#I love free livestream concerts for my fave band

[louis-in-red]

Top ten AFHF moments, Steph go!!!! ❤️

Hi Sea! As the rest of the Louies, I’m still processing the whole thing. I woke up feeling so proud of this person I may never meet, but somehow feels like a friend from my childhood who I am watching grow up into this amazing performer and singer.

Here are my top ten moments (to be honest the whole thing is my favourite thing in the world right now)

1. His voice at the beginning: hearing his talking voice after so long, was so important. This year was hard, almost zero content, no interviews… so just hearing him speak (…I understood how important people are) was healing. I could honestly spend hours listening him talk 🖤

2. Him interacting with the crowd with the Spanish fans at the Madrid show 🔥 he looked so in his element and so proud (I felt like a fucking God). Kudos to the fan who said Louis is the puto amo 💙

Credits to louisgalaxy for the gif

3. His little dance with Charlie when he arrives to film the Live From London Livestream 😭 I really like his relationship with Charlie and how Louis is always so silly with him. Plus, we get so see how Charlie is directing the whole thing which is HOT! Louis talking about how cool the livestreams are and a great opportunity for fans to see him for the first time… such a good soul that man 😔

Credits to Sanju for the gif 💙

4. His little feet when he is jamming with his guitar 🥲 also him talking about the lack of inspiration and how difficult this time has been not just for him but for everyone else… it felt so human

5. His excitement when speaking on the phone to Matt (I’m guessing it’s him) about the free concert. He said he wanted to be the first to doing one and being ahead of everyone else… 😫 plus he was so flirty, playing with his hair… 😮‍💨. I’m adding here as a fave bonus part, Louis being so involved in the whole process, choosing the venue, checking how the stage was going to be, also him being concern of respecting the distance with fans due to restrictions (the way he says Corona… 😳🤤)

Credits to Sanju for the gif 💙

6. His relationship with Helene, from seeing how they rehearsed together, to knowing they have been working this whole last year through video calls (when the media and “his close friend from the band” said he was just drinking beer and probably chilling)… to know he was working during all this time into improving his voice because he is a perfectionist… I LOVE HIMMSO MUCH!! ALSO! Louis just LISTENS, doesn’t he? Like you can see how he listens to Helene. She could probably give harsh feedback sometimes and he would take it in the most positive way, because he knows Helene only just wants the best for him and her feedback will only be constructive. Her being a huge important part of his life, not just as vocal coach but as part of his support system makes me so emotional 😩 Louis my god! I’m watching again those clips and I’m crying again 😭 (PS: who is John??? wtf 😩 that name has been mentioned way too many times now and I’m clowning)

7. His confidence through the whole show but specially in We Made It??? Like he went out there to WIN!! He gave his all from the beginning to the end. I have to say I’m wasn’t a fan of 7 (😳) because I didn’t really listened to a cleaned version (only the ones from Madrid)… but NOW??? I’m a FAN! The band was so SICK and so INTO IT! It was hot to watch! They really killed it and it was one of my favourite moments from the concert 🤤 kudos to Charlie for capturing Louis’ beautiful eyes during DLIBYH.

8. The fans and how they reacted to everything Louis did or say! Him saying it’s fucking unbelievable and that it’s only posible for the fans 😪😪😪 what the fuck I was worried about? 🥲 and the fans during CHANGE… I don’t think they were expecting that quality of a song and you could tell in their faces that he exceeded their expectations (kudos once again to Charlie for beautifully capture the relationship between Louis and the fans). It was cute that Louis said the song it’s name CHANGE and not CHANGES 🙂

Credits to setsfiretohistory for the gif

9. The band!!!! My GOD THEY ROCKED!!! They were so into it, they jammed through the whole thing and you could tell they really enjoyed it and that they love playing for Louis!! Steve was so 🔥🔥🔥 the drums were on FIRE!!! Michale and Isaac being a cute guitar duo during OTB and Matt being beautiful and cute during 7 just jamming and rocking 😫 Zak on the keyboards doing his little head movements 🥰 I don’t know what else to say I just love them and I love that Louis has them as a band. Kudos to the string ladies who sounded amazing and were so cool (drinking the encore shots)!!! I hope they go to tour with Louis 🥺

Credits to Sanju for the gif 💙

10. The after show moments: From the group hug (that shot did some magic as well), to his family and his best friends being there, from Helene being the most proud (crying because Louis sounded amazing) to Louis talking about how he can get lost in his head sometimes but it was different during the festival and that he trusted Helene saying he smashed it… I think he truly felt it! He knew he gave his all and since it’s been a year and a half since he had that feeling… maybe he was afraid he wasn’t going to be that good but now he knows he was the best he has ever been and he feels more confidente than ever. I can’t wait for next year when will get the tour (please let him tour 😭) and probably (hopefully) we’ll get more bts footage since Charlie will be there with him for some dates (I hope).

