Protoje – The Art of Acceptance

In.Digg.Nation Collective/Ineffable Music

Text: Davide Bor­tot

What more is there to say about Pro­to­je? No one else has been praised in this mag­a­zine as reg­u­lar­ly. No one else has shaped the RIDDIM phi­los­o­phy, this idea of future roots music, quite like him. And no one else embod­ies the mean­ing of com­mu­ni­ty and togeth­er­ness that con­tin­ues to car­ry us to this day. Pro­to­je does­n’t make Reg­gae. He is Reg­gae.

Nat­u­ral­ly, his sev­enth album ”The Art of Accep­tance,” too, is about this unique, mag­i­cal, vital music. Some­times explic­it­ly so: just check the sound sys­tem anthem ”Big 45,” ”Ting Loud” with Masic­ka (which recalls the eter­nal ”Movie Star” rid­dim), or ”At We Feet,” where Boom Sun­days, Ricky Troop­er, and fea­ture part­ner Dami­an Mar­ley all get their flow­ers. But more than that, Reg­gae is cel­e­brat­ed in the way the album embraces the gen­re’s inher­ent dialec­tic – the mil­i­tant and the mild, the weight of the cause and the light­ness of being, the nev­er-end­ing strug­gle and the impor­tance of lenien­cy, for­give­ness, well, accep­tance.

”‘The Art of Accep­tance’ isn’t just about peace,” Pro­to­je wrote on Insta­gram. ”It’s about the raw, some­times painful work of fac­ing your­self ful­ly, embrac­ing the parts you might want to hide, and then radi­at­ing from that whole­ness.” This process of embrac­ing and radi­at­ing from with­in begins – not unlike ”Scat­ter” on the album by his kin­dred spir­it and lit­tle sis­ter, Lila Iké – with block­ing bad minds. Pro­to does­n’t shat­ter them the way Lila does; instead, he holds up the mir­ror. He can con­fi­dent­ly do that because he has the courage to look into the mir­ror him­self – the hard­est piece of glass in the world. Across the fol­low­ing twelve songs, Pro­to­je engages with self-aware­ness, every­day prin­ci­ples, love as a way of life and faith as a shield, from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives. All of that cul­mi­nates in ”Ten Times Around The Sun,” where Pro­to­je man­i­fests a new ver­sion of him­self, entire­ly free of inner con­straints and exter­nal expec­ta­tions: ”I don’t want to be lost in my real­i­ty / Or be hostage to these dreams that you say you’ve got for me.”

In between sit both lighter moments like the cheeky-flir­ty Shenseea duet ”God­dess”, and heav­ier tracks like ”1,000 Lash­es” with Stephen Mar­ley, the Ras­ta rebel­lion anthem ”Locusts” (lis­ten close­ly to those addi­tion­al voic­es), and the inter­sec­tion­al his­to­ry les­son ”Ref­er­ence,” simul­ta­ne­ous­ly a dec­la­ra­tion of faith and a trib­ute to the Black woman. In Pro­to­je’s artis­tic and spir­i­tu­al prac­tice, these themes nat­u­ral­ly belong togeth­er. Self-care that sim­ply ignores his­tor­i­cal events and social real­i­ties was always mis­guid­ed. Under­stand­ing your­self also means see­ing the world around you – for what it can be.

And that is exact­ly what this music sounds like. The drums of the ances­tors and fore­par­ents blend in with the for­ward-look­ing son­ic vision that Pro­to­je has devel­oped over the decade-plus since Ancient Futures and now fur­ther refined in close col­lab­o­ra­tion with pro­duc­er Win­ta James. In their brand of roots music, influ­ences like hip-hop and R&B are no longer iden­ti­fi­able as such – because the roots were always the same to begin with. Every­thing flows, every­thing dis­solves, every­thing takes on new mean­ing. ”The Art of Accep­tance” is, above all, a vibe: med­i­ta­tive, uplift­ing, and full of the spir­it that has always dri­ven RIDDIM – and always will. Oje Ken Ollivierre, thank you for the music!

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