Music, for me, has been an ordinary service to the ear. It takes me a lot of listening and ruminating for a song to really make sense. Most times, I just listen to a song and move on to the next. Only a few songs in the past years have really resonated with me – like Adekunle Gold‘s “Ire” or Burna Boy‘s “Want It All”. Despite growing up with a mother who is obsessed with music legends Sikiru Ayinde Barrister – whom she claims is the best singer of all time by the way – and Ayinla Omowura‘s songs, I never really gave time to meditating on how insightful and poetic songs can be. I guess that’s because I used to believe music is not poetry, and that poetry is something that needs to be read with sound structures like meter and rhyme and all sorts of poetic mechanisms.
But lately, Omah Lay‘s “Reason” got me thinking about my life choices. As someone who partly believes in nihilism, I find some lines in the song so raw and true. I have encountered a couple of mixed submissions on Omah Lay’s genre of music and what he expresses through his songs. I believe music is art and an artiste can choose to express whatever they are feeling, but what makes “Reason” exceptional for me is how Omah Lay directs the questions to his listeners. Of course, the questions might be rhetorical or an internal query to himself about his existence. Either way, I connect.
How long will it take you to realise? While I don’t understand the exact thing Omah Lay is addressing in the song, this is the first line that struck me when I first listened to it. I paused the song and started asking myself, how long would it take me to realise what? My life choices? The journey of life is mysteriously bright yet dark. You have your eyes open but can’t see how soon danger can approach you. How long will it take you to realise that what you’re currently doing is not what you are made for? How long will it take you to realise that what you’re about to quit is what you are actually made for? It is a double-edged decision; it’s obscure. When the song starts with Uh, my dear. My dear e my dear, oh my dear, it sounds like a prophet speaking to his disciples. Picture a prophet on the podium preaching to his followers: my dears, it is time for you all to realise that life is nothing but a sea. Your deeds here form together as a canoe for you to sail to the world beyond. If you do good, you have a good canoe to sail through. If you do bad, then wherever you find yourself in the middle of the sea, blame no one.
I don’t believe this was Omah Lay’s intention but art, once it leaves the hands of the artiste, becomes whatever the audience translates it to be.
I have always believed that you have to generate happiness for yourself. Many a time when we are asked, “How are you?” We always say, “I’m fine,” even when we are not. But at a time when we decide to really express how we feel, we seldom have a thing to pin our emotions on. We always say, “It’s a lot. I don’t even know.” And when Omah Lay asks What is the reason you don’t have your own peace of mind? It just occurred to me that we might never really have the peace of mind we crave because we are always on a hunt, chasing something. Even when we achieve a certain thing that we’ve longed for, we always want more. And the process of getting more is not peaceful, it is full of doubts, worries and anxiety. Will it work? Will it not work? It’s the process of life; we all go through it. And I think it’s craft-ful how Omah Lay puts that as a question. Now, ask yourself, what is the reason you don’t have your own peace of mind? Can you have peace of mind?
The transition of the questions in the song is so sudden and abrupt that the new question does not allow you to find a response to the next. It’s philosophical because, in the process of thinking about how we don’t have peace of mind, we’re still on the move, striving to get another thing, which compounds our worry, right? We don’t even have time to think about how we don’t have time; which is why I’d have preferred if “Are you taking pictures of every memory of your life?” came before “Are you having fun or are you doing this to survive?” because as we are on the hunt for something better, we forget to hold onto moments. Therefore, memories documented will eventually make us appreciate the journey when we take a moment to scroll through our gallery. Documented photos help us notice a pattern and realise if we were actually having fun or doing what we were for survival. They also have a mysterious way of showing us what really matters.
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