mildly carsick. Or when Memo sends forth a scatter of butterflies of all the rainbow colors from the stage. An aquamarine butterfly lights on my avatar, giving it an aquamarine glow, and I feel an ambient buzz. In a sweep, the audience gets a vibrant multi-colored neon transformation, and spontaneous applause greets this. Ribad tips his hat at MeMo, who raises his hands in reply. Those two have chem, baby. Organic!
The sounds are primarily samples from music so far back it boggles the mind. I later run the songs by Time Crawler, which identifies one as rock from the fifties—of the last century! A few turn-of-the-century tunes sampled are spring chicken in comparison. Of course, a fine blend with more recent sounds makes them familiar to modern ears. On Glow is a nostalgia project, a rosy-lensed look backward, an enchantment with the antique. However, the project is so well put together that what could have been a hamstring is quite good, even its essential charm.
The last song, Night Comes Early in December, is a sleepy, jazzy farewell of lovers. One lone but lively trumpet picking up the offbeat attends deep, lonely plucks of a double-bass. Capricious piano swings into the melody, and buzzing cymbals join in, bringing the medley to a sweltering head. The accompanying visual is a night cloud canopy lit by a billion stars, against which appears now and then the silhouette of one and then another of this phantom jazz band. Even the audience’s avatars are partly dissolved in the dark. When the sounds fade, and the virtual environment winks off, floodlights come on and break a gossamer enchantment. One feels disappointed in the drab, comparatively fake night one finds oneself in. The night traffic along the beltway is thinner, and streetlamps light up cars that chase their headlamp beams along. After a few quiet seconds, we burst out a hearty applause for the performers. It’s 7:05. Night does come early in December.
With the creative choices Ribad makes on On Glow, from his employing old samples to his pick of earwarmers, he targets an elite audience and is not playing to every ear. His songs will not receive many play points from trenches Jero Oke Layout. Instead, it will be played more in neighborhoods from Omorevbie Pass, the border of posh, northwards. I predict an earwarm tour that would touch the Ivy-League campuses of Asanoba, Neyoma, blast in bars in Atlantico’s Strip, and play in arenas in Capitol, Bindi. Such a shrewd marketing ploy by an artist so young is to be admired (very impressive because I hear the seventeen-year-old is his manager). No points for guessing what top-paying establishments his endorsements will come from. I don’t know what you are waiting for if you haven’t cached Ribad shares. Now, it is still early, but not for very long.
Nor any points from predicting On Glow’s gaining wild currency come Christmas. Ribad tunes will keep the tethernet aglow this season. We will do reckless things to Get Lost (And Find Yourself), fall in corny love with Don’t Mind Me, ease off with Farabale, and take evening strolls to Night Comes Early in December. The critic in me is tempted to give him a 3.5 for somewhat shallow lyrics and a lack of thematic cohesion in the body of work. However, he makes a wise commercial decision overall, and sampling oldies is as unifying a theme as anything else. Alright then, I’ll give him a 4.5 because the last 0.5 is on God, don’t stress me.