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real life wavey instagram.com/cashfortunato

[moasanti]

So many thoughts flow. The coherence of which I can elucidate them isn’t all the way established. I just know it’s a cold day when a musical genius transcends into the next plane of life. Truly, as much as this cuts deep for many of us, I don’t necessarily like to look at it as death — especially with a legacy that will live on within the imprints of black music and what it means to be a black artist. To anybody that isn’t familiar with the work of D’Angelo, I personally would lead off the introduction by saying that it’s never too late to start. In the midst of reading Dilla Time, and in the midst of redefining my own sound, I started and never looked back for a single moment. This man was one of the many horsemen involved in breaking the template for conventional R&B in favor of a much more complex, time-conflicting, forward-thinking sound, and that’s something I personally couldn’t be more grateful for, both from an enjoyer’s perspective and a dissector’s lens. And to now live in a world where one of my personal top creative titans has fallen? That’s just not a timeline that I could’ve personally imagined occurring any time soon. Life truly is unpredictable. The message of loving your people while they’re here is a motif that could never be rinsed.

[moasanti]

to make a long story short, I surely want to make music that the hood can bump to, and I also want to make music that feels left of center to what’s accepted as conventional. both are surely bound to bring about polished sound quality with the room to get better — and I just believe I’ll always get better sonically and lyrically. I’ve always wanted to intertwine the worlds between the hood and the celestial ambience of outer space and the world of tomorrow. what’s different this time is that I no longer feel the need to suppress any of my facets to force an aesthetic.

the free and fluid nature of embracing my interests and expressions can’t and shouldn’t be bound by arbitrary constraints, as that’s what will come together at the end of the day to write my creative DNA, and solidify it to the eyes and ears of future listeners. I feel as though I was a fool for trying to be one thing at a time prior to 2024, and I realized that I am amorphous. I am an amalgamation of my environments, my emotions, my interests, and more. my first mixtape was born from this realization. beyond all this, nobody’s validation is worth more than my own in this journey. if I lead with that, I’ll never fail

[moasanti]

[moasanti]

the country of mali hasn’t left my mind in days. it’s just surreal to think that it’s been sixty-five years of independence from the french regime. quantifying time in this instance feels like a double edged sword. within the realm of humans’ half-life, it feels like a long time. relative to its western counterparts, its timespan is juvenile, just as many of the other nations that declared its own sovereignty over its imperialist-plagued past.

right now, I can’t help but think about all that the country’s had to overcome. the 1968 coup d’etat that sent Modibo Keita to prison for the remainder of his life subsequently led to a long era of surveillance & human rights abuse on the country’s population under Moussa Traore’s regime. throughout the 1980s, protests on the regime were suppressed. Mali in the midst of its political and social crisis launched military attacks on then-Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso in 1985 and clashes between the two countries commenced at the expense of economic instability until the two made a peace agreement in early 1986. in 1991, 150 individuals died in the midst of a protest march against Traore’s government — subsequently leading to Amadou Toumani Touré getting him removed from office and subsequently arrested and jailed. this bit of the timeline is only a smidgen of the hardship faced since my mom’s country’s inception. this doesn’t even account for how since the turn of the century, electoral corruption, locust infestations, droughts, guerrilla warfare enacted by the tuareg rebels, northern mali taken hostage and operated as an islamist state, french intervention intervened again, and a few overthrown governments in between.

and still, the country stands tall and proud. sometimes I wonder what a Mali free of western interference would look like, or would’ve looked like. I’ve lived through this country struggle to find its way in sovereignty since I was born — but Assimi Goita has given me nothing but hope. when I look at the current state of affairs in Mali, I’m given a project to believe in. I’ve always had a soft spot for this country. I dream of a world where I finally get to go home to Gao for the very first time. I dream about getting to celebrate a Malian independence day back home with the family I’ve always dreamed of growing closer to. I’ve kind of always been in the know as far as culture goes. my uncle loved playing Salif Keita on the FDR drive into Midtown. my parents spoke nothing but Dyula/Bambara to me. I was surrounded by people that looked like me in school, in the mosque. I recently found that my connection and my desire to deepen my relationship with Mali grew as my parents continue to watch ORTM on our TV. a quarter of my coworkers are Malian so all I speak a quarter of the time is Dyula/Bambara. but it’s not enough to me. I just want to be home to truly appreciate the beautiful country, and grow to know my extended family better than phones could ever show me. my allegiance to Mali doesn’t define me but it’s surely imprinted in my soul, inseparable from my heart in the physical realm. I would never trade it, for anything.

[moasanti]

Mulholland Drive (2001)

I’m not even sorry to say it but this is one of the best movies I’ve ever watched in my life. After finishing the movie, I couldn’t help but languish after knowing that I’ll never get the chance to tell David Lynch just how much of a genius he was for writing this screenplay. Much like the last film I watched in Oldboy, the build-up all the way to the ending showed me a calculated elaboration of the conflict within the main character’s psyche and social life. At face value, the movie articulates a slow burn of love in the midst of a crumbling universe for almost everybody involved. However, the farther you step back, the less it becomes about a slow burn of love — and more so, the gruesome stranglehold of guilt.

Without giving up many spoilers, if at all — the movie predominantly follows Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress from Ontario who comes to Hollywood to fulfill her aspirations of becoming a star actress. With a personality seemingly written as the glowing ray of light, she seeks out to find the identity of “Rita” (Laura Harring) the nervous amnesiac deuteragonist who snuck into Betty’s apartment before any of the other tenants knew. The two grow close in proximity and in fondness of each other, but as the story progresses, Los Angeles becomes less and less of a pristine atmosphere, all to grow more and more eerie of a workspace. This leaves the viewer, specifically me wondering — was this a noir or a horror film? The movie blurs the landscape of reality in such a way for the better part of two hours, that the last twenty-four minutes embrace a desolate feeling of hopelessness and stark parallels that flip the viewer’s psyche.

