Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-When Chiwoniso Maraire died I was hurt and disappointed.
Hurt because she had died and disappointed because we all die but she had died too early.
She was one of the only two female musicians that I could safely state I followed and whose creations I loved. The other one is foreign and negligible to this article’s slant.
Nhemamusasa carried me into another world and superstitions aside I hoped to find it a slot at my wedding.
Chiwoniso had managed to carry the African beat into the main auditorium of modern mainstream music; fused the traditional sounds and musical culture with foreign dictions and still managed to remain sounding authentic, with substance and not appear as some PR stunt for togetherness in a generally pop world.
She didn’t seem to be borrowing anything in her music even when she sang in English she still sounded very African and her beat still had an authentic local vibe.
Which is where my problem with Hope Masike comes from.
Masike has for long been touted as the next Chiwoniso but save for her use of the mbira and some ‘African’ javas just as Chiwoniso did, I have struggled to catch the real-ness of her African vibe.
I continually get lost in her beats as they wobble between the African beats of Chiwoniso streak into the pop weasel-whines of Beyonce and merge the two into a tangled fresco of ambiguous art.
At the end of each song im not sure what I have just listened to and tremble at the thoughts of identity theft.
In the aftermath of Maraire’s death I scavenged around for Masike’s songs intent to be on the new bandwagon and salve myself with the new mbira songstress. I harvested a plethora of songs that could number around fifteen.
Then I began to play them over days straining to catch inflections and diffusions that could resonate with my musical ear.
Those which I felt to be lacking I deleted.
By the end of the week I had only one song remaining. Mapfunde.
Masike’s music failed to infect me and elicited no response from inside me. What I get from Masike is the antithesis of what Chiwoniso actually was.
Masike has been desperate to placate her international audience and has infused a tartrazine load of international pop into her nasal mbira strain until what im left with is only a silver thin streak of Africaness.
For your information I don’t know what actually tartrazine is but I know it’s harmful and beverage makers take a lot of pride in omitting it from their products, so they print TARTRAZINE FREE on the sleeve.
Masike should do the same and shed off the Botox of pop that she has injected into her mbira beats if she is to in the light of Chiwoniso.
She is becoming the very PR stunt for a United Nations event that Chiwoniso never was and im pained to find the only female mbira salvation I hoped upon slowly become a hit commercial advert with no resonating vibe in the aftermath.
Chiwoniso still lives up to this day in more than the words of a musician’s songs outliving him or her.
Masike playing along the current musical wave won’t do the same as the tide upon which she is cresting produces a medley of many wannabes that we forget as soon as they exit the stage.
Obviously she is gifted but she is making too many compromises and amendments to her beats in a bid to embrace the Big Bang Universe and be invited for the Hungarian or Budapest Arts Festival.
Understandable as that is in today’s economically fragile Zimbabwe she should pity a mbira fanatic like me and once in a while dish out a straight-jacket mbira beat that takes no prisoners and will confuse the Budapest audience but resonate with an audience like yours truly.
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