Showing posts with label Chidinma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chidinma. Show all posts

Friday, May 11, 2018

MUSIC (AfroBeats): Nesly and Chidinma are All-Conquering in "All Right"

Two African Queens, Nesly and Chidinma, have teamed up in this magnificent song, All Right, to give us their very own and aurally gilded definition of a 'smashing' wimbo. We're all invited here, all of us, to a tonal fest; to an absolutely bewitching blend of visual and aural "tunes". The supporting cast of dancing ladies keep everything absolutely upbeat and on an evenly high keel.

The vocal harmony and the melody that we come upon -- and spiced they are with electrifying verve and pure joy -- are deeply immersing and all-conquering. The trailing and cascading echoes with which the singers' voices fill the air, and the universe, are so deeply entrancing and so indescribably African. They reinforce our sunny sense of place, and make us proud -- of us. They remind us of the depth and the beauty and the oft hidden strengths and settings of this vast continent that we call home.  


Click here to watch the All Right clip


NOTE: All Right, a song supposedly published on January 26, 2017, came to my attention only a quarter of an hour to midnight (GMT+3) yesterday, May 10th, 2018. Due 'credit' to YouTube algorithms.

Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Gone Forever: Chidinma's Moving Dirge

Somber background music sets off this mournful send-off for Mama, who is never going to come back. No one, sadly, does.

Cries Chidinma:
"If tears could bring you back,
I [would] cry you a river!"

It is that anguished moment which no caring human can escape,  but for those occasions when it is the mother who has to bury her beloved child. And so Chidinma's personal dirge resonates widely, and is indeed universal. She sings for all of us, who have ever lost a loved one!

She musters a choice of vocal possibilities to reflect, and reflect on, this irreparable loss: 

"My first love has been taken away from me," Chidinma cries.

Both the singing and the play of instruments are finely pitched for this indescribable loss. The video scenes, too, minus the early images of violence, fit tastefully into the rendition of this common human condition. The ocean-front scenes, in particular, have an ethereal touch which accentuates the deep emotions freely emitted here.

Gone Forever will resonate with everyone on earth, who gets to hear it. 


Click to view the video of Gone Forever

Click for the lyrics for Gone Forever

Tuesday, March 08, 2016

Net Worth: Top 20 Richest Musicians in Nigeria ~ September 2015

The video is shared on a need to know basis only, whatever that means here. One needs to know this? Then one will just have to construct a method for 'reading' and misreading the pictures and the numbers. Some surprises, OK? Sum 'em up.



Tuesday, September 08, 2015

Back To The Future: Today's Mass Migration To Europe Evokes Thotes and Images

Today's mass migration into Europe, I've recently been thinking, is a replay, of sorts, of African occupation of Europe c.30 to 50,000 years ago, when the Cro-Magnon were their only resistance. A Europe before Europa, even.

The Africans were not fleeing. They were going forth and multiplying -- populating a world, and then the world, without any profound level of Aristotelian thought -- Aristotle, who was their distant nephew -- about the consequences, for them and for the very same world (see Out of Africa: A Comment on..Roberts). At the same time, it's a wholly different thing.

READ: "Syrian Refugees Challenge Us to Be Better"

SEE! German Protesters Throw Stones at Refugee Buses at Heidenau:



READ: Today's refugees follow the path Hungarians who fled Soviets in 1956

There were no TV networks to record the Africans' movement, and the various arrivals. No social media. Perhaps talking drums. Perhaps smoke-talking. Perhaps an extinct precursor of vuvuzela under the armpit. No trains or rail-tracks. Only Cro-Magnons and wildlife. Only animal tracks to doggedly follow, then. An arsenal of stone things, perhaps. Wooden things. Stringed stuff. No gunnery.

LOOK! Refugees'face harsh conditions

No one to offer them shelter. Or winter clothing. Shelter offered itself, in the caves and hillsides and unreachable rocks. Or food. Or bottled water. Ah s'pose they had the wherewithal to grab and occupy unblemished bearskin from reluctant bears, who'd never seen apparitions such as that. Wolfskin from stunned wolves. Woolen gear from all those clueless rams in open spaces. Something of the woolly mammoth from altogether new neighborhoods -- and farther East, in the permafrost.

READ: Germany Struggling to house asylum seekers

The smarts to be their own transport. Or create transportation and communication systems out of nothing. To build rafts and boats for slow rowing, paddling up the Rhine. Hither and thither, blakka than blu, on the Danube. Down, up Senghor's Seine. And else.

To feed off a land without ice cream. Beat all resistance.

They changed Europe beyond anyone's reverse-prediction, and changed a world which in turn changed them too. They're today's Europeans agonizing over the new migrants.

Perhaps there is something in Germany's Angela Merkel, now crowned Mama, that 'remembers' all of this and urges her to do what she's doing.

And if nothing of what I've said evokes enough going, perhaps Chidinma's video images in Kite will, thanks to Clarence Peters, connect enough visual dots and cross enough Ts of the mind to evoke the kind of epic future we keep going back to in our acts and our thotes. and which I was trying to say something about here.



[Update: September 11, 2015:The video portion of Kite does evoke the past I think it does. Yet in making that remark I overlooked the fact there is, at least for me, another stand-out imagery to the same effect that I have previously publicly noted. A more powerful evocation, if I may say so now. Here, look at what I tweeted in April this year about the video stream in Davido's hit song One of a Kind:
"@MauriYambo Apr 5 The visuals in 's video evoke (unintentionally? subliminally?) images of 's epic migration "
You will have to decide for yourself if we are to 'read' the visual text in One of a Kind the way I have read it. Forget the lyrics for a moment, or perhaps you shouldn't. Just contemplate this recreation, this pure levitation, of the generic inner gaze confronted -- as it must surely have, so long ago -- with the possibility of a future beyond mortal imagination, but one (of a kind) in which we now live and in which current events have begun to present as such a monumental throwback]:




P.S.: VIDEO UPDATE 1 (Sept 10, 2015): "We walk together"

P.S: VIDEO UPDATE 2 (Sept 14, 2015: Something New, Something Old: CNN's chronicle of the new migration