Ever since the Coronavirus era, I’ve been cycling to work every morning.
Today, I’m no longer doing this to protect myself from viruses, but because I’m enjoying it. In hindsight, I’m asking myself what even made me squeeze into those chock-full trains in the first place, with their single-digit counts of available oxygen atoms and windows covered in condensation from wet jackets and coughing people in fall and winter. I ride my bike in any weather and, of course, without electric assistance – and gone is the middle-aged-man-belly. What I don’t do is listen to music while cycling – too often have I found myself in the blind spot of a truck or in the crosshairs of a SUV on the prowl. My inner voice tells me that the 30 minutes of rush hour cacophony are not the time to be listening to Bob Dylan. Ever since I got hurled over the hood of a sports car a year ago and, miraculously, only had a pulled shoulder and a lot of correspondence with the insurance to complain about, I listen to that voice.
And I’m glad that I do. Because that voice told me the other day: Stop. Buy yourself a coffee over there, take a seat on the folding chair in front of the kiosk and watch what happens on the other side of the street. So I did. I saw an old man squatting on the sidewalk over there. I see him there every other day as I ride past. A lanky guy, probably in his 70s, a ZZ-Top-like shaggy beard on his face and a walking frame parked next to him. He usually sits on his knees, like a pre-school girl, and draws strange creatures on the sidewalk with children’s chalk. Laughing moon faces, ponies with eight legs, grinning monsters and lots of colorful birds. The man plays music: he has a ghetto blaster by his side giving off a surprisingly thin screech for his size. The man listens to hardcore rap. Properly tough stuff that gets an extra dose of street credibility when blasted through the evidently damaged speakers. But he’s happy, at least I think he is. A smile is permanently stuck in his beard. And he’s grooving: throwing his arms up in the air and fidgeting with his folded legs while looking very much in his element, shrouded in a fine mist of chalk.
A few days later, I went to a concert that a friend had made me go to: two female rappers were giving a performance on the small stage of a phased out reefer ship of the Rostock deep-sea fishing fleet moored in Hamburg harbor. Skuff Barbie from Münster and Aunty Rayzor from Nigeria. The friend, who usually leans towards punk, fainted at a music festival in Uganda last year during Aunty Rayzor’s performance. He had something to make up for in terms of concert karma, so he dragged me along to the old vessel. Well, what can I say. Just one song in, and the skeptic and Bob Dylan appreciating snob in me walked out the porthole. There were only some 20 of us in the audience. We were dancing like there was neither a yesterday nor a tomorrow. “You’re a really nice crowd!” Skuff Barbie let us know. “So cute!” When Aunty Rayzor came on, there was no stopping anymore. The cute crowd was bouncing their hips to Afrobeats and heavy punchlines. I closed my eyes and let the grooves run through my legs. And even though I had nothing but soda in my system, I was seeing strange creatures flying through the room. A pony with eight legs and many, many colorful birds.
PS: Useless facts, part 39: Every year in November, the “Nyege Nyege” music festival is held in Uganda, founded by a Belgian and a Greek to give local talent a stage. The cosmos includes the two independent labels Nyege Tapes and Hakuna Kuala as well as a booking agency that arranges performances by previously unknown African artists in Europe – including Aunty Rayzor, among others. If you want to learn more, you can read a wonderful report about the festival, its artists and organizers on the homepage of the business magazine Brand Eins.
PPS: Incidentally, “Nyege Nyege” is a popular word in Luganda, one of Uganda’s national languages. It means something like “an uncontrollable urge to dance”.