Who wants a MAMA when you can win the Grammy?

Nneka. Photo Credit:Nairaland

Who wants a MAMA when you can win the Grammy?

I read Lolade Sowoolu’s "Between Sasha and Nneka" in the Showtime magazine of the Saturday Vanguard on December 18, 2010, and it was quite an interesting critical analysis of how and why the Nigerian rap diva Sasha beat the more internationally acclaimed Nneka to win the Best Female Artiste award at the last MTV Africa Music Awards (MAMA) in Lagos, Nigeria, making Sasha the first Nigerian to win in the Best Female category after Kenyans dominated it in the last two years. Sowoolu reported that many people thought Nneka should have won the award, because she is considered a more internationally accepted Nigerian artiste as Asa .



Sasha

Asa

Nneka the Nigerian-German hip hop/soul singer and guitarist is a popular artiste internationally, but not locally, because presently majority of her fellow Nigerians and the rest of Africans do not appreciate her kind of music which is more of a revolutionary fusion of modern reggae and hip-hop and her unique style has taken her places from Europe to the US and then to Africa and she won the award for Best African Act at the 2009 MOBO Awards. And Nneka was on the Late Show with David Letterman in New York before her first concert tour of the United States publicized as the Concrete Jungle and she performed shows in New York City, Vienna (Washington DC), Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And she made the coveted hot list of Rolling Stone and no other Nigerian female artiste has made it and for what Nneka has achieved so far, she is ahead of Asa and Sasha in the world of music. And her ambition is above the MAMA. She is looking forward to winning the Grammy like Sade Adu has done and even a dummy knows that the Grammy is a more globally acclaimed recognition in music than MAMA, MOBO or Channel O.

~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima

MAMA 2010 WINNERS IN FULL

Best Anglophone - Daddy Owen (Kenya)
Best Francophone - Fally Ipupa (DRC)
Best Lusophone - Cabo Snoop (Angola)
Artist of the Year- 2Face (Nigeria)
Best Female - Sasha (Nigeria)
Best Male - 2Face (Nigeria)
Best Video - Fally Ipupa (DRC): “Sexy Dance”
Best Group – P-Square (Nigeria)
Brand New Act - Mo Cheddah (Nigeria)
Best Performance - Big Nuz (South Africa)
Song of the Year - Liquideep (South Africa): “Fairytale”
MAMA Legend – Miriam Makeba (South Africa)
Best International – Eminem (USA).

Our Music Is Dying Slowly, And Still Smiling 1

King Sunny Ade is a legendary Nigerian musician of the Juju music genre.

LIFE-LINES

~ By Femi Akintunde-Johnson

Our Music Is Dying Slowly, And Still Smiling

Music is now so pervasive and in-your face that we dare not imagine a life without it, irrespective of your status or location. It’s that “bad”! But just as we are often propelled by inspiring musical presentations; so are we sometime dismayed at the irreverent hollowness of some “hip” music. And we are told the producers of these music types are profiting from their sweat, or more precisely, from their prodigious talents. I corrected myself about the level of “sweat” our music makers put into their music from reports I got while making enquiries on the state of the Nigerian music business; but more on that later.



Asa, a world class Nigerian musician

Now, that technology has made access to music more flippant, it is quite trendy to see foreign and local rave music downloaded from entertainment search engines, YouTube, Napster…free of charge…. Go to the campuses, and see students clamping MP3’s, 4’s into their earlobes, as they grind out body moves in tune with those sound blasters. As the sounds of the 21st century flies in the face of monumental deprivations, especially in developing and under-developed countries, the promoters and producers of today’s music tend to flow with the tide and stench of their climate, and make a living along the way. So, we are happy that Nigerian artistes, especially singers and wannabe musicians appear to be making tidy lump of money, as they spew out strings of musical presentations that their contemporaries, fans and well-wishers love to buy, dance and queue to watch when live shows come to town. It is good. But that is not my worry.


