A Song to “Define the Most African Moment of My Life”
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2023
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our producer, Regina de Heer, wants to know which songs reflect your experience being part of a diaspora. For her, having to choose an entrance song for her engagement ceremony made a new connection with her Ghanaian heritage, and made her want to learn more about afrobeats. So she found an expert:
Christian Adofo, author of A Quick Ting On: Afrobeats
Send us your song for our summer playlist! What’s a song that represents your personal diaspora story? Go to notesfromamerica.org and click on the “RECORD” button to leave a voice note with your answer. Tell us the name of that song and the artist, and a 1-minute story that goes along with it. We’ll gather all of the songs and your stories in a Spotify playlist that we’ll update all summer.
Tell us what you think. Instagram and Twitter: @noteswithkai. Email us at notes@wnyc.org. Send us a voice message by recording yourself on your phone and emailing us, or going to Instagram and clicking on the link in our bio.
“Notes from America” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. Tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on notesfromamerica.org or on WNYC’s YouTube channel.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You've always asked me like where are you from and they expect a long answer but what |
| 0:06.4 | I connect to the most is my Palestinian heritage. |
| 0:08.8 | I spent so long of my life trying to assimilate and it wasn't really until my grandmother died |
| 0:15.6 | in 2019 that I realized like what a mistake that I made and so ever since then I've been |
| 0:21.7 | trying to like re-equal break this culture back into my life. |
| 0:25.2 | I did not want to stay in America but I fell in love with a guy and decided all right |
| 0:30.0 | I'm gonna have to stay in America and that's how I'm here. |
| 0:33.0 | You know I always looked forward to getting you know in community with other Arabs really |
| 0:37.4 | any diaspora Arabs and just being with them and being able to have these conversations |
| 0:42.1 | and not have to explain everything all the time or just say to each other oh yeah I get |
| 0:47.2 | it we all get it. |
| 0:55.2 | It's Notes from America I'm Kai Wright welcome to the show and to get us started today I'm |
| 1:14.4 | joined by our producer Regina Dehear. |
| 1:17.0 | Hey Regina. |
| 1:18.0 | Hi Kai. |
| 1:19.3 | A couple of weeks ago you launched our Notes from America Summer Playlist project. |
| 1:25.2 | Woohoo! |
| 1:26.2 | How's it going so far? |
| 1:28.3 | Just to recap the focus of this year's Summer Playlist project is music of the diaspora. |
| 1:34.9 | We're looking for song submissions from listeners that speak to the experiences or personal |
| 1:40.4 | reflections of being part of some kind of diaspora. |
| 1:44.3 | Right and so you kicked it off with a conversation with these guys from a music duo called Wake |
... |
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