Category: Music
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Syndicated Loverboy – Oliver Mtukudzi in Kwekwe
Recent damning revelations about Zimbabwean superstar, Oliver Mtukudzi’s paternal negligence divided public opinion. This piece revisits the songs Tuku wrote in the heat of his family controversies and libertine adventures. What influence did Kwekwe have on his career over his decade there with his new family and an abused daughter from his first marriage? Published…
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Kendrick Lamar in Africa – Big Stepper’s Heritage Plug
Kendrick Lamar’s hip hop career is a never-ending attempt to go back home. Despite American novelist Thomas Wolfe’s singular warning, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame” or “back home to the old forms and systems of…
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The Njerama Files – Interview with Paradzai Mesi (Part 2)
Paradzai Mesi is the lone wolf who howls for the pack just to keep it visibly out of play. Sungura guitarists were family prefects, lending their strings to the bonds of community and country. A sigma-type genius, Mesi redirected the sungura album away from its family tropes to the service of the disaffected and ill-adjusted…
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The Njerama Files – Interview with Paradzai Mesi (Part 1)
Paradzai Mesi holds his floor among the great Zimbabwean artists. Perennial underdog in a 2000s sungura school headlined by Alick Macheso and Tongai Moyo, his unique and individual songwriting has been clouded by unfavorable comparisons and bohemian controversies that follow his name to this day. Published 3 years ago on April 24, 2023 By Onai…
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Three Silences of Winky D
Winky D wants to restore Zimdancehall to its default ghetto settings. His 13th album, Eureka Eureka, challenges culture capture by self-seeking patrons and state actors. Noted for his conceptual dynamism and pro-poor devotion, Winky D has repeatedly thrown his weight against trends to influence the industry in his own direction. Will Zimdancehall respond to his…
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Drunken Piper – Spokes Mashiyane’s Pennywhistle Knew No Bounds
Kwela pennywhistler Johannes “Spokes” Mashiyane (1933-1972) is one of the most influential names in African music. Sitting atop the loose genealogy of South African movements from kwela and mbaqanga to kwaito and amapiano, Mashiyane is also an old head in the township music renaissance of Zimbabwe, Malawi, Lesotho and other scenes.
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Zimunya and Munhumumwe: Two Cousins Artistically Defined Our Independence
Musaemura Zimunya and Marshall Munhumumwe’s culturally immersive and nationally minded writing and music have a foundational place in the Zimbabwean canon. The cousins not only found success in the early years of independence but also set the tone for others with distinctively Zimbabwean art. Zimunya remembers his great cousin, who died in 2001, in this…
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Lovemore Majaivana’s Totem Feast – A Philosophy (Part 1)
Rukudzo Onai discusses the metaphysical dimension of Zimbabwean mbaqanga pioneer Lovemore Majaivana’s music in the context of Ndebele orature.
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Mark Ngwazi Is Sungura’s Cyber Orator
Mark Ngwazi inherited a Sungura songbook which depended a little too much on folk wisdom and flat moralising. Humour, wordplay and counterintuitive observation could be Ngwazi’s strongest points but his charisma provides the binding virtue to the songs he is building from memes, jokes and wisecracks. Six albums in, his outdoor church is only growing.
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Jah Prayzah’s History As Told through His Best Albums
By Rukudzo Onai Jah Prayzah has been called a spirit medium for his culturally immersive performances. But the cards from which he read Zimbabwe’s political fortunes were blank. “Kutonga Kwaro” and “Mudhara Achauya,” the now controversial songs he wrote as army ambassador, possessed Zimbabweans all the way into a long dry season. Seers and meddlers,…
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Reblogged this on Brian Maregedze.
[…] Hokoyo is a solid album by one of the best African musicians of the generation. –Jikinya.com […]