Writer Jidé Taiwo shares his opinion on why talent is not required to make it in the Nigerian music industry. Read after the cut..
A strange thing happened last year at the third edition of the now annual Nigerian Entertainment Conference Live, Davido and his producer, Shizzi, demonstrated how easy it was to produce a ‘hit’ track. In about 15 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, what they did is what every other performer out there does. Arrange a catchy beat, lace some dodgy lyrics with a generous dash of auto-tune 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 selected few musicians, popular Nigerian music (which till date 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. Doing that requires barely any talent or brain tasking research.
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 is. 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 way out and produce popular nonsense.
