Alik Shahadah

What we learned about the rules is that there are really no rules. Halaqah Media, the parent company of Ocacia, is 3 decades old. Influential but not fiscally successful in monetary terms, despite setting so many trends. Kind of like most out there, never getting credit for work. From Pakistan to Nigeria, to America, you can find Halaqah products everywhere. 

But when you have 3 decades of work, you can understand things better than anyone. Back in 1998, there was no YouTube, no Streaming, none of it. The rules of the industry were so different from now. A decade before that, it was largely all about talent.  The Milli Vanilli was an outlier in this industry; today, those antics are the norm. And we wonder why the arts are so pathetic these days. I even remember as a kid getting on a plane and being an air hostess meant looking like an Ex-model. Being

When we build wealth we build value. Reward should never be divorced from merit because that is a form of corruption. And everyone suffers. Human progress historically has been built on the back of exceptional talent. The great European classical works, the great African American work with jazz, the pyramids, the Taj, and the architecture of Japan. I could go on, all of it without exception represents the best of the best of that era in those fields. Today we have a very contrive hand behind every field including music and fashion. Mediocre artists holding top positions. Funded so well that if they fell they would still not touch the ground. 

You ask yourself what song by Taylor Swift is so notable to earn her top bucks?  Dont ever underestimate capitalism and what it does to make wealth. We go to the cinema and spend our money on a film that has RAVED reviews but the film sucks. All the critics are in on it. Or the film is amazing and the pro reviews suck. In the case

Malcolm X said, if chickens are raised in an oven they are called chickens, not biscuits. People on the continent of Africa just like people in the Diaspora have been visited by the same level of destruction. In Africa, as in the UK as in America, as in South America as in the Caribbean have devalued our own clothes. We have Nike in Africa as our uniform just like in the UK. A friend of mine from Tanzania at uni told me we in the Diaspora have no culture. I forgave him because he had never been to the Diaspora and Africans globally have a terribly poor education which goes both ways. It is shamefully poor. And it was made that way by the forces which enslaved us. The last thing they want us to do is to unite via our common identity. But the Diaspora, just like Ethiopia is Ethiopia and Benin is part of the African world. It is just that we are in the West now. In Africa, just as much as in the Diaspora, we do not wear our cultural clothes preferring to add value to Nike and Puma. In Africa,