Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 10: Joe

Prompt: "A song with no letters in its title"

Selected by Joe

"11.12"

Kadafi Li

single, 2022

Kadafi Li's social media presence has been in a bit of flux recently. Li (a.k.a Kadafi Lior) is Puke on Your Birthday's in-house rapper, and so it's my responsibility to make sure that his music gets the widest audience possible on this blog. But unfortunately, when I go on YouTube and all of a sudden his entire discography is wiped out for undisclosed reasons, then it's hard to do that. As it later turned out, he was just moving accounts. I don't know why. Maybe he lost the password or something. Still, it was quite a shock. I wondered if he was okay.

See, this is why you have to save everything you do and everything you listen to and everything you like on the internet. Archive fucking everything, because if you don't keep it safe, then it'll eventually disappear. I don't know how many times I personally have to learn this lesson, but I keep having to relearn it every so often. I don't trust any streaming service. The only thing I trust is my iPod that has mp3 files on it, an iPod that isn't connected to the internet in any way, and thus nothing can touch it. I should just keep my Kadafi Li files safe on there.

The flipside of the internet is that, well... I can literally just reach out to Kadafi Li and ask him what the fuck happened. Before I discovered that he was on a new account, I slid into his Twitter DMs (sidenote: is "slide into his DMs" exclusively a sex thing, or can I use the phrase any time I contact someone via direct message on social media?). Here is our conversation:

PUKE: Hey man, can I just say that I appreciate your music. Been jamming to MA GEN all year. What happened to your stuff on YouTube? Did they make you take it down or something?

KADAFI LI: I'm not sure what exactly is goin on with my YouTube account I have to check into it. I do appreciate you reaching out with concerns that means a lot.

PUKE: Yeah dude, let me know. Would love to listen to the album again. Hit me up if there is any other way to listen to download in the meantime. Keep up the great work.

KADAFI LI: Apple Music and Spotify I believe.

PUKE: Damn, you're right, it's on Apple. I'll have to get my wife to let me use her account. I'll keep checking YouTube too, hopefully you can get it figured out so people can hear you. Good luck dude.

As much as I appreciate Kadafi Li even deigning to respond to some fucking blog, I also cannot understand the lackadaisical attitude regarding his own artwork. Dude, you worked hard on an album! Let the fans listen to it! Wild that the only place this thing existed at one point was on Apple fucking Music (and not even on Spotify, as he suggested). I like MA GEN but I'm not going to drop $10 a month to listen to it. Crazy.

That would be my biggest fucking fear, that something I worked hard on could just disappear like that in the blink of an eye. If that was me, and my shit was on YouTube, and then all of a sudden it wasn't, I would drop everything and work on figuring it out as soon as possible. Do you know how many times a week I save a backup copy of Puke on Your Birthday, just in case the worst case scenario falls upon us? More than once. Per week.

During that time, Li dropped a new song, which you can and should listen to above. Another good track from PoYB's star hip-hopper. But note that this song isn't even posted on Kadafi Li's own YouTube page. This one is on VXL TvFilms, which mostly consists of some other guy doing a vlog. Actually... now that I'm looking at the dates, it seems like the Kadafi Li video, along with the most recent vlogs, were all posted over a year ago. Which is fucking bizarre, because he posted it on Twitter on 10/22/23, and the tweet made it seem like this was brand new. Let's get organized, my man. You have a discography of solid work. Make sure it's all in the same place so your fans can listen to it!

No matter what the deal is with this messiness, I will commit to bothering this poor man no further. However he wants to run his hip hop empire is fine with me. If he wants post a music video on Twitter from some random dude's vlog that features a trash can with the address of the music video's Delaware County location spray-painted on it so that some asshole could easily doxx the fuck out of Kadafi Li if they wanted to, then so be it. I'm not the man's manager and I'm not his father. I'm just your lowly blog writer, and I'm here for the music.

But I read that article Pitchfork posted a couple months ago, about all the regional rap classics disappearing off the internet, and it scared the shit out of me. It scares me how fickle the internet in general is, and how easily all the 1s and 0s could disappear in the blink of an eye if someone wanted them to. I've lost so much on the internet over the years, pictures and videos and songs and words that I held dear, just fucking gone, washed away in the sands of time. It makes me angry and it makes me sad. And I don't want something like this to happen to Kadafi Li. I want his regional rap classics to live on. I want the grandchildren of my grandchildren to be able to pull up YouTube when they whisper the myth of "Transition," and I want them to be able to hear the goddamn song. Save everything, and then back it up twice.