Kenyan Music Collaborations Quickly Turning to musical Chamas

From sometime mid last year, a trend had been picking up quite strongly on the local music scene and is now strongly ingrained you would be forgiven to think it is the way majority of Kenyan music is done. I am talking about collaborations, not your usual two to three artists collaborating on a song but a whole horde of them four, six soon it will be ten each artiste getting a snippet. Previously, such acts would be left to songs on a campaign or a rare occasion and the length would warrant such a motley of artists. Not anymore.

Welcome to the new trend, the chama version of the Kenyan music scene. All you need is a group of artists with minutes to spare for studio time and ability to come up with a few lyrics that will feature a one liner and once done move to the next artist with an idea about a song and the same trend happens. The song titles are even beginning to sound similar and the same faces in most songs make the videos hardly distinctive. It is evident little time is spent on the song production given the kind of lyrics you get what we have here is a contribution of lines and the cycle goes on. It is boring and a fraud to say the least.

The idea of collaboration as I understand in a nutshell is to bring together two distinct but compatible styles in one song. There are other benefits aside from the musical quality the major one being the cross cutting edge added to the song by combining the artistes audiences. Now in the current Kenyan case, there are a few artistes who can boldly claim to have a following. The collaborations also feature same style with the occasional odd one out artist. The financial benefits are also negligible unless for a start out artist. In fact the current set up even affects the established artist with reputations and a solo steadily built career since they lack the space to lend their personality to the song and end up churning funny lines not even themselves can be proud about.

So why does it seem to be a strong trend having five or six artists making a cameo in a 3 to four minute song? Simple, there is a crop of artists who cannot hold a single song by themselves. There I said it. It used be a criticism directed on our comedians lack of nous the hold a 30- I hr show on their own but now musicians appear to struggling to hold a single 4 minute song. Realistically do away with the hook or chorus that’s repeated three to four times and you have something like two minutes in which you want to get four artists to shine through. I mean Uncle Konias did ‘Merimela’ for nine minutes by himself albeit with obvious shortcomings but it was a hit.

This trend needs to stop since no one is benefiting unless say the record label and the little exposure everyone gets since somehow these chamas of collaborations do get incessant airplay. Truth be told there are artists you have heard three of four of their collaborations but hardly a song from them. Is it that they up they up their game when in a mob song or are they simply not good enough to do it on their own?

There is nothing wrong with a collaboration it is in its perfect sense beneficial, just don’t make them the Bible you swear by and a roundabout musical chama.