“Elelelelelele......omode yii gbondi”........*coughs

This is basically sadly the sound we’re now accustomed to as music lovers listeners in the country, so much that an ardent listener can predict the next ‘lyric’ from a so-called artiste. Do we or these artistes really care about what we hear?

Entertainment is now so wide it touches all people from all walks of life, so much so that we now have our artistes bag series of endorsements from global brands. Is it laziness on our artistes’ parts? You hear a good/decent beat now, a solid/decent chorus and the total content and delivery of the song leaves little to be desired. Why can’t there be an extra effort for a few minutes of creativeness in the form of coining better and more meaningful thoughts into solid lyrics? It can’t really be that hard, can it?

We now have kids, youths who fawn over these songs and learn all the dance moves (which really isn’t a bad thing, provided it adds value to their scope of life). Hell, even the few kids we’ve heard one or two music material from have toed the path of their ‘role models’. I listen to Tuface, Asa, Timi Dakolo and a couple of respectable others and I think it is no excuse for any of our artistes to churn out the kind of baseless music they do on a daily basis. And No, not all can be like the above named artistes and it is good to carve your own niche, BUT you can carve a solid niche by just paying more attention to your lyrical content.

Our industry has now been polarized so much that anybody can pick up the mic and ‘spit’ albeit with no substance. It is now widely proven that our artistes follow trends rather than do something different and of positive impact. Yes, it’s all about the money they have to make, ‘cos at the end of the day that’s the sole aim of being in the lucrative industry. On the other hand, what has also been proven is that creative and innovative artistes are also not doing badly in terms of the return they get from making good music.

No one is kicking against the club/party anthems, but these club records can actually have in-depth lyricism while still maintaining the club/party appeal. I find it so hard to spend my money on a physical copy of a major Nigerian album these days, albeit a few, just because I can easily predict the theme and content of the entire album.

So who’s really to blame, we the consumers, or the artistes? It’s really a million dollar question as it has been proven that consumers/listeners appreciate good music, while they haven’t rejected or ignored the terrible ones. All they wanna do is dance, I figured. The artistes pride themselves on any little work they have been able to put out, so much so, that any form of criticism, be it constructive or malicious, is termed as ‘hating’...... so who are we to have critical opinions...

In subsequent columns, the unsung heroes of good/great albums in Nigeria would be compiled and given kudos to, which brings to mind how criminally underrated and overlooked GT the guitarman’s "The truth" album was. One of the very talented prospects we’ve ever had who’s suffering from the 'club record' conundrum.

Hell, even I am guilty for I have series of mediocre Naija songs on my playlist. And when these songs gets randomly picked by my player, I either dance(even as I don’t know how to make moves) wildly to them, shake my head at the appalling content, or laugh hysterically at how terrible some of our ‘superstars’ actually are.

In all, we clamour for better outputs from our ‘role models’, abeg, there’s little to how much we can 'whine' our waists (some of us have got serious ‘jedi jedi’ issue), spray the money (some of us are actually very broke), pop the champagne or ask Caro to follow us home(we’re still under our parents). Yes, we all also have our preferences as regards music, we all can't like/love same artistes or genre but at the end of the day, we ALL appreciate/want good music.

Same beats, same subject matter(girls,club,lavishing money), same composition. No one can tell me we don’t have countless of subject matters that can be touched on. Be dynamic, not stereotyped!

At the end of the day, I’ll still try to ‘dance’ to these mediocre songs at parties to celebrate the foolishness of us listeners in providing these baseless artistes the fame they don’t deserve........Yes, that’s how hypocritical I am.

Source: http://nexthop.com.ng/editorial-whos-really-listening/

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This article is 100% spot-on. I posted something similar on another thread, some minutes ago.