African Music Success Algorithm

 Afro Beats is going places far beyond where it originated.

Burner Boy. Source: Burner Boy Instagram Page

The current Afro Beats (not to be confused with Afro Beat) started in Ghana, but, like a UK based Ghanaian DJ puts it, “the Nigerians pick it up and polished it, and they are gone.” Afro Beats is over ninety per cent Nigerian. A lot of Africans want to join what has become a band wagon. So, there is a dogged search of the formula to achieve this dream. In proffering solutions, sadly, we see a lot of lies from folks that are bent on feeding fat on the ignorance of wannabe musicians.

There will always be abuses of anything that is designed with a good intent to help people. Some assume, without researches, that what they think of something is what it is. Others are aware that they are ignorant of a topic, but care less and knowingly go on to dish out lies.    YouTube is one platform that has been abused. There, there is this huge lie that why the Nigerians are successful in contemporary African pop is because many of them speak a lot of languages from across Africa. What that means is that Davido will probably speak Swahili, Zulu, Wolof, Hausa... in addition to the Yoruba and English that he speaks.  

It is not true that if your music must succeed you must speak multiple foreign languages. “Theories” like these work against what they are intended to solve –helping intending artists. Artists would only get more confused, since there are multiple of these sorts of lies that are told.  It is the reason why I am posting this to let people understand, precisely what is required to become successful in music.

Here are they:

Talent.

An “artist” must have the talent. The singer must have the vocal ability, if he wants to sing.

You must know how to write professional lyrics.

If you are not sure how to achieve this, listen to successful musicians to study the structure and content of their songs. These days, with the internet, there are always lyrics of popular songs posted online. You can download and study it. And the word “study” shouldn’t scare you. Studying could just be ten minutes of you reading to see what the artist has said in the song and how it is related to his life.

You must be original in your singing style. 

This is important. Originality is the quality of uniqueness that is natural to you. Check out the vocal character of every successful artist. You will see that he is unique. 

You should be able to sing with an urban feel. 

Growing up in a major city should give you an urban personality.  But it is always good to start somewhere and grow.

Find a good producer.

There is the need to find a good producer. How do you know if someone is a good producer? You know a good producer from the consistency of his good works.

Your song must have a hook.

In this context, a hook is that mood that gets your head spinning or which “makes your head scatter” as the saying goes in Nigeria. When people keep coming back to your song, you surely find relevance.

Understand when your song is good.

Not all good songs get heard. It does come from poor publicity or ill luck, sometimes. There could be other factors. If you know your song is good, despite its inability to get heard, you understand that the problem isn’t you.

It is dangerous for an artist to be unable to understand that not all good songs or albums rise above the horizon. The danger is that the artist begins to try other needless and counterproductive approaches.

The Wailers songs weren’t known, for instance. It was after they broke off and found individual successes that people started looking into their past works to discover how good they were. What if they didn’t know that they were good?

 

Yiro Abari High is the author of How to Become a Music Maestro: 

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1523494999?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

Dismantling Tekno Miles into Bits

I knew about Tekno from one of his earliest songs, Dance, sometimes in 2013. The song was everywhere: underground, above the ground, in the sky, in rivers, and anywhere else.  

Then, I didn’t know his name. In time, I learned that his name is Tekno. You know a musician is creative even from the sound of his name. I told myself that this guy promises so much for the Nigerian music industry, that he was going to bring his contribution to the role Nigerian contemporary music is doing to the name of the country. 

Today, after hearing the brilliant pattern of rhymes in his song, Diana, on radio, I decided to look up the song on YouTube. I found and downloaded it. Then I went on to download the controversial Pana. Then I downloaded Rara, Samantha, Where, and, even the video to Dance. From this downloads, I saw that Tekno is, indeed, Avant Garde. There is always a new feel in every song, a feel that has never been heard in the history of Nigerian music. Thanks to the vast options presented by music software. But one has to know the worth of these options and know how to harness them. Tekno is one of such artists. 

In the video of Dance, Tekno is younger and full of energy, so much that one could feel a reserve of the energy, saved for the long future ahead.  His music is a mirror of the Nigerian character. He plays the new contemporary Nigerian pop in a way that satisfies. I want to call the style Azonto, but that name is becoming less heard. The music straddles to also include Afro-beat. 

I had been pessimistic that the young Nigerian musicians of today may not be able to play Afro-beat in a way that satisfies, because what I have heard in the past are artists trying to play up the inborn traits of Fela Anikulakpo Kuti, the inventor of Afro-beat rather than playing their own brands of Afro-beat. Just as Wizkid, Tekno proved me wrong. 

Listening to his music, The Nigerian feel is heard and seen in the Pidgin English that flows spontaneously so that originality is not lost. You hear it in elements of the music, and in the dance that is decorated with Igbo native dance effects.

The Nigerian music independence is with us, and, if you fear that there won’t be artists to continue the good works of Tuface, D’banj and the others who led the way, you are making a mistake. Tekno, the Bauchi born artists, is a reason for you not to fear.