Just A Band Gets Featured On New York Times
Just like Lupita Nyong’o eccentric boy band Just a Band continues to make us proud on global stages.
After being featured on CNN the band gets featured on yet another esteemed platform New York Times. In an article titled African Artists, Lifted by the Promises of Democracy and the Web Nicholas Kulish has the following to say about Just a Band:
“They built their reputation with wild music videos featuring a flying animated turtle and a campy urban hero often considered Kenya’s first Internet sensation.
But when it came time to choose the subject for their video of the song “Matatizo” last year, the Kenyan musicians known as Just a Band abandoned the surreal and the ironic for the infamous torture chambers of Kenya’s Nyayo House. They even posted a link on the YouTube page to a 77-page report on the victims of torture under former President Daniel arap Moi for good measure.
“We’ll never solve things unless we stop sweeping things under the carpet,” Bill Sellanga, one of the group’s members, said backstage at a recent concert.
The political video would have been impossible under Mr. Moi, who kept an iron grip on the country for more than two decades. Just a Band formed in 2003, the year after he left office at a time of creative ferment following years of repression.
Binyavanga Wainaina, a writer and a founding editor of the Nairobi literary magazine Kwani?, said that the changes went beyond his country to include much of sub-Saharan Africa.
“The growth of democracy in Africa in the ‘90s led to the growth of many, many, many independent artistic institutions and artist production houses,” Mr. Wainaina said, “some to do with technology but also increased freedoms for people to imagine things for themselves.”
From the anti-colonialism movement to the decades after independence, successive waves of African art, whether writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o or musicians like Fela Kuti and Youssou N’Dour, have reached well beyond the continent’s shores.
But the growth of democratic expectations, the decline of dictatorships, the expansion of African economies and the explosion of the Internet and other technologies has created new space for African artists to thrive…”
The article was rather long but you can catch it here
