MUSIC: Elengi ya Innoss'B na Koffi Olomide

Innoss'B and Koffi Olomide chose Elengi, which means sweet in Lingala (as in "What sweet love!"), for the title of their song here, which runs for 4:09 minutes and which is sweetness itself, from the beginning to the very end -- believe me! The word Elengi itself is sweet, tamu, mit! Bayaye! Wololo!

"Elengi ya Mbongo"

This amazing song is sung in three lingua francas: English, Lingala and French. The music is pure excuse for the funk in the lyrics that run in tandem with (and are integral to) it, and the groove in the dance that interprets the both of them for all to see and hear. As I see and hear it all myself!

"Elengi ya Mbongo"

Innoss'B is the Jeunne Leader in all this AfroCongo stuff! He who pleads with all the ladies "Show me what I want to see!" And isn't, or perhaps is, but not in the video. And Koffi Olomide, who roars like a Lion, his stage name, written invisibly in his mane, in truth is: "ah ah ah ah Quadra eh eh eh eh". Quadra in short.

"Elengi ya Mbongo"

A dramatic beginning, full of creative and rousing noise-making, prepares us for a journey of lyrically explosive sounds, unbelievably smooth glides and gloriously choreographed group-dancing, w/ a touch of Bruce Lee's kung fu posture even (arms raised and bent outward and downward at the wrist). Pity, though, that we see only glimpses, taunting and hunger-inducing glimpses, of dancers we can tell would be a wonder to c in full blast. P'raps it's all about the money. 

"Elengi ya Mbongo"

As said, then, Innoss'B and KO are the main agenda. When Innoss'B calls, KO's callback is a roar. And when KO is by the spirits moved to weigh in, he does so in stacatto bursts of phrase, and the effect is a moving, multicolored dance-hall ado. The supporting cast knows its place. When the act is really going and everything else is really 'forgot', Elengi is a grad (grand) seminar on cool performative swag. At its best, the rhythm of the body heaves and troughs like slow-motion waves in the near sea. That is, as the unseen band goes wild with whatever keys it uses to light up this wilderness of sound and mirth and technicolor -- as wild as the River Congo itself, at its crest.

"Elengi ya Mbongo"



WATCH VIDEO: Elengi by Innos'B ft. Koffi Olomide

CLICK: The Elengi Lyrics




Just found out that Mbongo means Money, as I got ready to publish this post (Dec 17, 2016 ~ 12:55 pm, GMT+3).

On Music Video

In the heyday of the radio, music was all about listening. Music video has changed all that. Far more than the musical, it has forced dance upon the song – and then pushed song to the back row. It pays more attention to body movement than to sound. The song would indeed disappear if the dance could continue alone, but it can’t. Things didn’t use to be like that. Now, we spend more than half the time hearing the dance.

And yet, I think, video was meant to reunite what radio had put asunder. That is, to put a face to the song – to make the singer, howsoever far away in body, sing in spirit before our very own wide eyes. It was the means by which our eyes could feast upon the singer’s virtual, spirited presence. And it so happens that the thrill, the emotion, of co-presence sparks motion, which fires up even more emotion – till, that is, we tire. Thus did the singer begin to strut – and likewise the band, and the back-up singers. We joined in, mirror reflections of the very stage-act which reflected our spirit. Strut called in the services of choreography, and the camera. Which is how this history is writ.

Is a time not coming, in humankind’s uncertain future, when we will agree that we have seen enough, and had enough, of music video’s dance routines? I think the time, such as it is, cometh. Soon enough, the youth will run out of dance ideas, so that each new routine, however fine-tuned, will smack of the last. So that, more and more, everyone will, against their will, dance clips of just the same extended dance.

And then what? Tradition. Traditions are extended routines. They are routines which have become too routine. They are habits we do not think much about; habits which, in fact, inhabit us.

Such routines suggest how traditional performative art forms were born. How they were borne, place to place – time before time. Why people occupied them with a singularity of mind which allowed them to ask where you went wrong if you didn’t go along. That is how sure-footed cultural envoys, complete with ostrich feathers and all-too-familiar drumbeats and garb, come to journey among the un-initiated with fancy footwork. And to sing songs which only the dance enables us to truly hear.

That is how the new melts into the vast terrain of what we call heritage – and sometimes kultur. What we call yesterday. That vast, tiresome landscape from which the youth, who must people another era (and other places), will as surely as tomorrow’s sun will rise, and with a certain slyness of purpose – with a certain meekness of means – seek to distance themselves; but from which they cannot, in form (as opposed, perhaps, to content), entirely escape.

You see, it is just that, if you are deep inside the thing, you will never see (you will really never know) how not-so-very-far in time your actions have in effect drifted – even as the bell loudly tolls for another way of turning, curving, bouncing the supple body. The earth-coloured body. The not so certain – not always – body. The some-time bounty-less body. You will never escape the fact that all dance is in the end routine; and the body has just so many possibilities. As routine, dance is a closed system, subject to entropy, music an open one. Music transcends routine.

Another time and place, another sort of leather and feather, another kind of garb – another sound, even. That is how life always was, until the emergence of mass communication and travel. But today’s technology hybridizes and homogenizes, even as it creates new traditions. Being less localized, being more regional and global in its effects, it can only create them on a grander scale than witnessed in the receding past. What sort of popular dance will there be 500 years from now; and how will they regard Thriller, whose 25th anniversary is now?