I know from recent bric-a-bracs in the media, following an article by my friend, Reuben Abati that tended to rile the tender underbelly of the hip-hop motley crew…the singers went on and on about the sacrilege of a grumpy old newspaper intellectual with a giant-sized ego, big enough to attempt ridiculing their hard-earned reputation and well-oiled fiefdom. You would think Abati was a snooty frustrated 60-year old pensioner moon-lighting as a journalist. I laughed at the indignation of the latter-day counter-critics, and their feverish protestations. Many people were stunned at the remarkable adroitness of the leader-writer, Banky W and the extensive disputations with Abati’s profiling of a misdirected youth in the prism of confused commercialization of an art form. He lampooned the historical mishaps in Abati’s intervention, elaborating ceaselessly on the embellishments, rather that the substance of the journalist’s clarion call.


Banky W


Now, I have come to remind the young Turks that the consequence of what Abati was warning against is coming pretty close to its cataclysmic eruptions. The decadence in the Nigerian music “industry” is bellowing near rupture; and the scattering, unfortunately, will engulf the good and the bad. Sadly, people like Abati will have no choice but smirk “Didn’t we tell them” at the remnants that will remain after the storm. Of course, noisemakers and warriors of the current raving nonsense would have fled to whence they came from…leaving the larger body of the follow-follow singing peperempe to froth in the mouth, and grovel for unavailable visas.
Why am I worried? Because the way the business of music is set up today, catastrophe is merely around the corner. Sometime last year, I sat down with a long-time friend and a foremost song-writer, instrumentalist and musician. We analyzed the trends in music production, promotion and dissemination; and came to a unanimous conclusion: the Nigerian music industry is dying; and frankly, it will, or probably have to die patapata, before it can truly rise, and take its due position, in the light of things. Incidentally, the best hands to give it life are the same starving it of the elixir for irreversible success – the young Nigerian artistes. How? Stay with me next week. Katchya.


fajswhatnots@yahoo.com or faj-alive.blogspot.com


(First published in Guardian on Sunday, February 07, 2010)

Sex-exploitation In Hip-hop And Hiplife Music In Nigeria

Two popular Nigerian Hiplife Artistes

Sex-exploitation is doing collateral damage to the psyche of Nigerian youths who have become addicted to the psychedelic and pornographic musical videos flooding the TV in Nigeria and the worse victims are the impressionable and vulnerable young girls and women who are paid to display and portray themselves as sex objects and are now seen more as prostitutes than dancers in Nigerian musical videos.

Please read The Exploitation of Women in Hip-hop Culture by Ayanna on My Sistahs.


The erudite Dr. Reuben Abati addressed the dangers of the negative influences of Nigerian music and how desperate to get-rich-quick Nigerian Hip-hop and Hiplife artistes are suffering from identity crisis and the tragedy is that the majority of them are ignorant of the grave consequences. Bella Naija and Linda Ikeji have addressed this in the so called Dr. Reuben Abati vs. Banky W debate. Many of the ignorant artistes called it the generation gap between them and Reuben Abati's generation.

How old is Reuben Abati?
How old are the producers of these ignorant Nigerian Hip-hop and Hiplife artistes?
I know them very well, from when they were all smoking garri decades ago to date.
I have produced a single in OJB's studios and OJB was not born yesterday.
DJ Jimmy Jatt and I were born on Lagos Island.
I was born in Obalende and I produced my first single in the United States in 1984.
The sheet-music is in the Library of Congress.

Even the highly gifted Nigerian Jazz artiste Mike Aremu knows the truth as he said:
"People now think that once they do Yahoo-Yahoo, the only cover-up they have to do is music." ~ Page 27, Saturday Punch, August 8, 2009.


My own primary concern is the negative images of our young women in their musical videos. Their lyrics are shallow and they rush to the studios to voice-over already recorded sounds and music lifted from a software synthesizer. Most of them do not even know the rudiments of Music and they just Lip-synch to synthesize and synchronize to the dubbed music. Finis. What's next?Oya, omoge shake ya booty musical video is made and then they bribe the local DJs and VJs to play their music and videos showing shamless girls and women as sex objects.
No wonder the cases of HIV/AIDS are increasing among Nigerian girls and women when they are decreasing in America.

Are there no positive images of dignified Nigerian girls and women to show in musical videos?Must you use them as sex objects to sell your music!
Don't you have enough brains to compose sensible lyrics and produce good music like Asa?


Nigeria o ni baje o!



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