A Thought: 12 ~ Music Addiction

We humans can and do get drunk on all sorts of substances and things, which we build a deep affinity to. It all just depends on who and where you are -- and what point in your life your life happens to be at. You can even get addicted to a kind of music. 

Such addiction occurs at various levels (any and all of which may intersect): Global, national, sub-national, communal, group, individual. At higher and higher levels it inserts itself in more and deeply cultural distinctions. And these distinctions may in turn confound or be confounded by the social orders. 

The main point I wanted to make here, though, is that people do get addicted to all kinds of music -- and turned off by all sorts as well. And it is possible for such addiction to shift with time from one genre to another, one end to the other. Wild birds sing too, but each species seems stuck to its own genre -- as to its own feathers. The first is a pity, the second seems glorious (though not for us). We prefer made up or spun threads and, depending on taste, personally coordinated designs and colors -- where mass offerings give us only the basics, or templates to tweak. 

There are people who seem too dour or too serious and too self-absorbed to sing, or ever dance -- which is hard in any case to do alone in public, or before certain publics. We would certainly think they'd lost control of their senses and gone sort of mad, if they were suddenly and dramatically to do so; let alone what they would themselves think. But perhaps we would be wrong. You don't know what tunes and beats light up their hearts and their spirits in private -- and when they're bathing. You know what gladdens yours.

