features

A fragmented reflection, SonaOne and me

January 15, 2016

The enigmatic Malaysian rapper SonaOne is set to debut his next album title ‘Growing up Sucks’ which covers a wider field of music genre than just hip hop. – Facebook pic, January 15, 2016.“The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it gets.” – Vladimir Nabokov.

Eminent emcee SonaOne’s latest single, “Firefly”, has set the Malaysian charts aglow as it fluttered to number one, and, in addition to that, the tune’s apogeal landing came with the announcement that the versatile vocalist is going to let fly his highly anticipated debut album, “Growing up Sucks”, in early 2016. The following is a personal essay on our shared beginnings, common grounds, and growing up in an atypical environment.

Someone older and wiser once told me that one's formative years are between the ages of 15 and 25. As awkward and tumultuous as those years may be – looking back, meditatively as most do – those are the years that many of the old guard cherish with unbridled nostalgia. “The good old days,” some say; others, “the best years of our lives.”

After that decade-long rite of passage, it isn't evident that anything drastic should change in the immediacy of being on the other side of 25. It might even be reasonable to suggest, that the surroundings that shape one's life post the quarter-century mark, are the years that predate it, culminating in the now.

Similarly, Gore Vidal, the late, great intellectual colossus of American letters, once intoned that nothing new really happens after one turns 25; that life, from that point onward, just becomes a series of variable reruns of the same happenings. Having said that, changes occur incrementally. Sometimes, they are seemingly undetectable, even to oneself. Other times, they are willingly visible.

Which brings us nicely to the enigmatic rapper’s multiple award-winning single “No More”, in which themes like metamorphosis, and circumstantial transformation, are addressed, in its lyrics.

“And the changes won't stop,” he rasps pre-emptively, on the post chorus of his first number one, before musing over a former belle, with whom the polymusical strip has presumably fallen out (of love?) with. “She used to be cool, and now she’s not,” he concludes, dismissively, displaying what could only be described as a lack of patience.

Is this possibly due to one of the symptomatic effects of time? That time leads to outcomes? Such as the rendering of certain human relationships obsolete, no matter how melodious the affair may have been?

Some say that another universal feature of time is its ceaselessness. However, what matters most is how we spend it. “To fill the unforgiving minute,” the imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling once wrote, in his stirring poem If, “with sixty seconds worth of distance run.” We all abide by the perpetual 60-second sequence, whether we like it or not.

Some may choose to adopt Kipling’s verse as a mantra, whilst others live their lives idly. If we are indeed “condemned to be free”, as the sideways-glancing French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, then it is only fair to surmise that one’s choice to do the utmost – or to do the least, for that matter – with one’s own time, lies with that individual.

In my humble estimation, the inimitable chart-topping hip hopper undertook Kipling’s notion of pursuing time in as purposeful a manner as possible – as opposed to squandering it – long ago. And, if the changes won't stop, nor will the emancipation of the artiste, now the rhythmic radical of Malaysia's rap game.

In the final chorus of “No More,” as the bouncy notes melodically careen off the airwaves like birds chirping away from the seashore, parts of his evolution are professedly complete. (“I used to be cool, and now I’m hot.”)

To the credit of rapper-cum-record label mogul Joe Flizzow – whose mentorship helped pave the way for SonaOne’s success – Kartel Records has in its ranks the genuine article. If there is something to be learned from the young star’s rise it’s the sagacious veteran’s capacity for identifying and nurturing talent.

Let this be a lesson, you cannot cultivate your own creativity without recognising the creativity of others. (This approach has been the bedrock for mentor-mentee relationships since Homer conceived the concept, in his 8th century BCE mythological opuses Iliad and the Odyssey.)

Quirky beginnings

However, I knew SonaOne when he and I were snotty schoolboys, before the beat-driven medley of music and celebrity set him on due course. Hence, I consider myself an insider; not necessarily by way of membership, but something slightly different. (Subscription, perhaps? Not quite.)

