BEFORE AND NOW

Friday

December 9^th

08:10

Look At These Photographs

Look at these photographs

Every time I do, it makes me laugh

How did our eyes get so red?

And what the hell is on Joey’s head

So goes the monster hit single, Photograph from the commercially successful Canadian alternative rock outfit, Nickel Back! A feel-good jam that will not only snap your head out of your neck, the unmistakable voice of the lead vocal man, Chad Kroeger will throw your ass into nostalgia! The group is one of one my favorite rock bands of all time.

Anyways, this mornin’, without meanin’ to, I went through some of my old photographs (hard copies, of course), shit I took years ago, stuffs from way before camera phones took food out of these photographers mouth.

And nah, those photos weren’t from the era when photographers were mainly old timers and Kodak, Olympus, Polaroid (asses are the only things that shake like Polaroid pictures nowadays. Lol) and dark rooms reigned supreme, huh uh, not that far back.

Am talkin’ about photos from when digital cameras and young’ns who can afford ‘em had already snuck in through the back door of photography and took over the scene while the old timers were locked up in their dark rooms tryna develop some of their shit. Am talkin’ about pictures from late ‘99 and early 2000s, times when I rocked corn-rows and ‘Fros like my life depended on ‘em.

 Ah ha! Those were simple times, times when you had to take your ass to the studio or the motion ground to get your picture taken (motion ground is the name given to an outdoor area on university campuses in Nigeria where students go to take photographs). I got some iconic photos taken from those.

Mags and Rep

Even before I could string the English alphabets together porperly to make words and form meanings out of ‘em, I love readin’ magazines! Did I say I love readin’? Well, not exactly.

If you brought Ebony or Word-Up or any of those other foreign mags to school back in the days, you’d be king for a time and if you could keep them mags comin’ month after month, your rep gon shoot to the skies!

We all wanna read those, well, maybe not read as such, cause some of us jus wanna look at the pictures and piece together our own stories from there. You dare not ask any of your mates who can read properly what was written in there for the fear of being the butt of mutherfuckers joke! Ah, secondary can be a cruel place if you’re a weak nigga, lil douche bags gon turn your ass to a punch line for their jokes.

One thing that stayed with me from all those magazines was some of the dodgy ads I used to see in ‘em. The ads always claim they got some special brew or method help people “lose” a certain problem. The opratin’ word there is “lose”, note that. Y’all should have an idea what am talkin’, right?

Before and After

While lookin’ at those old school photographs of me, old school? Ah, I love exaggerating, don’t I? Anyways, I unconsciously reached for my phone and went straight to the Gallery, clicked on video and images and bam, I was comparin’ photos!

I didn’t really see much changes except for the fact that strand of greys on my goatee have increased, apart from that, the mean look in my eyes is still the same, ten years later and am back to rock that dirty fro and I still got some of that six pack goin’…yeah, yeah, I know am ego-trippin’ again but hey, am allowed to, right?

That lil vain exercise of comparin’ the photos of me before and the “me” now kinda took me back to those acne-clearin’,  slimmin’ and weight loss ads i used to see in those mags from back in the day, I always used to peer deep into those photos tryna ascertain the truth, I suspected somethin’ was fishy but i couldn’t proof shit. I know am not the only one who thinks those photos were of two different people (they were always two, one fuzzy, the other one clear). Back then, there was no Photoshop, think of how easy it is nowadays to doctor peoples weight, scars, acnes and shit in photo.

It’s amazin’ how an otherwise beautiful and intelligent overweight (ladies especially) person would buy into anythin’ that claimed to help ‘em lose those excess pounds in one week! Men, shut the fuck up! Did you put those extra pounds on in one week? So tell me how you think some magic potion gon take ‘em off for you in one week, huh?