Mannequin: Fally Ipupa's Make-Believe Cat-Walk

In Mannequin, the catwalk rump isn't really for "the walk." That was a ruse everyone went along with, though a few do get to walk. Or perhaps those gathered there couldn't find a more appropriate venue for their purposes. The real business in this music video is "talk". But everyone is agreed, it seems, that the talk shall be walked, without any strict "runway" rules. Still, everyone, aware of the venue, is dressed for the part they imagine will be theirs, when the "show" gets going.

WATCH: Mannequin Video  

There are three camps at the gathering, fronted by Fally Ipupa, KeBlack and Naza -- if one gets it right. And there is only one item on the agenda (as the lyrics reveal): Preventing, at the eleventh hour, a "marital" (or relationship) breakdown, presumably between a male-and-female pair. But each of the three protagonists, who talk only in song, is, er, male! Perhaps they are only the lawyers. It is a well-executed theatre of the absurd.

Everyone goes along with the charade. The band -- the invisible band -- infuses and punctuates the "proceedings" with great, shall we say, aplomb. The vocalists have a great do, too, each in his turn. They are the key participants. There is a supporting cast, to be sure, largely of tastefully dressed ladies -- some of whom get to sway with the music and to turn as models do, when it suits their fancy. But the thing ends with no declared resolution to the matter which brought the gathering together in the first place. Still, everyone leaves without a fuss. END.

READ: The Mannequin Lyrics [NOTE: I don't speak French, but I thought I heard a few Swahili words (such as "suguli mingi") thrown into the video, which I don't see in the printed lyrics]

MUSIC: Soke ~ Burna Boy's Jam Session

Burna Boy is, in my book, an honored elite member of Africa's musical (uni)verse, with a handful of great songs credited to his name. His single, Soke, is one such. The language in which it is sung is taken as a given here, though the opportunity to glean deeper meaning would significantly be reduced for many Nigerians, I suppose, and nearly all non-Nigerians, were it not for the available transcription and translation (click here for the Soke lyrics). The video, published on May 2, 2015, was directed by MattMax. It runs for 3:40 minutes, which, in the light of what I'll say below, potentially denies us, ardent 'followers', some 23 seconds of deserved funk, by my reckoning. But so be it.

For a while now, I've been meaning to share my thoughts, with everyone, about Burna Boy's Soke. This is because I think it's an exceptionally fine piece of aural design, interwoven with a 'revolving' set of still images that are both visually rich and enriching. Someone has aptly dubbed them "pictorials", and so they are.

Soke is an unusual, visually provocative music video in which only the protagonist, Burna Boy, croons and -- most of the time, certainly -- moves, with (some) abandon. Till nearly the very end, the rest of the actors, the supporting cast, are in truth in frozen motion. They are in pure immobility amply evocative of the realist painter's most distinctive and treasured doing. The cast's moves are already in freeze-dried 'full flight' even before we, the guests, are allowed in on the spectacle.

There's a wonderfully upbeat blend of sound and voice in Soke.  A highly refined beat of wind and stringed instruments, all blended together by the flick of a magic wand of sorts, brings itself, in perfectly-timed modes, into a superbly choreographed duet with the singer's own, virtually independent, voice. The song's overall tune is thus, for all intents and purposes (and for me), ethereal, without being sentimental. The whole blended thing, which is dance-hall leaning for sure, seems tailor-made (as well, if you like) for the last hour of the afternoon; that is, the sundowner, as we have come to know the hour in Nairobi. And for the secluded couple, too.

As for the visuals, what the eye, our gaze, has here, in essence, is a canvas, a video, mostly of stillness. This accentuates every move that Burna Boy makes, which he does superbly; and every baritone sound that he lets go, so to speak, via his distinctively rich vocal cords. Thanks to the invisible and subtly positioned and re-positioning camera(s), though, every still image 'gets a life', or reincarnates itself, and so projects the illusion of uninterrupted motion: still, improbable, movement in several acts, if you like, embellished with make-believe emotion(s) of a kind. Frozen wiggles of the waist. Waists wiggling in frozen pieces of Time -- time pieces -- and segments of Space-Time. Great images of poised dancers-as-mannequins, in various tasteful poses. BB sings and dances, with reserved passion and sure-footed, among and around these veritable figurines, these presumptive waxworks. There's much ado (about everything) in all this stillness, and everything works!

Everything! Great images of musical things and bodies and other 'intrigues': Played piano. Saxophone. Gold-plated timepiece. Bronze-plated water-tap in classical design. Rocket afterburn, seems to me, or lesser smokescreens. Some kind of power-puffing pop, spearheaded by BB himself. Hung pictures half-way out of a negative pre-life, Newton's Cradle.

And yet, and yes, there's real dancing -- real bodies really dancing, a laid-back band-member blowing his horn -- at the very end of this captivating jam session packed with great sound and voice. All of which is going to be hard to beat, I do think.

And so (you'd think Kenya's Matatu touts got to him, already) --

"Soke, Soke, faster, faster.
Soke, Soke. Ooo faster, faster,"

 -- it ends.


Click to watch the video

NOTE: As I get set to press publish for this post, I note that Soke has so far enjoyed 731,474 YouTube views, as of 7:30 pm (GMT+3), October 24th, 2015.