A couple weeks ago I left The River and got into my Uber back to Park Slope — as many are apparently apt to do. My driver wasn’t playing music through the car system but had a single headphone in and I could hear Fally Ipupa playing. Ipupa is one of the most famous people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, perhaps the most famous of the non-athletes and non-politicians. Given how fame has been significantly stratified across various channels of media, his fame largely goes unnoticed outside of the African diaspora and “World Music” aficionados who reject hypnagogia and hipster labels in favor of the pop music that is generated by countries and cultures that fall outside of the usual axes of power.

I discovered Ipupa in Paris, eating poisson yassa at a Senegalese restaurant while a TV played music videos. I Shazam’d the song — titled “SL” — and proceeded to listen to it many times over, to the point at which I could sing along with the Lingala lyrics while building a rudimentary understanding of what Ipupa was singing about via French loanwords. As I came to understand the song as a work about heartbreak and longing, I became obsessed with this titular “SL”, the initials of Steve Loemba, a politician and lobbyist whose name is repeatedly mentioned throughout the song, grafted on for a reason that I couldn’t fully understand.

I began to research — first I found a paywalled article published in Africa Intelligence from 2017, whose headline notes Eminence Conseil, a company who seems to engage in investment capital, development and lobbying, as a firm making strides in Brazzaville. It was a funny wrinkle as I noted that this was Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, and not Kinshasa, the capital of Ipupa’s native Democratic Republic of the Congo. And after more digging I found a PDF published by #Saussofit, a citizens action collective that aims to raise awareness about kleptocracy with the aims of bringing about political change. The dossier presented a significant amount of information about Loemba, a minor figure in the world of Congolese kleptocrats. He was the lover and “sugar baby” of the Congolese President Sassou Nguesso’s stepdaughter, who utilized his political relations to amass wealth that was offloaded into mansions in Dubai, among other assets — perhaps a remake of My Date with the President’s Daughter (1998) is in order.

I was still unable to fully ascertain the relationship between Ipupa and Loemba but given the number of philanthropic and foundations Ipupa is involved in, it seemed only natural that these sorts of overlaps existed. There was a conspiracy to latch onto, one that was fascinating for me but seemed to be of little interest to any of Ipupa’s regular fanbase. This business of corruption and kleptocracy was business as usual. The song was good. They carried on.

On my ride home from The River, I tried to listen to the latest Chanel Beads album through my wired 10-dollar deli headphones. The music struck me as largely milquetoast, a cultural product that can be pushed on the merit of the fact that tired debates about authenticity/inauthenticity and irony/sincerity–as well as several reduxes and influences–can be mapped onto it. Beyond that, one can extend the criticism of such a music product into criticism of “the scene,” diving into the conspiracy of Downtown New York, the both purported and very real right wing money that floats around in attempt to purchase cultural cache, and what it means that a band helmed by a white boy from Montana has a music video in which a Latino kid rides around on a bicycle and brings his mom, who works at a dental office, flowers. Very little seems to be said about the music, because the music itself isn’t memorable — instead its purpose is to conjure memories of past music, to play in past references to make you believe that a certain “New York” is still alive rather than existing as an undead simulacrum of itself.

It appears we’ve reached a point at which the role of the artist-as-cultural-producer can no longer be fulfilled through the making of work; it seems that the arena has expanded. Sites and situations must be constructed, whether it’s a hollow Home Sweet Home party or the deification and degradation of the image of a critic, along with the hackneyed fetishization of lore, historization, and corporatized aura. All of this works to both compete and co-create with algorithms — along with the tragedy that you will never buy Chanel Beads at Barneys New York.

Steve Loemba smokes a cigar in Dubai. You smoke a spliff outside Elsewhere. There’s a small concert and scene to engage with. Somewhere in France, Fally Ipupa performs to a stadium of immigrants. Maybe someone else will take care of the kleptocrats and all that’s been stolen.