STATE OF THE NIGERIAN MUSIC INDUSTRY: NO TALENT REQUIRED

Them boys dey lose they minds, music is getting empty; they don’t mean nothing and

really they talking plenty- Iceprince; Overkilling Remix by Djinee

A strange thing happened last year at the second edition of the now annual Nigerian

Entertainment Conference Live: Davido and his producer, Shizzi demonstrated how

easy it wass to produce a “hit” track. In about fifteen minutes or less, they had hummed

and ahhed their way into a sound no different from any of Davido’s several hits.

To be fair on the pair of them, what they did is what every other performer out there

does: arrange a catchy beat, lace some dodgy lyrics with a generous dash of autotune

and voila, a hit is made. However what made this demonstration strange was the

audience- made up of entertainment insiders (producers, journalists, record execs etc)

applauded and stood in ovation as though they had just witnessed a euphoric magic

trick by another David- Copperfield.

It is pretty much obvious to anyone who is not musically oblivious that the standards of

the music industry and the artistes involved have significantly dropped during the past

decade. The popular music currently streaming across the airwaves simply lacks quality

and any form of talent on the side of the artiste. Aside from producers and a select few

musicians, popular Nigerian music (which till today still has no definition or genre) is

nothing more than run-of-the-mill sounds. It offers no lyrical depth; no tasking

composition and any random performer can be referred to as “talented”.

It is undeniable, for the most part that the music is catchy, but the credit is not placed in

the right hands. Instead of the artistes (and I use that term loosely because the word

“artiste” in this context is an anomaly: what they do cannot be described as any type of

art) getting all the credit, it should be the producers. Producers are the masterminds

behind the writing, mixing and mastering of these tracks, not the artistes. Of course,

there are many exceptions to this, but for the most part, the artiste is nothing more than

the talking head and the personality presenting the music, which is why they should be

called performing artistes and not musicians.

Worse still, majority of our most popular artistes simply cannot sing, or rap as the case

might be. There’s a reason that most live performances are out rightly crappy, the

performers almost always struggle to reach the sound so perfectly honed in the studio. It

makes listeners wonder if it wasn’t the same person that made the CD version of the

cacophony they’re suffering live.

By implication, any producer or label can pick ANY boy from the streets of Bariga and

make him record Skiborobo Skibooo I’m not alright oshey. Doing that requires barely

any talent or brain tasking research.

Back to back, every fucking single was a hit- Olamide

The issue of Olamide’s grouse with the Headies Awards has been talked about to no end

and it is starting to bore this writer. However it is instructive to note what his point was:

every song that his protégé had released was actually a hit. That exactly is the crux of the

matter: for whatever reason that cannot be more than the rush to make music that

caters to the present wave of absurd gyrations and monotonous gibberish, an average

Nigerian artiste will rather take the easy out and produce popular nonsense. After all,

that’s what everybody is doing, isn’t it?

Talent means that you possess an attribute that stands you out. When you do not have

that talent, you overcompensate by flooding the airwaves with single after single. The

idea is pretty basic: beat the audience over the head till they get it: E fe jo ku. That’s why

no Nigerian artiste can afford to take a sabbatical from music. They’re all cut from the

same unimaginative cloth and the result is the ton of music that is, with apologies to MI,

fast food, disposable music.

Nigerian music is in dire danger of becoming irrelevant as its practitioners. Five years

ago Dbanj had a godlike status that made him think he could actually be Africa’s

Michael Jackson. Today, the ridicule that his “artistic” struggle attracts is painful to

watch. His diehard fans will let you know though, that “Baba is still making money o!”

Whether he or any other artiste makes as much money as their PR handlers would make

the audience believe is a matter for another day. That is not why we are here.

For some of us, it is about the music and it is intensely scary that even the few truly

talented musicians are not immune from the petty nonsense that is the rage now:

Jantamata is a weak, opportunistic material that Don Jazzy, with more than a decade

long status as near genius, should have outgrown. Chidinma should not be singing “My

money be like lorry”. Iyanya should not be doing some damage control by insisting he

meant “birth room” when he actually sang “From the bed to the bedroom”. (What the

heck is birth room anyway?). Even MI made a hook that said “My shepe bottle standing

on the wall…If I drink shepe and I accidentally fall…

For as long as this trend goes on, the assembly plant will always churn out dozens of

disposable music that fades as soon as the next fad comes along. It’s perfectly okay to

make flimsy music but as we can see from Asa who is Nigeria’s biggest international act,

you can also choose to put hard work and meaning into your craft and still be relevant

It is commonly said that talent is not enough. It never is. But it should be at least present in some measure, no matter how minute. Sadly enough, like Nigerian’s oil earnings, true musical talent is in very short supply.

Jidé Taiwo is a Lagos based writer and creative.

He’s on Twitter as

@thejidetaiwo

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