JOY OLADOKUN - OBSERVATIONS FROM A CROWDED ROOM

In the summer of 2021 my friend Ricky Ross introduced me to Joy Oladokun, via social media. I fell in love with her voice, her familiar melodies and her songs to deep soul. In Defence of My Own Happiness was my album of the year. Proof Of Life didn’t woe me in the same way but Observations From a Crowded Room reveals a young woman maturing in her craft.

These songs inhabit the space where I would love to do church. Her observations are so real. She is subjectively vulnerable, wrestling inside her own soul yet at the same time she is giving us objective insight into the state of the world almost a quarter of a century into the Third Millennium after Jesus walked the earth.

Oladokun has her personal reasons for trauma. She grew up in church writing Christian songs and then when she came out as gay she left that behind and started writing outside the church. A black queer woman in America these days will be brushing against all and of antagonisms.

In Am I Oladokun inverts John Lennon’s Imagine. Instead of dreaming of a better world, she takes us into the nightmare of how the world is:

 

Does anybody feel like everybody's flying

Even though the sky is falling?

Has anybody noticed someone's always crying?

We don't do a thing

Does anybody feel like it's getting hotter

Down here under the sun?

Am I the only one?

 

Like Lennon, Oladokun wants to contribute to change. In the Third of her spoken word Observations she says:

 

But I feel like at the end of my life, like, when I'm on my death bed

When I'm looking back on my life, I feel like I'll be able to confidently say

That so much of it was motivated by love

And actual care for the world around me

And hope that I could make it a different kinder place

For people who don't always feel welcome in it

And I sort of saw the world change, you know?

 

Her relationship with the church certainly seems fractured:

 

Tell me, was it ever really love

If it's not meeting our needs?

If we're so scared of where the truth leads?

 

BUT Oladokun has not been as able or maybe willing to jettison God. In Questions, Chaos and Faith she lays out her aims, “I have traveled all the world/Looking for songs and girls and God.” 

In Dust/Divinity she sings, “Though it hurts me to believe / It kills me not to”, a feeling that so many of our millennials are experiencing. 

That previous song Questions, Chaos and Faith, my preferred title for the album declares her deconstructionism:

Nothing is certain, everything changes

We're spirit and bone marching to the grave

There are no answers, there are only

Questions, chaos and faith

The album comes out the same month as a new book Invisible Jesus: A Book about Leaving the Church and Looking for Christ by Scot McKnight and Tommy Preson Phillips that looks at the huge numbers of younger people leaving the church, even suggesting that their deconstructionism might be a prophetic movement of reformation. 

In the midst of the uncertainty and trauma of a dark night for her own soul and the world’s Oladokun still finds resilience and hope and light. In the closing Goodbye

 

I hope you find the light

Find the light

 

I hope she does… and me.