And, although I occasionally enjoy playing a round of state the obvious, my purpose in penning this short memoir is not solely to praise the oft flap-back hat-clad musician as the Malaysian music industry’s urban Adonis (though he undoubtedly is), but to biographise our quirky beginnings, from a past-tense perspective, ante adolescence.

Thus, as though in an imaginary darkroom, I will attempt to elucidate images from the relatively distant past, as my mind’s eye sheds light on half-forgotten memories.

I will thenceforward refer to him as Mika, as he is called by those who have the good fortune of knowing him personally. His birth name is Mikael Adam L’ozach.

To serve as a kind of prefatory cue to the reader, I’d like to recount that his charming mother, June Yunos L'ozach, told me not too many years ago, that the first time Mika and I were “acquainted” was when I was a mere foetus, still in the womb of my mercurial mother, Rabitah Tahir. Mika could not have been more than a few months old then, as the narrow gap between his birthday and mine is of a year and two days – he rocked into the world on November 30, 1988, I more leisurely followed on December 2, 1989.

Whether what Mrs L'ozach recounted to me is fact or embellishment, I can't confirm, but the thought that friendship can precede life in utero enlivens the prospect of a bond, let alone forges it. Call it what you will, but I'll say that that day in the twilight of the 1980s, in the inescapable swelter of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, serendipity cast its emblazoning spell.

Both of the women attributed with bringing us into this vast world are Malaysian – the former originating from Mersing, Johor Bahru, and the latter from Bayan Baru, Pulau Penang. Apart from sharing nationhood, this is where the similarities between our mothers ground to a staggering halt.

June was, and is, an affectionate, charismatic mother, with a flair for show business and parenthood, whereas the same can’t quite be said about Rabitah, who on good days struggled to differentiate euphoria and hysteria, which may compel one to ask the perilous question, what may have she been like on not-so-good days? Bluntly put, her knack for irrationality was unsurpassable.

Soon after I was born, my father, EA Scheers, a somewhat pleasant and thoughtful Dutchman, was stationed in the French-speaking city of Lausanne, Switzerland, where I started my schooling, in a francophone kindergarten, La Chenille, located on the suburban street of Avenue du Cour

Meanwhile, since the birth of Liyana, Mika’s elder and pulchritudinous sister, the amiable L’ozachs had spent just a solitary year abroad, in France, the motherland of the unit’s calm and grey-haired co-creator, Michel.

Renewed friendship

Six steadfast years elapsed before little Mika and I were to see each other again, and when we did, it wasn’t so much a case of renewed friendship; instead, and without much adamant urge, we simply got along. (Children before the age of ten simply do not renew friendships; they form them.)

Upon my return to sunny Malaysia, my good-natured father (being the only proper parent of my two makers) faced an inevitable conundrum, does he extend my education, in Kuala Lumpur, by enrolling me in the Lycée Français, does he alter my educational path, by enrolling me in an English- speaking school, or, even more contrastingly, does he place me in a local school, where I would’ve most certainly been taught in Bahasa Malaysia?

My pensive père carefully deliberated, I was to continue on in the French system. This decision, however worthy of superlatives, would prove more complicated than expected.
For the Kuala Lumpur-domiciled L’ozachs, where precocious Liyana and mischievous Mika were to spend just about the entirety of their schooling lives, being enrolled in a French-speaking school was a no-brainer. The fact that both are half French meant that the pair did not, and would not, face the same difficulties as I did. Let me explain.

Despite initially rejecting my application, due to a policy that required all admitted students to be of French citizenship – or, at the very least, to have a parent who is – the ambassadorial school, the Lycée Français de Kuala Lumpur (LFKL), made of me an exception. On one condition.

My determined father was required to obtain a document, issued by the Ministry of Education, disclosing that I had been granted permission by the government to begin my schooling at the LFKL. Every condition, as seasoned negotiators will have you know, is not complete without a counter-condition. This time, it was the Ministry’s turn.

The Ministry of Education’s condition was that, due to the fact that I am Malaysian – but of an illusory breed, so hollowly accredited with being Bumiputera – the French School would have to see to it that I was given lessons in morality. To be more precise, mandatory classes in Islamic morality. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, my father must have murmured to himself, exasperatedly.

