Just when I am beginning to understand local musicians and appreciate them more, they go and come up with something utterly outrageous that it leaves my eyes smarting and my ears humming.
I know we live in a country where almost every woman is fighting with the other over some man; where witchcraft seems to rule the day and dazzling women seem to have resigned themselves to poaching on other women’s men instead of finding unattached ones, but really…
Will someone tell me the logic in Winnie Munyenga’s Saasira? The song that catapulted her to ‘fame’ in pure Ugandan style is one I had never listened to until it became so talked about I had to find it.
Unlike Abdu Mulaasi’s Swimming Pool, which I also listened to for the first time a couple of weeks ago and found it extremely funny in its local, assimilating way, Saasira left me missing the point.
A concubine whining for someone else’s husband to stay the night and not return home to his wife and kids? Puhleaze! With all due respect, these things do happen in society, fine, but what is a ‘perfect-legged’, ‘perfect-bodied’, talented Munyenga doing rolling her massive eyes and crooning ‘things’?
And this Harriet Kisakye who did Kandahar and Ki-Nigeria… I have never listened to Kandahar, but I recently heard Ki-Nigeria and was amazed! The woman is encouraging women to use all sorts of charms, witchcraft and love potions to tame their men…
Okay, men can be a randy lot when it comes to relationships. And we all know women in this country will do anything and everything to keep a man… including human sacrifice.
Then comes this funny voice urging them to go on and do to their men all these things depicted in the popular Nigerian movies, where witchcraft is the main plot in each of them.
By the way, I still miss the whole point of those movies too! Apart from their heavy accents, can’t any director come up with something that is not violent or witchcraft-centred?
Certainly, Africa is about more than that!
Anyway, back to this local music. The musicians are such a quarrelsome bunch!
Today it is Bebe Cool composing something about Chameleone or the media. Then Chameleone composes another shutting up Bebe Cool and other critics. Then the two artistes make up and each composes another song abusing someone else…
Or Mariam Ndagire taking her very public issues with Ruth Wanyana over John Ssegawa too far. I must say Lwaki Onvuma has very good beats, but the lyrics come off – for lack of a better expression – cheap.
When you sing to depict what goes on in society when it is happening in your own house, it is very difficult to convince the listeners that you were just doing your job!
Listen to Sheillah Nvannungi’s Doctor… She addresses the societal issues in relationships without being repulsive.
You hear the insults in the latest Eagles Production releases and when the song hits, another musician dashes back to the studio to cook up better insults.
Well, maybe we are just a quarrelsome lot as Ugandans; that is why it earns people a fortune offloading personal stress and the latest expletives on us!
Let’s dance on!
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QUOTE:
Saava this post, I think, belongs to Kimeeza as a topic of its own. Would you be kind as to start it up again there so we can all contribute. Thanks