Credits to Manu for this gif 💙

Well… this was an emotional rollercoaster. I laughed, I cried, I was horny, I was sad, I was happy, I was proud… It was everything 😌😮‍💨 I’ll watch it again later 💙

#I love crying #Sea 💙 #thanks for this question!! I got to see it again just to remember which parts were my favourite #the away from home festival #Sanju you are my main gif provider 😳👉🏼👈🏼

[oneweekoneband]

Ninety One, “Mooz” (мұз), from Qarangy Zharyq, 2017

(Warning: flashing lights around two minutes in; also, some violence. Here’s the audio-only video.)

But, like, it’s still just a band: they were never actually protecting anybody or setting anyone free. (from a post by @whitehotharlots​)

To make a long story short: about five years ago I fell in love with a pop group. Like spending-hours-on-Tumblr-learning-all-the-in-jokes love. Like imagination-run-wild love. Like as-opposed-to-grief, as-opposed-to-despair love. But once the initial euphoria-through-learning-through-euphoria phase had run its course, the love was a static thing, directionless. One of the great pleasures of love is doing things for the beloved; but what, exactly, was I supposed to do?

The company, and the performers themselves, said: buy our albums! Stream our songs! Help us win awards at music shows! Come to our concerts! And I did those things; but trying to think of them as expressions of love left me feeling inadequate and a little sordid. Other options were to leave messages and hearts on their livestreams, and I occasionally did that too, using Google Translate to turn “I hope you’re doing well” and “Thank you for your hard work” into Korean, but thousands of other fans had the same idea, and the resulting rush of love felt impersonal, statistical. They, the performers, had no way to know who we, the fans, were; and furthermore any attempts on our part to make them know would be so forced as to violate the very spirit of love that had prompted the attempt in the first place. Each of us was speaking singularly and truly, but the sameness of our language, and the volume of our messages, flattened us out.

What can I do? I kept asking. Which is another way of saying How much power do I have?

We (who have the ability to get online) have a strange relationship to power, in this day and age. Entire books have been written about how people with ostensibly enviable amounts of power might not feel secure enough to actually accomplish anything. (The late Benazir Bhutto apparently once said: “I’m in office, but I’m not in power.” The quote came up in a discussion of Aung San Suu Kyi’s responsibility for stopping the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.) Meanwhile those of us with less formal titles are nevertheless capable of possibly destroying people’s reputations with a single Tweet, or perpetuating unjust systems simply by growing up in them. It feels like we have a great deal of power, wanted or not, to do harm; and seemingly much less power to do good.

That becomes even more pronounced in pop fandom. We want to believe, so badly, that we have the power to do good things for our faves, or at least make them feel loved and valued. But our attempts at exercising our power frequently add up to very little, at best. We also want to believe, so badly, that we can do good with pop music, support the virtuous and punish the wicked; but that, too, carries the risk of being much ado about nothing, or degenerating into a series of sniping wars where everyone’s fave is problematic and no one has any self-respect left.

That pop group I fell in love with wasn’t Ninety One, by the way. When I started writing about Ninety One I said cheerfully to friends: “Oh, I’m not, like, emotionally involved here. These guys are fun and cute but this is just a fun intellectual activity, a side way of getting at some of these questions I’ve had. I’m not crying or anything, thank goodness.” Please remind me I said this next time I try to give you a stock tip.

In my defense, I said it before “Mooz” came out, which is to say before I realized Ninety One was thinking about power and doing good too.

***

I haven’t seen the movie yet. Reportedly NTK, a channel with which Ninety One has struck some sort of deal, is promising to put it online at some point (most likely with Russian, but not English, subtitles). I assume bootlegs are traveling around YouTube. A lot of the footage in the “Mooz” video was already featured in the two-minute trailer uploaded to Ninety One’s YouTube channel in early August.