If you ask me, Mulholland Drive being “symbolically dense” as some may say, is actually a huge bonus in how the movie may possibly be interpreted by its viewers. The movie isn’t the most straightforward, but it surely operates in an interconnected loop of context clues. In all its exploration of lust, coercion, and death, the motif of failure is hard to miss. I couldn’t fully grasp what was real and what was imagined by Betty, but I can say wholeheartedly that her storyline is one of which that suggests the pendulum of fate can’t be escaped. You do in fact, get out what you put in and the repercussions of the actions of which you committed will come home to roost. Surely would watch this again, as this struck chords on different ends of my emotional spectrum.

[moasanti]

Oldboy (2003)

The last thirty minutes contained a sequence that completely rattled me to the core. Just when you think the story has culminated — the entire thing completely flips on top of itself, and it’s genuinely one of the best and the most grim of movies I’ve ever sat down to watch on my own accord.

The movie begins in 1988 — Oh Dae-Su, a businessman is arrested prior to his daughter’s 4th birthday. His friend Joo-hwan comes to collect him but Dae-su later disappears and wakes up in a hotel room locked away. Framed for his wife's murder, he's locked away for the next fifteen years with his only companion being a television. Attempting suicide by wrist-cutting, Dae-su later fails and finds himself practicing martial arts as well as digging an escape tunnel. In 2003, he's freed but not before a hypnosis. Dae-su’s initial quest is to find his daughter, but after learning that his daughter emigrated in the midst of his sentence, the movie now becomes a hunt to find the man who held him captive in jail. In addition, Dae-su seeks to learn as well why the captor ever had him stashed away in the first place, and along the way he falls in love with a woman he met at a sushi restaurant.

I genuinely just clicked on this thinking it would be a cool ass action movie, and I slowly learned that the two-hour work was psychological warfare. At its core, the movie illustrated a man experiencing death multiple times over. In the words of Sade Adu, “have you ever seen a man break down?” The work was shot on a ARRIFLEX 435, ARRIFLEX 535 B with both Angenieux Optimo Zoom + Zeiss Super Speed Lenses in tandem — making for a pristine watch in its two-hour runtime. I was also drawn to the attention to detail within the mise-en-scene, clues that might otherwise whiff over your head on the first watch. If I had to pick a stand-out trait, I loved the way color was used to convey certain motifs; to bat, red symbolized revenge and purple symbolized melancholy. However, I can say that there was one moment in which I felt red symbolized lust, passion, sensuality; the scene where Dae-su slept with his love interest, Mi-do.

To return to a previous point though, revenge was the motif and I watched two fucked-up enemies go to war for two hours. The entire ordeal was absolute horror even if it didn’t feel like it straight away. Watching one of the greatest acts of hatred I ever seen enacted in a movie, I can’t tell anyone seeking to watch anything other than… watch at your own discretion. I sympathized with Dae-su yesterday until I grew to recognize his ills all over again. His situation was fucked but this isn’t to excuse the fact that he’s still a sicko — it just so happened that his gripes lived and died with combating another sicko. But it does make for referencing a very valid point… although he’s an absolute beast, gremlin, barbarian… “[does he still not] have the right to live?”

[moasanti]

i think futurism and africanism are heavily intertwined within one other. in music, blackness in itself in the future and it always has been, across all parts of the diaspora. amapiano. afrobeats. coupé décalé. dancehall. hip-hop. house. highlife. r&b. the list goes on. i’m just one of many artists that want to push the boundaries on a sonic future while allowing the uniqueness of my cultural identity to decorate my sound. fela kuti said music is powerful and not to be played with. i just hope that when people hear me, they leave feeling inspired to be a better version of themselves

[moasanti]

[moasanti]

Ghetto Dreams jacket with the buttas

[moasanti]

Eid al-Fitr

CDG Pegasus

April

[moasanti]

[moasanti]

currently in FL Studio practicing for 2025. bonne année

[moasanti]

25th Street/10th Avenue — shot by me, 2022

[moasanti]

[moasanti]

[moasanti]

CASINO: Journal Entry (9/22)

Comprehending its multifaceted colors of greed in its graphic nature challenged my cerebral. I loved it though — no matter how graphic it may have gotten. I keep saying that it felt like watching Icarus fly too close to the sun, and for good reason too! Watching Sam Rothstein’s empire rise and fall was intriguing for the way it maneuvered through the perspectives of Rothstein and Nicky Santoro, sort of like Chungking Express in its own right. Rothstein maneuvered with, albeit questionable, a bit of rationale, even if some of his decisions didn’t make any sense — like falling in love with a woman who didn’t even know if she were capable of returning the mutual devotion. Can money buy love? Not in this lifetime. Santoro legitimately embodies what it meant to crash out, and for him to do so at the expense of Rothstein’s reputation and his own family’s operations? It spoke volumes to the type of character he was. You can’t keep a guy like Nicky Santoro around you. He’ll get his, even if it potentially ruins your motion. The woman Sam fell in love with too? Ginger was a woman with her own demons. I’d hate to reiterate it again, but money can’t buy love. Especially when the woman you choose has stockholm syndrome. Every character embodies greed in their own right, and dabble in wrath and lust at different points of the film respectively.

[moasanti]