The range of interpretations of Passionfruit strikes me as illustrative of our ecological entanglements and the media that articulate them. I made the piece in solidarity with the tang ping movement and all those who find it more instructive to watch internet videos of displaced elephants walking through the mostly inhospitable Yunnan province than to continue working towards our socio-ecocide.
In 2021, a study found, over a kilometer, joggers ran 21 seconds slower while listening to Drake's music compared to other artists. Drake's music was also found to extend a three-mile run by 105 seconds.
Drake fascinates me for the complexity of his routes and roots. As a black and jewish Canadian teen actor-turned-musician, his very particular positionality is resonant with an extremely broad spectrum of listeners and interpreters, as demonstrated in Deconstructing the Passionfruit Narrative and thus suggesting the porousness of some of the categories schematically applied in Han’s Good Entertainment: Deconstructing the Passion Narrative. And of course, Passionfruit should be largely attributed to the unsung Nana Rogues, and in his telling, it is Mama Rogues that’s the plug.
I understand Drake as excessive; excessively emotional, excessively confident, excessively vulnerable, both somehow excessively “male” and “female”—used here in scare quotes to signal their social constructed-ness and situated-ness. He is preeminently associated with the neologism sadboi (sad boy, sadboy), denoting the acceptability of depression and other mental difficulties. It occurs to me that he perhaps opens up an affective space that has felt off limits or under-articulated for certain identified or interpellated groups, grappling with the schizo-mania of attention economies in platform capitalism.
I’m also interested in how the deep pool of affect that Drake dams up, can be siphoned and rerouted. I imagined for instance, while listening to a kaleidoscopic spectrum of Passionfruit’s, that it was a breakup song with our technocratic elite, who seem intent on destroying the world and fleeing impossibly into the internet and outer space. And maybe once we rid ourselves of their prevailing logics, we can become freer to enjoy ourselves creatively with the people we love.
This is perhaps not the time.space for me to elaborate some of my misgivings about Drake and how the passion narrative presents more generally in the Drake mythology. And I’ll also hold off on exploring the intersection with moodymann, quoted on Passionfruit, who I rate as one of the great sonic curators of our time.
I imagine each encounter with Passionfruit is irreducible in its subjective-affective dimensions, while we share many structural conditions that produce Passionfruit.
After the small group finished assessing our work I felt a bit ridiculous, sitting in an old classroom in a vocational school, saturated in affect and questionable aesthetic decisions. And even more so after talking with the men hired to fix the air conditioning (about how amazing the night sky looks in rural Botswana). I slowly turned everything off that was electronic and making noise. Then watered the plants and ate some of the passion fruit I got from Adriana and Saul at Petit Village on the high street in Deptford. Adriana was born in Ecuador, and Saul was born in the Dominican Republic. They became friends in Barcelona many years ago, and when Saul decided to open a fruit and veg store in London (the same month I started the Art and Ecology program) Adriana came to help. Adriana loves plants, and they flourish all over the shop. Saul goes to the fruit market very early in the morning. The fruit comes from all over the world and so do the people who shop at Petit Village. One of them came in today and asked me to buy her a hat from the charity shop, which I happily did. Barney and Pascal came by and ate some passion fruit. I put on Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and we helped Laura move her sculpture.