It’s the story of the first couple years of Ninety One, but not a documentary; rather, it’s a docudrama, with scenes acted out by the guys themselves months after the fact, but everything based on What Actually Happened--90% true, I’ve seen Kazakhstani Eaglez say. I’m not sure how great an idea it was, mental-health-wise, to have the members re-enact confrontations with would-be rioters during the 2016 tour, let alone whatever happened to prompt AZ to put a gun to his head. But even if I’m right (and I’m speaking with my own understandings of what happened and how it got processed, which could very well be way off the mark), something can be emotionally costly to create and still be worth it.

Without knowing about the 2016 tour, “Mooz” is hard to understand, since it’s not a typical believe-in-yourself song. It’s subdued. Ace has the chorus, but he sure isn’t belting. Bala has “I have a dream,” but he prefaces his lines with a little chuckle, as if he’s somewhat amused by all the twists and turns this star-in-a-pop-group idea has taken him on. AZ’s rap is pure lament. Alem at one point just flat-out stops lip-syncing and simply stares into the camera, looking devastated and unsure.

There’s a sense of uncertainty in the wake of damage done. Ace keeps singing, Мүмкін күн шыққанға дейін, бірге күте тұрамыз? The official English translation is “Let’s wait together until the sun rises.” The Russian lyrics, similarly, drop the question: Может вместе подождем, пока солнце не взойдет. “Maybe together we’ll wait until the sun rises.” (Says Google Translate.) But in the original Ace is asking a question: can we wait together until the sun rises? Is that even possible? And AZ continues: the whole world, in fact, we are strangers to each other? The members’ collective sense of their own ability to proceed forward--to do good--has been called into question.

Moreover I think the uncertainty stems not just from the experience of having had their concerts shut down, though that’s the most extreme (and audience-pleasing) culprit. The trailer actually begins with black-and-white footage of masses of Eaglez screaming at concerts. In the interview this summer the members say, no no we’re glad that we’re not The Band That Spawned a Thousand Thinkpieces right now, we don’t want to be regarded as just controversial attention-getters, we want fame on our own terms. All according to plan, Bala says in the song; but “the plan” calls for greater fame, and greater fame is going to mean less and less power, in terms of their ability to control their own images.

Here I am thinking of a video I’ve seen but won’t link to, of Ninety One at some kind of industry dinner at the beginning of the year. Alem sees the camera first, as he’s about to go into the dining hall, and he waves, throws a V sign, seems happy to have the attention. But the camera continues inside, and when ZaQ and Bala catch sight of it they’re clearly uncomfortable; they’re not looking to be public figures performing for fans right at that moment.

Thinking, also, of Rana Dasgupta’s recent essay, “Notes on a Suicide”:

The problem was that, for the most part, it did not matter how widely broadcast your discontent was: no one cared. The great majority of celebrities – in this new world where even nobodies were celebrities – were lacking in that basic attribute of the celebrity, which was fame. They were half-creatures – unfamous celebrities, anonymous superstars, VIPs like the entire rest of the world – and unlike their fully formed counterparts, the world did not gasp when they expressed their thoughts and feelings. Everything was lost, in fact, in the infinite cacophony….

In the world of social media, where everyone becomes a celebrity, they do not inherit merely the life force of stardom – its beauty, achievement and sex. What is transmitted also to these faceless ranks of superstars is the inner knowledge of death. For, as all true celebrities discover, the media image feeds parasitically on human energy, starving them and removing them, slowly, from the realm of the living.

Even setting translation issues aside, the odds that Boss Yerbolat and Ninety One read Desgupta’s essay before filming the video for “Mooz” seem pretty low. But seeing the brief manipulation of ZaQ’s face into that of an old man’s, I wonder if they haven’t had similar thoughts about what they have to lose, in staking their accomplishments on the awareness of strangers.

***

And yet, and yet, and yet.

They keep yelling Eaglez! It’s practically a trademark: Сәлем, Eaglez! Part of that may be marketing. Part of it. Not all of it.

There are a lot of directions they could have taken with “Mooz,” and didn’t. They could have chosen to laugh off or minimize the disruptions, reassure fans that nothing can touch their commitment to Ninety One. They could have refused to address the uncertainty altogether. They could have done more easily sellable songs about love and relationships, as they did on Aiyptama. They could have put out something more upbeat and generic.

