Blessing, by Nigeria's Stormrex, is a marvelously crafted and artistically balanced music video, creatively produced by youthful Clarence Peters. It is a cleverly addictive song. You can listen to it over and over again. Here’s my take on this gem:

First, the sounds and the vocals:
No sooner does the song begin than the assembled musical instruments – the versatile guitar, the jarring percussion, less forward ones – impose a stamp of dominance on all things aural. They are plainly more audible than the singing. Save for the percussion, the background music consistently delivers heavenly tunes. The percussion itself, assigned a contra role, abstractly mulls a stormy day.

Stormrex is the great mumbling Diva in this improbable vortex; the irrepressible whisperer of all that there is to whisper. She sings here as though this is a funerary moment, and so a dirge; as though it is a supplication in the name of all the lost ones: "Tell me what you want", I think I'm hearing. "Halleluyah!" These sonorous pleadings of The Storm, stir silent, kindred spirits all over the occupied stage, and in the captive audience before it. Mercy is to be had on all souls, which shall by that token be, in the fullness, blessed.

I don't understand the language in which Blessing is sung, and in which The Storm presents herself, but who cares if I don't? I know I hear halleluyah; so it's a language God understands.

On to the visuals:
The video starts with a motley of black and white images drifting, anti-clockwise, from right to left, like the sun; as though heading toward some mysterious place, westward, on an imaginary, indescribable, conveyor-belt. It is a fog-filled form of life. The Storm arrives in person 0:07 seconds into the game -- heralded by a tentative beat and then a crisply rousing and angelic tune -- and almost never leaves the 'field' or the audience's line of sight. The lady gets us going, and keeps us thus – till the ballerina’s final act. She, The Storm, has fine dance postures, though she never allows them full swing. The musicality of her body, of her body language, is as smooth and as strung with possibility as her voice. All through, she appears in several artistic costumes and 'guises', too, befitting the Diva that she is, truly. It’s all bewitching, all protocols observed.

Thanks to Clarence Peters, the visuals of the whole show are quaintly spectacular – with a choreographed, slow-motion release of the energies and the passions – in this enchanted, black and white, e-wasted ecosystem marred by an intermittent power-surge, or else sheet lighting, and front-lined by a silently crackling and still-working TV screens, all in a jagged pile. This is an unbelievable mix of concepts and metaphors and intentions, a hermeneutic puzzle, but it works.

The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words – ten thousand, even – correctly reflects the nuances of this many-layered music video. Words, they cannot adequately capture the magic of the thing: the seamless weaving of a whisperer's silky voice with instrumental tunes strummed and plucked and beat and 'shook' with feeling fingers and hands; and richly varied art-in-motion images for the eyes, and only eyes, to see – incredulous eyes.

The calmness with which the video's cast projects its artistry is inspired and infecting. And it is right from the start likewise measured in the fusion of vocal cords and made strings, enchanting in surprising ways, compared to the musical 'fashion' that's trending across Sub-Sahara today.

The image of an elderly couple, in the midst of everything and each other's presence there in the video, is in itself a classical painting, dark and understated, with motion slipped in. Rembrandt's , perhaps? O regard all the fine tangles, all that ebb and flow. Amazing that a video, barely 3:45 minutes, can have so much effect on the audience's gaze, if mine is any guide.

There is, in the visual text, much to-and-fro darting, gazelle-like, from the 39th second; in a foggy and unrelenting context. Thus, in this complex script, a dancer emerges from the left, leaps and, catlike, lands in the middle of the show. A ballet dancer, with sporadic reign over center-stage, makes the most of it – with a lovely body narrative. Only The Storm has more time than she there, and for good reason. And, lest we forget, there's that adorned youth – with a virtual, leonine mask – who waves his fly-whisk as though it were a magic wand for distracted and weary eyes. Likewise, cameo appearances of smiley faces as added 'layers' of visual embellishment.

The heap of analog TV sets (here BnW, there colored) -- perhaps rescued on their way to an E-waste graveyard -- through which The Storm periodically blows, and behind which the dancers dance, is a thoughtful, ingenious, make-shift touch; as well as a part of the deep art, and the artistry, of the producer. It’s a virtual and shifting pedestal. A paradigm-shift with no airs, then. The Storm lives a chunk of her life here and in the neighborhood, and lives by choice, behind a veil of semi-discarded screens. The images of her that show here are, appropriately, at once electrically charged and challenged. There is a storm, which The Storm is, indubitably. She is the eye of the storm, a study in calmNESS itself

End:
The music video ends in a controlled frenzy of sound and dance, and in the supple images of an adorable, spot-lit ballerina – adolescent and all that – in black undertone and white.

safarigirl:
I'm more impressed with the Kenyan blogger's general construction of his article.

it's brilliant, simply brilliant

ashewoboy:
wow! this guy writes so well. you nor be female, i nor love you. i don't know why, i love female writers. that's why i love repogirl, she writes so well. that's why i call her "impeccable writer".

jiggaz:
...

jiggaz:
alright