Before I proceed, I'd like to open with a video.
This video was taken on Friday 23 January 2026, while my spouse and I were in Christoph Jakob's neck of the woods. One of the nearby small towns has a monthly karaoke night that is hyped up among the locals, and from day one of our visit Chris made sure to let us know that we were going to this. For days I racked my brain thinking about what I was going to sing… then on the night, it hit me.
I could sing Whitney Houston. Specifically, the one song that my schoolmates and I sang every Children's Day when we were in secondary education, when it was celebrated between us as “Everybody's Day.” That song, you know. Greatest Love of All.
And so I did.
The venue was packed that night and the crowds erupted in applause when I hit that initial D5. The praise for my performance was effusive. Notably, many people repeatedly said one thing, in German and in English: “your voice is extraordinary.”
I'd like to talk about that word, “extraordinary.”
For years we were all sold the tale that for someone to be successful in music, they had to be that word, “extraordinary.” Another term for that is that someone is meant to have the “X-factor.”
And to that end, many of us, myself included, were told by our parents, teachers, peers, and even industry figures, that if we didn't make it, we didn't have anything extraordinary. Even the Home Office declared, overtly and otherwise, while I was an asylum seeker, that I had nothing to give to this country. By definition, no skills, nothing “extraordinary.”
In that small town's karaoke night, I was told the opposite for the first time in a long, long while.
See, it's not fact that is believed or taken for truth: it is repetition. We see it in people when conspiracy theories and disinformation are repeated to them on a daily basis by figures small and great who are given a platform. We all can run the risk of believing lies when they are repeated to us and no alternative is presented. We can even believe lies about ourselves.
After I had received this massive effusion of praise, a slew of questions started to run through my head, and they would not leave me. I want to give voice to them now.
These are questions that demand answers, regardless of whether we can answer them.
Do I have the extraordinary to give, yes or no?
If yes, then why the FUCK has my work been slept on for so incredibly long?
I can only imagine that anyone in a similar situation to myself would ask the same questions (as they should). I will go even further, and say that if we can't answer these questions, then maybe we've been lying to ourselves and to each other about “extraordinary.”
This is a tale as old as time, too. I can think of many composers from centuries past whose names we know, who did orchestral versions of popular dance tunes. But they weren't the ones who composed those dances, for all we know. Nor were they the ones who came up with those dances. Gavottes, waltzes, mazurkas, the list goes on. In all likelihood, these dances were dreamed up by peasants whose names we wish we knew. Their names and their extraordinary musicianship, that touched the likes of Bach and Chopin for example, are lost to history. And that is a massive travesty. We have effectively signalled that their contributions are not extraordinary, and that they don't matter (when, in fact, they do).
Today is no different. We don't need to complain about lacking the extraordinary in music when there really are extraordinary musicians all around us. I can name a few, but my list would be woefully inadequate – Christoph Jakob, Psamathes, Fogheart, BLKY, FMA+12Gage, SnugglyBun, all extraordinary in their own various subgenres and niches of music – and I say that my list would be woefully inadequate because I know for a fact that I have only barely scratched the surface with criminally underrated musicians and their individual brand of “extraordinary.”
Music is expression; where singing or stage performance or playing an instrument is involved, music is also athleticism. We push our bodies to the limits to bring forth entire worlds of experience, to communicate with people who need to hear a given emotion or message. And if none of the athletic side of music is involved, we go to some really dark places sometimes to write music. I'd argue that that's fucking extraordinary, and that it's sorely needed in this day and age.
We're at the cusp of recognising entire peoples' musical contributions; we're at the cusp of something better. We're living in a time when the current systems propping us up seem to be failing left and right. Spotify and TikTok, the two platforms used by venues over the last decade to determine whether an artist should ever be played in a venue, have sold their souls for various reasons, the latest being the enablement of ICE and their cruelty through ads, or the provision of users' data to ICE.
Music, as we've seen over the decades, is a reflection of the social situation. Billy Joel did Goodnight Saigon when the Vietnam War was raging. Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis, the most recent number 1 hit, touches on the ongoing brutality committed by ICE against the people of Minneapolis. But let's not stop there. Music and social change need not be limited to those whose names we know.
At the end of this we can all emerge better, lamenting that those voices that should have been heard were not, and trying to redress that balance. We can all emerge better, making pipelines for new creatives at any age and at any stage to advance. We can recognise the musicians around us, especially the small ones, and give them whatever leg up we can.
We can recognise that the recognition of talent happens when we return to a stronger sense of inclusive community. Many of the old names we recognise were picked out from everyday community settings: singing in bars, singing in churches, singing in karaoke nights (when, in this day and age, none of these seem to be ways forward for so many musicians). We can reject the brickwalling of smaller musicians and say, enough is enough.
Extraordinary happens now, and in our everyday.