O de Dinkart: Haiku

All that body text!
Ancien art in soaring flight.
Up noord, b'yond Gu Lu.






~~~~~~~~~
Note: Re-Imagine

Jua Cali and Enika in a Nostalgic Call, "Niimbie"

Play Niimbie {Video}

[Kenya + Tanzania]

There is a song I would like you to hear, and whose video I would like you to watch. It is Niimbie (meaning "Sing for me"). I didn't even know it existed until three or so weeks ago! And I'm surprised that it's been around as long as it has without my being "aware" -- despite the fact that Jua Cali is a household name in his country (Kenya), certainly among his age-mates (whom we, lots of us, live with). It is a lovely production, and the producer's intent was clearly to make it as genuinely as possible a period piece. Jua Cali proves himself a pretty good rapper here. He's really on a roll.

Niimbie is, at root, a nostalgic and truly moving story-telling, a remembrance of the singers' more formative years -- though with accent on Jua Cali's. The feelings expressed are not to be spied on the singers' faces, but rather in the words that they put forth -- with puzzling 'religious' conviction, even. They are in the tunes as well, which we hear. 

That the beat is suggestive of something that older folks more clearly remember from a past more distant than Jua Cali and Enika really can, is no matter here. It is really not so surprising when you dig into it that this is indeed a story of the difficulties.Niimbie is a truth-telling. The story starts, coincidentally, in Orwell's 1984 for these millennial types who, as a cohort, insist that even events recorded just one year before their birth are plainly too "too long ago". Perhaps all generations think the same way. Niimbie is, regardless, a her/history. First recorded as audio in 2009, it 'dropped' as music video only in 2010 or thereabouts.

Enika's voice in Niimbie is pure gold. It is nimble and deeply evocative. It carries us along with her in this return to a past life of millennial pain -- relived now only so, perhaps, it can be communally exorcised after all these years. As she sings in the song's more lyrical lines: 

"Tuli jikaza-a,
Mwishowe tukaweza.
Tuli sumbuka-a,
Mwishowe tukapenya."

[We hustled,
In the end we did it.
We suffered,
In the end we broke through.]

"Pote tunaenda,
Wote watupenda."

[Everywhere we go (now),
Everyone loves us.]

In 2009 and 2010, though, change (or material success) was not happening quite as expected, or as narrated, or as it could have. In many respects, that was pre-history, but one they remember without having it told to them by others. It is only in 2016 that serious progress appears to have begun in doing justice to Kenyan artistes, but the details and end-results are another story in themselves.

In "a word," then, Niimbie is delightful rap wrapped in melodic vibes of a kind. That's the form. The content is this living history told and retold by the very same masufferers (as one Ruto would say) who lived it -- under our very noses, and in our shadows, so to speak.

So, who's Enika! We've been hearing a fair amount about Jua Cali on various Kenyan media, but who, and where, is Enika? What ever happened to her? It so happens that she is in fact a Tanzanian songstress. I got to know that only yesterday. And I've also come to know that Niimbie was not her first shot at fame, nor her last. Still, from what one knows about the current scene in Tanzania, and despite references I have just seen about her subsequent performances, this once-rising star has ostensibly dimmed with time. Can she make a glorious come-back?

READ: A brief on Enika

READ: A bio of Jua Cali

UPDATE: New YouTube video link to Niimbie inserted on July 27, 2020

Orses: Haiku

Her car twerks. As. She
Rides 'er thru the lunch country.
Like Sosuun's brown 'orse.







HOOFNOTE:
Ah! Here is Sosuun's
'Orse! See esp from 2 point five
Eight to three 0 five.

Sheebah's Nkwatako

Queen Sheeba isn't bashful. No, no, no! Which is a good thing. She sings like a snake-charmer -- with, perhaps, her namesake's (her role model's) beguiling voice. The slowed-down tempo in Nkwatako (which means "Touch me" in Luganda) is a disarming ruse, central to her secret art of war -- and her seduction. It accentuates her unique vocal cords, which demand it here; and around which every command and everything else revolves.

She, Sheebah, dances like a rebel queen, at a makeshift camp of her own choosing, outside the gates of the last fortress, north of something, which she's fixing to overrun with her time-travelling troops -- on her way to meet her fabled king. And so to realize her grand plan. 

Her dancing and connecting motions are thus by design, and sprinkled with allusions. It's an art-form masquerading both as pure war-dance and pure theater; a fleeting homage to, a cross between, the choreographed motions of the dance-hall and today's (and tomorrow's) stylized ballet. It is, at its core, a muted fertility dance -- with accent on (her own) desire. 

The costumes we see on everyone involved, and the funky mix of colors in motion, are a pure fashion do brought in to camouflage, in plain sight, the real intentions. And the music, ah yes the music, is the real weapon of war here: Hard-edged and yet harmonizing, spartan (and so without flourish), mobilizing and equal to the task.  

READ: Felista Esolio's Review of Nkwatako

NOTE: The lyrics of this Ugandan song are an intriguing mix of Luganda and English.

READ: A Version of the Nkwatako Lyrics

A Thought: 11 ~ Comfort Zones

Without comfort zones, life as we know it would not be sustainable against all the dangers and potential predators. Indeed, it would not have begun. There's always need for dens of safety, zones for unhindered and perhaps voracious feeding, and, invariably, certain places for incubation. They are integral to the very idea of territoriality. And territoriality is integral to them. We should never lose sight of their immeasurable value. And yet survival and continued success demand that we constantly think and prudently go beyond them, as parameters and environments change and reveal threats and opportunity in unequal measure. Indeed, they more than nudge us to become uneasy and innovative and doubly unafraid, and even migratory -- and in the end extra-terrestrial.

December: Haiku

End of December
Is for all the borderlands
You were born to cross.

Blue Key: Haiku

Pinksea, rapsinblue!
All the desolate islands!
Alien hieroglyphs!

Wizkid's Ojuelegba

