Song & Story Vol. 4: Inferno x Kin

This week, I’m thinking about a simple question: What becomes possible when an artist embraces the most basic building blocks of their craft?

Inferno, a hit track from Afrogospel artist Greatman Takit’s new album Flames of a Wildfire, is my latest earworm. The song is hypnotic. After listening to it enough times, I found myself almost trance-like in my dining room, then in my study, on my feet with my arms spread wide, spinning around and around as though I, too, were on fire.

When I stopped spinning long enough to ask how the song had done this to me, I noticed how little its foundation seemed to be doing. The underlying chord progression—[CHORDS]—is simple and familiar, the kind that has held up scores of songs across genres. Through this familiar chord progression, Takit invites you to relax into the repetition, to free up your attention for everything he will build on top of it.

And what he builds? Anything but simple!

He brings the vocal rawness and inflections of Fuji into a Gospel song. His lyrics move between English, Yoruba, and Christianese. And he compares his love for Jesus to being drunk on palmwine, even slipping in more risqué metaphors through clever Yoruba wordplay. The foundation stays simple, while the performance grows stranger, funnier, and more culturally specific as the song progresses.

By the nth time I hear him sing, “surely you give me what this world can’t relate with”, tears fill my eyes, because, if not for the love of Jesus, how else could I be going through fire and not smelling like smoke?

Tayari Jones does the same thing in her latest novel, Kin.

I was struck by the simplicity of the prose in the novel’s opening chapter—it pulled me in as if with a firm, gentle hand, saying: “Come. Relax. Trust where I’m taking you”. The language in Kin was lucid enough that I found myself relaxing into the arms of a storyteller who wasn’t immediately trying to show me what she could make a sentence do. Instead, she was asking me to focus on Annie and Niecy, her leading characters, and their backstories.

But Jones doesn’t stop there. She saves the extravagance for her characters themselves, putting language into their mouths and minds, like:

“She’s been like that all her life, salting the fields on her way out,” and

“When the songs get to swinging, I feel tiny, like a piece of dandelion fluff floating on the breath of God,”

amongst many other sentences I highlighted before putting my Kindle down and taking a deep breath each time.

Because we’re not wrestling with the narration in the novel, we can notice when the language becomes ornate in someone’s mouth. We can ask: What does this person believe about the world and about themself, to reach for this specific metaphor?

This simplicity—built into the foundations of Inferno and Kin—doesn’t make either work less rich. Instead, it concentrates the richness exactly where the artist wants it to go.

And one more thing both works accomplish? They reward insiders without excluding outsiders.

You don’t need to be Nigerian or Christian to enjoy Inferno, but the song opens up differently if you recognize the Yoruba slang, the Christianese, the Fuji lineage, and the audacity of putting palmwine in the same sentence as Jesus, of saying to Him “fa mí”. Gutsy!

Likewise, I don’t need to be African American to be cocooned in the warmth of Kin, but there are frequencies—1950s HBCU life, Black Southern social codes, queer love—that will ultimately resound differently to those who can recognize them from inside.

Neither writer nor singer insists that you understand everything before welcoming you in. Instead, both bring you into a comfortable, cleanly-furnished living room and offer you a drink. You settle in, thinking you understand the dimensions of the place. Then someone presses a button by the fireplace. It swings open, speakeasy-style, onto a weird indoor slide. And suddenly, you’re plunging into a world where Fuji-fied vocal inflections, Christianese, and palm wine; HBCU joy, queer love, and familial yearning float and intertwine freely.

The simplicity was always just a door.

Iná ń jó mi ò!

Watch me talk about this on TikTok.