Yesterday (May 26th) evening, as I drove and listened to Nairobi's Classic 105, Larry Asego, the 'DJ' of the hour, played Kanda Bongo Man's single titled Muchana, which was released as a video in 2012, if my source is correct. It brought back many memories of what Kanda Bongo Man meant to a certain generation of us. A caller endorsed Asego's comment that if one wasn't moved by the guitarist's solo moment in Muchana, then one needed to have the ears checked. I silently concurred, behind the wheel.
That radio-play has prompted the lines that follow.
Kanda is a much-adulated Congolese/Zairean musician in large swathes of East Africa -- Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. He is particularly fondly regarded as a versatile singer with awesome dance routines by those who came of age (I won't define coming-of-age) in the Seventies and Eighties. But his reputation began to fade, at first imperceptibly, with the coming of the video -- and then, specifically, video music. It's a fate that has befallen most of his great compatriots, certainly in the countries I have mentioned.
It can be said in retrospect that Congolese musicians of Kanda's age, and those who shone earlier than he did and probably served, at least remotely, as his sounding-boards -- titans such as Franco (a.k.a. Luambo Luanzo Makiadi), Tabu Ley (Rochereau), Bozi Boziana (with his lovely troupe), Pepe Kalle (with his two 'faces' -- here's the other), Papa Wemba; and the leading divas: Mbilia Bel and Tshala Muana -- were tutored on audio recording and live performance, on some sort of stage that was invariably set on minimalist principles. Kanda was something of an exception, to be sure, with his stylish (to the older ones perhaps rebellious and precocious) dress-code. In general, one can say that older Congolese musicians were never -- or, more accurately, never became -- adept at the nuances of show which video music came increasingly to demand of the lead singer and the instrumentalist and the bit players.
With the video, a fusion of sight and sound rather quickly became the defining feature of popular music -- the very genre (let's call it Lingala Pop) which the Congolese certainly assumed their fans would forever associate them with. Sight required a choreography of colorfully dressed and agile bodies -- bodies dressed more modishly, if not more minimally as well, than in the not-so-distant heyday of Congolese music, when Lingala and music meant the same thing.
Kanda could be most of that, and indeed was (to some still is) something of a Johnny-come-lately dandy. So was/is the irrepressible Awilo Longomba, and some of the younger artistes. But many veterans began quickly to look like veterans in fading garbs -- and to lose their appeal and fans across the region.
But even for impresarios like Kanda, the fact that the musician (at one with his/her band) was not the master of all his/her set, or stage, or 'production' became more and more obvious with the rapid evolution of the music video, incorporating the increased 'equalization' of audio and video components of the totality of a single, or an LP.
I am trying to say here that a good music video now requires (has indeed to some degree always required) for its artistic and commercial success a certain mix of things: the well-endowed if less glamorous contribution of the producer, the director, the set designer and the camera woman or man. In all of Africa, the Nigerian music industry -- representing a highly competitive market segment, energized by a huge consumer base, and lodged in a culture where highly-charged 'theatrical performance' is deep-rooted -- has been the most successful in cracking this 'code', since circa 2013-2014. That is to say, it stands out as a country with the entrepreneurial and material resources, and audience-base, required to monetize it. Other countries will follow.
Earlier yesterday, I'd had a sort of interior monologue about what constitutes a classic, and how 'hits' morph into what we loosely or strictly call classics. In brief, we can say (it is widely known, for sure) that, in pop music, the hit that tops the chart(s) in the first week of the year is not necessarily the hit of the second week or the month, though it might be. The first month's hit is not necessarily going to be the hit of the quarter or the half-year, but it just might be. The hit of the half-year may or may not be the hit of the year. One year's chart-topper is highly unlikely to be the next year's. Today's fans, for whom last year is by definition passe, just want to celebrate something newly 'dropped' -- something of this year -- which conveys a sense of now and, therefore (certainly implicitly), of temporal movement.
But underlying this 'tradition of the new', this fixation on the 'here today, gone tomorrow' moment, is a deeper interest, as one grows older, in enduring 'likes' (that is, in what we have widely favored in the past and still like, and like to like still); in, as we say in Kiswahili, Zilipendwa (or Zilizopendwa). Likes we can grow with and pass on from our cohort to the one after us, and then from one generation to the next, on and on as time flies, are what we, all of us, come to know as classics.
Kanda Bongoman's Muchana is certainly on the way to becoming an African classic, of the audio kind. The visuals aren't so hot, as I have been suggesting, and could perhaps be tastefully remixed.
'Kanda the Dandy' is hardly to be seen in Muchana. It's as though he wanted inexplicably but temporarily to appear here under the cover of drabness, in a visually drab video. The gals, though, are fine and supple -- as fine and supple as can be. As if to reclaim the sapeur tradition in which he was born, and of which he is obviously proud, he resurfaces, an all-in peacock with a surprising twist, in Sweet.
It will be said in the days to come, I imagine, that straight out of the "Heart of Darkness," sapeurism, a sartorial classic in its own right, as supremely confident of its body language and ingenuity as of its view of the world, its weltanschauung, was able to create a classic or two, and then a fistful, in another genre -- music -- which it offered to a skeptical world not quite ready to grasp the connections. [A video of Congo Brazzaville Sapeurs here]
Here, a crisply produced video of Muchana Lyrics
NOTE: Last paragraph added on May 31, 2015. Some editing done on October 10, 2017. Link to the Lyrics added on May 5, 2019.
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