So, predictably, here we are at the final melting down of the Bahrain office. Something remarkable needs to happen to keep this thing going. Firstly it’s Ramadan here. What’s Ramadan like? Well it’s not a grim as I had initially feared. Firstly and most importantly, the working hours are reduced as the locals are now zoned out thanks to their starvation. We work six hour days which is awesome as you can go home early. The streets are empty in the day and everything is chilled out. Of course you cannot eat, drink, smoke or chew gum but it’s not too arduous. Local staff are not exactly full of energy at the best of times so watching them slow down even further is not exactly a jolt. Besides, what is there to do? Zero. That’s what. As I posted last week we need new projects and we need them now. We are not getting them and we won’t get anything of any substance until next year I am guessing. The situation is as serious as cancer.
There’s been a bit of a Kool G Rap renaissance in my house recently. A quick breeeze through Discogs has one amazed at how cheap and rare his early output was with DJ Polo. Make no mistake, if we are talking about Golden Age MC’s then look no further than the Kool Genius of Rap. Recently I heard on that internet a demo version of Big Daddy Kane’s Raw with Kool G Rap keeping up with Kane on this seminal track. If anyone can keep pace with Kane in his prime you know this brother has the skills. Make no mistake, these jams upped the game with each release and this was not money but the simple fact that each MC wanted to put out better product than the next. G Rap is up there with Rakim, KRS One and Kane no question but he really never had a classic jam like these guys and somehow never appealed to the white media. Not sure why but the simple fact is that nobody could fuck with G Rap. Pure cinema in each track. So, I splurged on some of his classic shit which was mucho cheapo I was amazed to find. Anyway,I’ll speak on G Rap another but let me leave you with this stroke of mid 90′s class that was on his overlooked first solo LP. Now tell me this is not the shit.
days away as I was from buying ye olde George Forman grill Playstation 3 it looks like i was wise to hold fire. Sony announced today the thing most of us already knew – the Orginal PS3 looks like butt and had to be redesigned! Lets all laugh at the early adapters.
It was a month ago that we all had this chat. You know,everything’s gonna be alright. Work until October. Relax. No more sackings. Well OK, I can dig it but the fact remains we don’t have any new jobs since that announcement was made. 4 weeks and nothing. The small jobs we did have are running out fast. Every office I have worked in before was always a mass of people but this office is different. Still people scattered around but in groups. You can tell who is working on what. None of them are flat out. Soon, in around 2 weeks, all these jobs will end and people will be left doing not very much. Everyone is the same. Everyone is scared. Deep down. Imagine not knowing what you will be working on in 2 weeks time. Everything is hand to mouth. Job comes in and people pounce on it like a pride of Lions chewing on a Gazelle. It’s getting like that in our department. People are turning on each other. Clients dangle our livelihoods between our their fingers – unhappiness and the Gazelle gets tossed to other lions ready to feast on the scraps. It’s sad. It’s uncivilized and I can see that this week is going to be the start of things. The drip drip. There will be staff in our department that will have nothing to do tomorrow. Nothing. I can’t give them anything at all. I have nothing to give. I need to look after myself and I can’t trim down the tiny scraps I have for anyone. There will be sackings soon I can sense it. Despite all this October bullshit there will be sackings. But now its the real sackings. All the easy targets are gone – wiped out in the first wave and now the cream of the crop need to be thinned out. Good people. Bad people but people that are big people within the company. Have I made it? Have I drunk with the right people? Have I done the right things? Time will tell. The next 4 weeks will define the rest of the year. Good people will go. I hope I am not one of them.
Another superb EBay performance. Between Discogs and EBay you can find some bargains out there but you have to dig. Digitally dig. Until I get back to London or another civilised location the internet is my friend. Besides that I doubt even in reality I would have been able to find an O.G. copy of Peachfuzz for eight quid. Bargain.
KMD’s first release and its a weird video but the song is wonderful. The samba like OC Smith’s ‘On a Clear Day’ is looped and KMD inform us that, despite the girls laughing in the background and despite not being old enough to grow a beard (or peachfuzz) they have what it takes. Innocent but not cheesy. This is the time when KMD were hanging around with 3rd Bass and you see Prime Minister Pete Nice at the start of the video checking out the boys afrocentric stall. Golden Era’s get no more golden. Play it loud.
”you’re management naaaah” one of the bosses drunkenly slurred in my shell like. It’s code for ‘you’re in the gang’ which I assume means the inner circle of management. No, not that highly influential inner-circle where people are hired and fired but rather the accepted larger social circle that one has to get into before they let you at the big boys table. They need to know you drink. You are not a fruit. You think and act the same way they do. You have the same values. UK? Check. Drinks? Check. Likes birds? Check. Kids? Check. In short, am I just like they are? On paper I guess you’d have to say yes – there’s no denying I am from the UK and I work in their company. That’s possibly all you need they need know. It will take time but no more awkward silences or suspicion. I can roll up to them at the bar and talk shit. I have been initiated. Last weekend it all happened. A drunken Thursday night session where you go to some soulless oirish bar attached to a hotel culminating in me waking up still drunk around 10:30AM. It gets better. At 12:00AM I had to go to a pre-arranged champagne brunch with them. So, there we all were, drunk and hungover but we bonded and got through it until at 4PM it was all over and we headed downstairs to the same oirish bar for more punishment. By 9PM I gave up and headed home but it was an experience. In the UK Muslims are largely invisible. Never seen in bars or clubs, just in their own communities behind closed doors and praying in Mosques we never enter. You see them on streets or Sky News but that’s about it. Same for the English in a Muslim country. We don’t interact. We get pissed. We pray in bars and clubs that most seem like weird places to the locals. That how the expats live. Drinking and smoking. Overeating and laying by their pools. Sun. Work. Drink. A couple more years of this and I’ll be one of them. That can’t happen.