The former was a document that took longer to receive than my father would have liked, and, thankfully, the latter was an imposition which remained unimplemented. Finally, with all conditions provisionally agreed upon, I could start my schooling at the only French Lycée in the whole country.

(It is noteworthy to remind Malaysians that lessons in morality are still grotesquely enforced upon many young students throughout the country, facilitating the ruling political and religious class’s’ doctrinal agenda. Even in international schools, such as the malignant institution where I finished my Secondary education, Sayfol International School, located off Jalan Ampang, these mind-numbing sessions are shamelessly part of the curriculum, commonly at the behest of aspiring tyrants.

The likes of the philanthropic Fugee School founder Deborah Henry, a fellow alumni of the squalid “Green and Gold”, might concur that such contemptible institutions stunt many inchoate minds in the name of education, which is otherwise a most noble trade. I can proudly say that I helped come up with the name and slogan of the commendable Miss Henry’s remarkable setup; an exemplary outfit which now provides underprivileged and disregarded immigrant children with the kind of learned teachings they would sadly be deprived of whence they came – where war-minded, oppressive regimes rule the roost. Where is the irony in all this? There is none.

My well-travelled father was thrilled, his persistence had proved fruitful.

On my first day of school in the Lycée, smothered by the midday roast of Kuala Lumpur in January of 1996, seven-year-old mullet-coiffed Mika and six-year-old bowl-fringed I met, at the end of a customarily hour-long lunchbreak, in the concrete courtyard of the old LKLF’s Primary wing.

The building itself was a colonial bungalow, converted into a makeshift campus. Picture, if you will, a cross between the Bates Motel and Sri Carcosa, though altogether much smaller, mind you. Then, add a tone or two of pale reds, browns and off-whites, perched amidst a cooling backdrop of a luscious and verdant jungle, a handful of palm trees, and that was the LFKL.

It was located off of Jalan Tun Ismail, in Kenny Hill, atop a diminutive colline, and, despite possessing some quasi-antiquated charm, it was unreassuringly decrepit, all the same.

Occasionally, monkeys would swing violently on telephone cables within the school’s premises, meanwhile, the more placid members of the primal pack picked at each other’s scalps, as the likes of Mika and I dawdled away nervously from their general direction, not without simultaneously bellowing uproariously with a pair of accusatory fingers each, pointing at the pathetic, bare-knuckled and pink-nosed primates. Oh, we enjoyed a good bout of schadenfreude, no matter what the circumstances.

There, Mika and I formed the foundation of what has been a lasting friendship. We managed to make a few jokes along the way, during our time in school, and in the L’ozach household, which, up until the age of 15, was more than just a second home to me. It was a sanctuary of peace and pleasant foolishness.

I moved on from the LFKL, less than a year after an incident pertaining to an exhibitionist act committed by yours truly, left a teacher’s chubby jaw on the floor in shock. Without going into too much detail, the 13-year-old me pranced, with my back to the class, baggy shorts at knee-level. And I, rather spontaneously, revealed to my fellow students, what must’ve looked like two halves of the same peach. I was, after all, a very slim shady.

Mika departed the Lycée Français de Kuala Lumpur a year after I did. His immediate legacy, unlike mine, was not a display in puris naturalibus, of one’s own posterior; but rather, it was a multi-coloured graffiti of the word Fanti – spray-painted bombastically on the inner walls of the school’s cramp foyer. Until this very moment, I am still at odds with the meaning of that whimsically obscure word.

The most Mika was willing to impart to me, regarding the meaning of that neologism, is that it was his own linguistic invention (I had gathered as much by then). He also added, moreover, on that same overcast afternoon in 2004, that Fanti meant something very rude. Aha, I thought. He was, after all, a very slim shady, too.

I’d like to assure SonaOne that although contact has been sporadic since those quondam days, I still regard him with brotherly admiration. Yes, growing up might suck; however, growing apart sucks even more. – January 15, 2016.