Ojuelegba, I think, is the song that made music fans and connoisseurs, first around Africa and then other parts of the world, sit up and take note of one Wizkid -- as literally a new kid on the musical block. And it wasn't that the song had a soaring melodic (or declarative) start, or red-hot tempo -- or that the video had mind- imprinting optics; far from it. Nothing in it asked us to dance, or to get off our seats at the very least. If anything, the expectation was that we'd just sit back and take it all in at our own pace. But the video, it turned out, had a secret and beguiling and perhaps subliminal charm with delayed-effect, and I don't think anyone (not even famed Director, Clarence Peters) pre-scripted that. But he, CP, will just have to have the final word on that. 

The video had this wonderfully unobtrusive beat, this sort of slow-motion and off-handed posture in the vocals and the instrumental accompaniments, that was so powerfully disarming. There was no star posturing -- not by this self-proclaimed but elf-effacing Starboy domiciled in his own song (in that very Ojuelegba) inside Lagos, inside Nigeria. 

And it was mostly in black and white -- or shall we say grey, as it is grey megapixels that do crowd the remembering of it. Except for Wizkid's red-pink half-boots just as possibly made of soft leather in the upper parts as of 'brushed' canvas, that really stood out. And for the truer-red cap and juicy water melon we saw at 3:09-3:22 as the Wiz sang in final despair: 
"I can't explain,
I can't explain." 

In hindsight, what we saw was the image of a young man not simply ambling into a public combi -- by definition a Matatu, if you live in East Africa -- for a short ride to somewhere in his hometown. We were witnesses to a magical moment of due transformation -- the starting point of a teleportation of one aspiring artiste into a future (which is, already, now) of enormous but at the time quite unanticipated fame. In the end, I hazard the thought, it was in fact our gaze -- we, 'tough' customers, who are kings -- that did the trick. It was how we watched Wizkid, through the camera's gaze, enter that Matatu, and how vaguely we heard him say those things that he said in the song, that propelled him into that future I'm alluding to.

READ: The various meanings and allusions embedded in the word Ojuelegba. 

READ: A summary of early critical reviews of the song Ojuelegba


If I can sum it all up in a few words, the song is essentially about the singer's desperate inability to explain on his own why he might be "feeling good" (tonight), given his life-story -- in which his "people suffer". Thus, it is the expression, at once, of a conquering and conflicted humility. 

It so happens that Ojuelegba was not in #TheYamboSelection of Africa's top 40 pop hits of 2015. Instead, it was that lovely Soweto Baby -- serenaded by Wizkid, legendary DJ Maphorisa and DJ Buckz -- which was deservedly ranked, at 15. And so the story goes.

Click here to watch the Ojuelegba video:



HERE: A Link to The Ojuelegba Lyrics

This Blog's Milestones at End of December 2016

Here are some milestones of the Mauri Yambo Blog recorded at the end of December 2016:

1. Published posts (all-time): 741
2. Draft posts (plus formerly published posts back in 'draft'): 46
3. Pageviews on December 31, 2016 only: 417
4. Pageviews during December 1-31, 2016: 14,944
5. All-time pageviews: 380,331


READ: Blog Milestones at End of June 2016

READ: BLOG POSTS: More Milestones Recorded in October 2015

Humblesmith and Mr. Flavour Strut Their Rooster Stuff in Jukwese

Jukwese is an Igbo word which, for present purposes, means "ask around about me," if you want to know just who I really am -- and why I'm more, so so much more, than I may seem. The song Jukwese, rooted in that connotation, has a genealogy which it will be futile for me to retrace, as you can see hints of it for yourself. Just click on the link to the lyrics given below to catch a drift of it in the short narrative provided at the beginning. Your quest can move on from there. 

Here: The Jukwese Video

I think that for the non-Nigerian, the first impressions that draw your attention (as they did for me) to this music video, 'shot' by Clarence Peters (a superstar in his own right), are: 
1. Irresistibly melodic tunes (with a touch of Congolese, I reckon)
2. Really lyrical lyrics
3. Colorful, super fine, optics
4. A delightful ambience.

Going beyond those four attractions, the song's vital punch lies almost entirely in the literal and interpretive import of the lyrics, which few people outside the language of the song have immediate access to. For the Nigerian, instant knowledge of what the lyrics really mean, or imply, perhaps detracts -- as the viewership numbers probably suggest. 

In the Jukwese lyrics, Humblesmith and Mr. Flavour essentially adopt the rooster's frame of mind. To twist a little bit the meaning of the title of one of Seyi Shay's signature songs, a rooster is essentially a jangilova. And a jangilova is a swinging, carpetbagging, rooster -- here today, gone (at sunrise?) tomorrow. In a comment under the Jukwese video, one Eke N wryly observes along these lines as follows: "Flavour gets reunited with the girl in Ada Ada video, hope he doesn't get her..." [Or, someone tell me, is it the girl in Gollibe?]

The two gifted singers, the gift of the gab in hand, are sly salesmen for love -- in a campaign in which they are the very same products they're pushing. All things considered, though, they don't sound as sincere as Kiss Daniel and Sugarboy in Upon Me. Just read the Jukwese lyrics to sense the unbridled self-adulation in the words. 

Here, as I conclude, is a sample:

"A baby boo, imalu mma.
Anu'm eme na tau tau.
Anu'm eme na mili mili.
Anu'm emekwa ofuma.
Baby, Jekwa jukwe ese.
.......
Jukwaesa na Alaba Lagos O".

HERE: The Jukwese Lyrics

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS: Here below is my original take on Jukwese. I have today (April 2, 2018) deleted the post (of June 17, 2016) in which it appeared. It survives!

JUKWESE is, as, "Too much lov"; as too tru a do! Humblesmith and Mr. Flavour do a super melodic thing here. It's thus: there's magic from the very start. It soars, and is higher than life as we're wont to know it on a purely material plane. So we're on another -- much, much more elevated. Transcendent, even.

The visuals are happy and refined. Refined and finely blended with the music and the body language, and the superbly tuned voices of the superstars..

What an altogether happy act!