Instead: Неге бəрі мұз? The English translator on duty has Ace’s line as “Why is everyone so cold?” But мұз actually means ice. A better translation might be “Why is everyone frozen?” To continue the metaphor from “Su Asty,” and spell it out: even with gills, you can’t breathe in frozen water.

Ace says, can we wait together? AZ says, and why am I still hugging my knees? Alem says, I don’t know who is who, but my heart continues to believe. ZaQ says, Either their judgment will crush me, or I will pass by not noticing them. Bala says, I will not give up so fast. To me it adds up to, continuing on in the face of profound uncertainty. That they don’t know exactly how to love Eaglez back en masse but they’re going to keep trying. That they can’t be sure this will all work out to their benefit, but it’s still worth doing.

And then, for the first time in their discography, they switch to English:

When you feel alone You can breathe with the world Just keep our rhythm One love, one rhythm

And because now is not the moment for subtlety, Ace looks at the camera for the first time, and Bala makes a heart gesture record-setting in its sincerity.

It’s grandiose. Of course it is. It’s a grandiose idea to begin with, to say, This was my experience, and I think you had an experience like it, and here’s what I want to tell you, this helped me, I think it will help you too. It’s grandiose to think you can talk about the meaning of true happiness in a pop song. It’s grandiose to talk about love and one rhythm to millions of people you’ll never meet.

It is grandiose, in truth, to assume you deserve enough power to be able to do good.

***

There have been times, putting this week together, that I’ve wondered if it hasn’t been a gigantic waste of time, or worse. Quite a lot of time flew away while I happily wrote, and then I looked up and the doubts crowded in. Everything from Are you sure this is worth taking time away from your kids for? to It’s just a pop group, after all to You’re just flattering yourself into thinking your consumption choices are somehow “deep” or “ethical” to Who gave an ignorant American woman first dibs on writing about a Kazakhstani pop group anyway? to Even if you do somehow succeed in getting Ninety One more publicity, that’s not necessarily going to make them more comfortable or happier to All this time, and no one’s going to read it, and meanwhile you still haven’t washed the dishes.

You have to understand: I come from city planning. As a discipline we’re swamped with two things: people who enter with the fervent, heartmost desire to do good, and examples of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. And as a general rule of thumb, the bigger the intention, the less predictable and controllable the consequences.

I think Ninety One want to be famous with their work, the way most people who like to create original works (myself included) do. I think they want the power of visibility for themselves, their genre, and their country; more specifically to beat back the powerlessness that comes with invisibility. And I think they want to do good. “Mooz” feels like an acknowledgment that none of this is simple, that the power to do good is hard to get and harder to use; and a resulting combination of resolution and humility. The desire to reach out, still; to use their song to speak; but their promise is small. When you feel alone, not “you are not alone,” not a promise of connection they can’t deliver on; but, you can breathe with the world. That’s all. Just breathe. Such a small thing.

What was the superpower ZaQ and AZ boasted about in “Su Asty”? We have gills, remember? Simply breathing underwater. Breathing.

That’s it? Ace asks. That’s it, Bala says.

Why did I even start getting so obsessively into pop music and its stories in the first place? To feel less alone. And then to marvel at the idea that people on the other side of the world, speaking other languages, coming from experiences fully foreign to mine, were willing to offer enough of themselves to cameras that I could, in fact, feel less alone; even if there was absolutely no way of my being able to do half as much for them in return.

As best I know Ninety One hasn’t seen this. I don’t know how to show it to them--I don’t even know what would be the best platform for jumping up and down and yelling HEY GUYS LOOK WHAT I WROTE AND IT’S ALL ABOUT YOOOOUUUUUU, leaving aside any issues about queue-jumping in front of other Eaglez who put time and energy into their own presents. I don’t know how to tell them that I find them lovable and inspiring, or that thanks to them I’ve had a great deal of fun learning about Kazakhstan and Kazakhstani music. I don’t know how to say thank you--рақмет сізге, or maybe Спасибо--loud enough for them to hear it; and even if I did, there’s no good reason why I should be the one who gets heard and not some other fan.

But it’s still worth doing.

introductory post / all Ninety One posts

#ninety one #mooz #qarangy zharyq #91 movie