Practicing “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” on piano again; Damilare Kuku’s short stories; Dubstation at the Substation.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#27

1) Back in October, when I wrote the first installment of this now-regular roundup, one of the obsessions on the list was practicing Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ late-1962 hit “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me.” I say “late“ 1962 because the song (as Robinson has openly acknowledged) was lifted from Sam Cooke’s early-1962 hit “Bring It on Home to Me,” which explains my path back to this original obsession.

Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” came up on one of my playlists this week and, for a minute, I thought I was listening to “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me.” Do I still know how to play that on piano? I thought in a panic, remembering how much time I’d spent working it out last Fall when I fell in love with playing every crushed cluster.

It took about a day to piece it back together from the sheet music. Particularly, I had to re-learn the ascending phrase that sets the chorus in motion after “you treat me badly” (in the first verse), “you do me wrong now” (in the second verse), and “I want to split now” (in the third verse); the four slightly different “You’ve really got a hold on me” melody lines in the chorus itself; and the cascading heavy-on-the-black-keys chords during the dramatic break before rolling out the words “tighter” on the piano keys.

Once I got the song back, I couldn’t stop playing it.

Smokey Robinson & the Miracles perform “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” live at the Apollo Theater in 1963 (and segue into “Bring It on Home to Me.”)

All week, first thing, every morning, I’d run through “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” several times, still loving the crushed clusters, but also with a new appreciation for: the descending bass line under the sad-sack intro; the low C# in the left hand with (three-octaves up on the right hand) an A/C#/F# blues chord that calls out “Baby!;” and the cool-kid syncopation on the words “and all I want you to do.”

2) I have been searching for the great Lagos novel;Teju Cole’s thoughtful Every Day is for Thief (my review is here) wasn’t grand enough.

I’d hoped Nigerian Nollywood movie maker, actress (that’s how she describes herself) and creative artist, Damilare Kuku was en route to it with her 2021 short story collection, Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, which is just now being published in the U.S.

And while it is an addicting collection of reverse-rom-com tales (the affairs do not work out here), the stories felt more like binge-era-TV pilot episodes than literature.

This might not be the classic I’m looking for, but indeed, I did binge. This is a flip, fast-paced book; I read all 12, neatly crafted, 20-page stories (which often experiment with narrative POV, including rotating narrators and even some Bright Lights, Big City second person) in a few delightful sittings this week.

Certainly, Kuku’s candid, mostly female narrators—no-nonsense entrepreneurial strivers who fall for good looking lover boys with rizz and fatal flaws—convey the tragicomic condition of life in Lagos for women caught up (along with their guardian angel, best girlfriends) in the go-go capitalist patriarchy that fetishizes them as both subservient wives and party girls.

Set against Lagos’ backdrop of first-time apartments and lush compounds, clubs, scandalous texts, social media melodrama, ubers and public transit, nepotism, hustles, corruption, starter jobs and start ups, Kuku’s city stories focus on wary, posturing characters whose inner monologues ruminate about class, raunchy sex, tragic pasts, toxic family dynamics, love, and lousy men (even the sensitive ones.)

The breezy, pop culture tone and rushed, tidy finales interrupt Kuku’s frequent literary and philosophical turns, so I’m hesitant to recommend it. But, admittedly, I’m recommending it.

3) It might just be that I like the clarity of the bus route: Catch the #8 at the northeast corner of Miller park in my canopied, mixed-use commercial/multifamily Capitol Hill neighborhood; head downhill on Denny Way and transfer at the bus top on the southern cusp of the South Lake Union tech district; take the #40 north across the water, through Fremont’s jumble of shops and bars, and then west into lower Ballard along nondescript Leary Way.

Or it might just be that it was the good-mood hour early on Saturday evening. Either way, this route (and the I’m-in-London-circa-1898-illusion-that-I-live-in-a-city every time I transfer at that South Lake Union bus stop among the tall buildings and twilight crowds) takes me straight to my new go-to music venue, the Ballard Substation.

The Substation’s 4/13/24 “dubstation” show, featuring distorted bass, distorted time, and echoing computer beats.

Located across an absent-minded street from actual electric utility infrastructure—the Substation is a converted industrial space around the corner from a small cluster of bars that’s otherwise a mile from any other nightlife.

As roomy (and as spare) as an airplane hangar, the Substation hosts DJs who take the stage with their laptops, patch cords, turntables, digital EQ boards, and analog mixers to loop beats and distort bass lines and time. At a recent show, a video camera projected live footage of the DJs’ magic-trick hands onto a big screen stage left.

Also expect a friendly food truck-guy selling beef and veggie hotdogs on the worn sidewalk out front, a chatty doorman reading a fat sci-fi novel, a low pressure merch table (mostly with an array of free stickers), and Lord of the Rings and Dune 20-somethings digging the electronic sounds.

There’s a slightly hipper, though equally ragtag crowd for live looping DJs on Capitol Hill at Vermillion’s Soulelectro on the second Friday of every month. Annie and Charles and I often dance our rear ends off there; it was Annie and I this past Friday.

But I still found myself hopping on the #8 to the #40 to Ballard’s Substation the very next night.