The Audio v. The Visual: Olamide's Music Video "Melo Melo"

PART I: (February 10, 2017)

[PART 1 presents archival material extracted from an earlier version of the Top 40 list of 2015. The extract was effected in order to ease (speed-up) navigation up and down the Top 40 list]

Olamide's Melo Melo video was released on June 1, 2015. This is, with a little re-touch, what I said in two tweets on June 10 about this haunting, entrancing song:

1. "Melo Melo", straight off #Olamide's master oven, delivers a mellow-sombre mood unto the soul and unto the ether.
2. #Olamide works very hard, as 'Melo Melo' shows. Heard that? A harmony of voices and things -- framed with the strings of 2 violins and 2 cellos.

The song is indeed sung in a distinctly brooding, "solitary" mood, and this leads me, even now, to ask: What exactly is one to think was going on in Olamide's mind with this song? Was it plainly an actor's pose, as it might very well have been? Whatever the case, Melo Melo is certainly one of Africa's top songs of 2015.


Click to watch the Melo Melo video


Here is an earlier take on Melo Melo

NOTE: By 3:40 p.m. (GMT + 3) on Boxing Day 2015, Melo Melo had been viewed 1,459,226 times on YouTube.

PART 2: (Updated on February 14, 2018)

For a non-Nigerian, it's the translated lyrics (click here to read) that at last reveal what was going on -- not in Olamide's mind, but in the mind of the character Olamide plays in his own song. "Melo, melo", it turns out, simply means "How many, how many" [In Swahili, that would be "Ngapi, ngapi"]

Melo Melo is mostly a song of gratitude, love and commitment. That is, a feeling of gratitude toward someone, his Babe, who'd stood by him when the rest of the world had judged him a loser.

"My baby you are the best" [...]
"...there's no other person, only you" 
[The two lines sound too prosaic, though, written down]

Why the disconnect, then? Why, given the feelings of deep love, such a brooding mood (a mood of the defeated, even) as we hear in the singing and in the instrumental ph(r)ases and tunes, and as we see in the visuals with our own eyes?  The answer, I think, lies in 'the genre'. I have two broad genres in mind: cinema and music video. In cinema, the sound track faithfully tracks the twists and turns -- indeed, the dictates -- of the screenplay. In music video, it seems to me, such fidelity remains atypical in many enough #AfroPop cases to constitute a distinct 'pattern' of its own. 

Often enough, then, the eye follows the optics into terrains quite at variance with the aural muses which the ear by its nature must follow. Thus, two discrepant stories often contend for the undivided attention of the 'divided' fan. The experience can be quite enriching in subtle ways, powered by the magic of an engaging and unexpectedly delightful montage; but it can lead to much misreading of what's really up as well.