It’s time for local artistes to reinvent indigenous genres to get air play

The question has often been asked: Between culture and biology, what precedes what? Most scholars agree that culture does.

Whites do not have a long nose because it biologically predicted the cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere. That would have been as impossible as a cow’s alimentary canal foretelling the difficulty of digesting grass, and therefore dividing itself into four stomachs in anticipation of the task. Both cases of organ specialisation are a result of gradual adaptation (culture) which spans millions of years.

The long nose partly came because of the need to warm Europe’s cold air by making it travel a longer distance in the nasal blood capillaries than it does in the African nostril where there clearly isn’t any need to warm our tropical air.

We can ask the same question concerning the recent announcement by the Ministry of Sports, Culture and the Arts, of a National Music Policy which requires the Kenyan media to devote 60 per cent airplay to local music. Shortly before that, the Kenya Musicians Movement had demanded a 70 per cent airplay.

Overrated street band

Different commentators give very good reasons in disagreeing with the proposal. My only worry is that their view does not explain why African music remains the way it is. I therefore go with the other opinion which does not mind even 99 per cent local music in the Kenyan media.

Friends, who hold the contrary view have rightly observed, however, that the headache would be how to define “local.” For instance, I would reject as foreign, 90 per cent of music produced by an overrated street band which I have since nick-named ‘FBB’, for ‘Face Book Band’ (I will return to this).

The opposers’ reasons do not tell us why Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Tanzania and others dominate music in the African continent. Why Jamaica –a tiny island of barely 2.8 million people –drowns over 40 million Kenyans in reggae. The secret might explain why Kenyan music has a very “short nose.”

The fact is that countries which are famous for good music are invariably known for single genres of the same. In special cases such as South Africa, there is a historical explanation to that exception. So South African jazz, reggae, mbaqanga, kwela, kwaito etc. have their contexts firmly anchored inside apartheid.

The two countries best known to us in respect to single national genres are Jamaica (reggae), and Congo (rumba). Yes, rumba has Spanish ties, but ever since the Congo region contracted and reclaimed it via the Caribbean Island called Cuba – where Congolese slaves found themselves through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade – Mobutu’s people have completely refused to let go, constantly reinventing and re-affirming their historical input into that genre.

It must be striking that the above two countries stick to their music irrespective of the obvious monotony which listening to just one kind of music is likely to create. That is a real challenge since human beings resent monotony in the same way nearly the whole world has rejected one party rule. But Jamaicans and the Congolese overcome that weakness by reinventing sub-genres of the same music. You can count the different rhythms of rhumba and reggae way beyond your ten fingers.

It ought to be clear that your music would never sound monotonous–and therefore begin to develop and change – if in the first place you did not even play it repeatedly over the national media. And that has historically been part of the tragedy with Kenyan music. There was always a “Reggae Time” which celebrated Bob Marley’s birth and death with amazing regularity at the state broadcaster, the Voice of Kenya (VoK). There was –and still is –a ‘Sundowner’ where people weep on the shoulders of Demis Roussos, Kenny Rogers, Nana Mouskouri, and Crystal Gayle; and a “Late Date” where love-choked voyeurs mentally make love to African-American songstresses every night.

Monotony

After the 1982 coup attempt, ethnic paranoia flooded the Kenyan radio with Congolese music, forgetting that even rhumba, too, came from certain ‘ethnic’ groups in Congo.”Lingala Mix”, “Shaky Leggy”, and “Rumba Nostalgia” at the Metro FM capped the hypocrisy in the late 1990s.

But there was neither a “Bango time” nor a “Benga time”. It partly explains why Kenyan music has a “short nose”; why our musicians have never really felt the need to reinvent indigenous genres and save listeners the monotony.

It’s why tough-minded artistes like Eric Wainaina, Suzanna Owiyo, Bismillahi Gargar, Alai, Ayub Ogada, Kidis,Chikuzee, Susumila, Ken wa Maria, Banasungusia, Western Commandoes Success, Osito Kalle, Loiyangalani, Makadem, Olith Ratego, Harry Kimani, Elani, Sali Oyugi, Sagero, all ohangla players, Chumba, Benter Ageng’a and all rare Kenyan singers who refuse to be blown away by street noise deserve the medal.

Enter the “Face Book Band”. I praised it in the past when it cheated me with one song. But I quickly saw it for what it was and warned you not to throw your money there. I repeat: Don’t – this is fake. They ride around in a car hired from Boys2Men and Keith Sweat. They have recently released a single, which is a mixture of Destiny’s Child and Awilo Longomba. By the time they fizzle out of the limelight in spite of the national good will –including President Uhuru Kenyatta’s –FBB will have been the biggest Judas Iscariot Kenya’s music scene ever knew.

However, we should prepare to be disappointed if by “local” the Kenyan media will resort to playing 60 per cent of mongrel noises such as FBB. In Senegal or Mali, Afro-Pop is real music. In Kenya though, much of it is con art –an excuse for a people’s stark inability to develop their music.

Of course the musicians are not wholly culpable. The media rarely played Kenyan music in the past, and therefore the spontaneous need to develop that sound did not naturally occur, as it did –and still does –elsewhere in Congo (Ferre Gola’s Kamasutra is Franco’s Makambo Ezali Minene, but the two songs are not exactly similar).

Those who cry that local music is mediocre are very right. Yet they are wrong if by it they mean that the music should not be aired in the Kenyan media as proposed by the Ministry of Sports, Culture and the Arts. No one told them that Americans, Jamaicans, Nigerians, South Africans, and the Congolese play

Kenyan music. Precisely that cry is what our music needs if it is to begin developing a “long nose.” Interestingly though, those who croak toad-like about the mediocrity of Kenyan music seem unaware that they gauge its quality against foreign music which reached them through the same national media that they now want to deny local music, and for whose appetite they have now developed very “long noses” indeed.