Pianopornography
Radio and The Death of Sex

Kofi Fosu Forson

Have you heard of a band called The Betty Blues? They sing about love and rainy days. I don’t know if they exist but when I close my eyes, I can hear them coming through the radio waves…loud and clear.

To my knowledge The Betty Blues don’t exist. Are they not my reality? That governed by my creative genes, keen awareness of music, mild sarcasm, I can invent and reinvent a world of my own? We aren’t allowed such madness. Why? It’s the greatest escape. Trouble is we have been forced into a fallout shelter where everything is at our disposal, meaning what you cannot find doesn’t exist.

Pianopornography, I exist in it. The thought of a naked woman behind a grand piano playing feverishly everything from The Beatles to Chaupin! Doesn’t the mind reverberate further into other fetishes?

Is sex dead? The radio is. The conscience that is the voice of the disc jockey planting itself within the mind is no longer a source of disillusionment. The Ipod and the burning of compact discs have fulfilled every notion of the common man as a modern day Wolfman Jack.

Sex is not dead. Sex is sleeping. For some, we continue to waiver the cause between morality, what is art, the intervention of spirituality, Zen and the rest, the plural advantage in abstinence and the overall definition of what is the sexual male and female.

Does coitus remain solely definitive of pleasure? The erect penis and the moist vulva… ‘nuff said.

New York:
Love/ Sex/ Death

Kofi Fosu Forson


A Brooklyn girl listening to Johnny Cash is fundamentally American. A Bronx girl in a bikini dancing to Fat Joe is well… urban.

New York is governed by a means of self-identity, race, power, class and sex. The binding truth overwhelming everyone is money and death. Together they form a sense of disillusionment one cannot escape. In a sense, both money and death are inescapable.

A city like New York is a combination of culture, history, business, racism, violence, immigrants and singularly forms as a unique voice metamorphosing from borough to borough making it distinctively a crush of greed and power, love and sex.

There isn’t a unified conscience in New York. If at all it’s based on cultural identity and that of the individual. He or she is defined by their prowess within the realm of vernacular, sexuality and money. No matter what a person does for a living or how they make their money, shelter is singularly the most important reality to every person.

Homelessness as a conclusion due to fire, rent due, lost of job or whatever else is a harsh truth New Yorkers reluctantly embrace.

The typical New Yorker is confident, almost brash. He is constantly aware of his surrounding. This is always due to impending danger, especially in an unfamiliar neighborhood. However, New Yorkers tend to be respectful of people in need, whether it’s a street musician, some one seeking direction or a person hurt from an accident.

Socially, a New Yorker can start a conversation anywhere, whether on the subway, at a bus top, from a passing stranger or certainly at a bar or club. Women in general are sophisticated of mind. They don’t always appear sophisticated, from the girl in the East Village with tattoos to the girl in Harlem wearing Daisy Dukes. But the New York woman is tough in her decisions because everything is crucial.

Money has to be made. Things have to be bought. The New York woman loves the company of a man. She does everything to make this possible. New Yorkers are however lonely. Sex is the equation when it should be love. New Yorkers are content on looking for love but they settle for sex.

There’s sex in a hotel with a stranger. Sex in a bathroom stall… Sex in a stairwell… Sex on a rooftop… and the old fashioned sex in an apartment with a boyfriend or girlfriend…

Those who find love are fortunate. The very reason one gentleman walks a dog is the same reason a man and woman hold hands walking down the street.

Love, Sex and Death define most New Yorkers. Money and shelter is our reality. We exist in it. The psychic precautions one takes, define him or her as a lover and as an honorable citizen of New York with hopes to live another day.

Photo by Kobina Annan, Jr.

Backbone:
Maturation of a Cow-punk

Kofi Fosu Forson


Deceased! Do we ever arrive at the point where we used to exist? To then say we are newly born, ready to begin the promotion of a personal portrait starting with the self, pronounced I, me, my?

The ego is death. We are afraid. And so we are forced to keep it alive. Figure the ten-inch protruding musculature. The bulbous size D on a virgin! Listen to the perfect pitch of a soprano.

Worrisome, are they? Leave that to the African cowboy, a supercilious persona that need be vexed and honed. Is it the cowboy that begot the African? That his ego is similar to an African cowboy singing the blues at midnight on New Year’s Eve inside a club somewhere in Switzerland?

Must one exercise the ego to the point of flatulence without pardon? Is that not shameful? Are we limited to what we can’t do all because we have a huge ego. What warrants the size of the ego?

This African is at first African and yet he’s a cowboy. He imbibes everything from Country and Western to Juju. He welcomes all women of worth, from Shania Twain to Les Nubians.

Is he then definable? Does discipline not shape the individual into a person and not a creature? As if to say, the creature is an entity. A person travels along a protracted deal of birth and death. Why shouldn’t we then curse the creature and adore the person.

The creature in this case is the artist who is challenged by fear, making him or her susceptible to numerous amounts of outside forces. These can be found in music, poetry, theater, etc. Among the likes are Rimbaud, Patti Smith and Trent Reznor.

The backbone of a cow-punk! It requires a soldier. Iggy Pop, the ultimate punk is his own Sergeant. Sensitivity becomes of any and every poet. The poet, given his socio-political upbringing is a punk. He is truncated upon by the levels of society, family and history.

Internalizing these variants allows for a form of creativity. It is known that psychologically, the poet is fragile. It is not his mental frame work that defines him. This is defined as a foundation. The ability to transcend defines him as artist, poet, punk.