GREETINGS, EARTHLINGS.

Brief Note on Reality, Time Travel, and the Curious Case of “Earlier Rights”

There is a strange new version of history circulating lately. In this version, ManaTapu appears to have materialised fully formed in Malta in 2012, like a well-funded pop-up mushroom, with no past, no pilgrimage, no muddy boots, no years of struggle, and—most impressively—no founder.

It’s a neat story. Almost elegant.
It just happens to be wrong.

Let’s get a few things straight before this turns into a Netflix docu-fiction.

I am Jorge (Jogy) Bo Smid. I founded ManaTapu. I created the name, the concept, the songs, and the direction long before anyone was printing posters or filing forms. ManaTapu did not begin in an office, a registry, or a press release. It began on the road, in life, and yes—on a journey that took me all the way to Pōhara Marae in Aotearoa / New Zealand, where the words mana and tapu were not marketing tools but living concepts, treated with respect.

You don’t accidentally invent a name like ManaTapu. You carry it.

By the time ManaTapu reached Malta, it already had a spine, a voice, and a face. That face was mine. Between roughly 2010 and 2019, audiences didn’t meet an abstract entity called “Manatapu Ltd.” They met me—on stage, in recordings, in interviews, in vans, in bars, in festivals. Songs like The Dude didn’t fall from the Maltese sky; I brought them with me. Fans knew it. Venues knew it. The people now writing revisionist essays knew it too—because they were there.

Now, to be absolutely clear (because clarity is fashionable):
I do not deny anyone their rights in performances, recordings, or contributions made during shared years. Musicians played. Music happened. Rights exist. That’s normal. That’s civilised. That’s how art works.

What does not work—legally, ethically, or philosophically—is the idea that participation somehow rewrites authorship. Playing in a band does not retroactively invent the band’s name. Performing songs does not delete the person who wrote and embodied them. And no amount of legal copy-paste can turn collaborators into creators by sheer repetition.

Much is made of “earlier rights,” a phrase that sounds impressive until you look under the hood. Yes, unregistered local use can create limited, territorial protections. It does not create a time machine. It does not erase founders. And it certainly does not grant immunity to continue using a name as if the person who created it never existed.

Then there’s the trademark argument, which is waved around like a holy relic while quietly ignoring context, continuity, and common sense. Claiming that a founder acts in “bad faith” by reclaiming his own creation is a bit like accusing the author of stealing his own book because someone else printed a later edition.

Bold strategy. Rarely successful.

What’s most fascinating, though, isn’t the law—it’s the psychology. Because the people advancing this narrative didn’t discover ManaTapu in 2012. They lived it. They rehearsed it. They toured it. They know exactly who founded it. Which makes the insistence on pretending otherwise less a misunderstanding and more a performance of denial.

And denial, like bad jazz, can go on for a while—but it never ages well.

So here is the calm, unglamorous truth, stated once for the record and then left to history:

ManaTapu was founded and created by Jorge (Jogy) Bo Smid.
That was true before Malta.
It was true during Malta.
And it remains true now.

No one’s rights need to be denied for that to stand. No contributions need to be erased. The only thing that needs to stop is the attempt to erase the founder.

Reality has a stubborn habit of resurfacing.
And unlike press releases, it doesn’t need rewriting.

— Jogy Bo