(((This is the 2019 draft of a post I never made. It was the first idea for a title and design for the album that became Fete. I worked on different designs to support the idea but they ended up looking like, well, color wheels… not interesting and definitely not exciting. Sometimes even the dead ends are interesting, because they represent a thought process and a journey of discovery. This is probably from sometime last year April, I believe. I think the title Fete is better and I love the color and the design of the album cover. It fits the music. I heard that a good ratio of success to failure is 60 : 40. A rate of success that is higher than 60% means that one isn’t trying hard enough, not taking enough chances, and a rate of failure that is higher than 40% can be dispiriting… I did end up naming my new record company HuHeartDrive, which plays with the ideas of the Hard Drive, or memory, with Heart and being HUman)))

The title of the album may be: Hu

For me there is a double meaning to that word HU. The first is HUman without the patriarchy. The backstory is that MANN was once the old English word for people. At that time WIF was the word for a female mann and WER the word for a male mann. Those words are still in use, because WIF became WIFE and WER is still used in the word WEREWOLF, man-wolf. Somehow we ended up with huMAN, an English word that has always bothered me. I think words matter and words like woMAN and huMAN I don’t love. Similarly there are the words MALE and feMALE.

Here is a quote from an article about FEMALE – MALE:

Female has its origin in Latin and comes from the Latin word “femella”, or “femina”, which of course means “woman”. Male, on the other hand, come from Old French “masle”, or as we know it in modern French “mâle”, that itself comes from the Latin word “masculus”, both of which mean “male human”. Over time “masle” became Male and, around 14th century, after a long use side by side with Male, “femella” morphed into Female, bringing both words in line with the modern usage. There is no prefix Fe in the word Female, Female stands on its own, and only after centuries of misspelling did the words Female and Male acquire their similarities.

The second meaning of HU is, of course, HUE, as in color…

I am thinking of creating a color wheel of human skin tones. I imagine it to be a round representation (like a circle or a planet), but I want the tones to lose their separate fields and blend into one another, and I want the background to be black – since we all came from Africa.