Music Is A Story...

It’s kind of sad when you compare the music we have today to those that came out ten to twenty years ago. These days, good music is basically characterized by beat and rhythm, especially how much in the mood to dance it puts you or how quickly it gets you to sing along. That’s what music has evolved into today. This does not mean that there are not exceptional songs, there are. Lots of them, in fact. However, you have to agree with me that these exceptional ones are only in the minority.

Meanwhile, in the past, it was a totally different story. While the beat and rhythm were important, what was also important was the story that the songs told. Every song had an underlying message and something that it had for the listener to learn, it also had a theme that separated it from other songs. These were the things that set them apart. When you listened to Fela, Madonna, Micheal Jackson, and Celine Dion when they were in their prime, their music always had an underlying message.

This is a trait that cuts across all genres of music; high life, fuji, blues, reggae… many times, you could be listening to the song and burst into laughter because you’re getting the story that the artiste is trying to tell. Back then, artists put a lot of effort into the content that they shared with the world. They wrote songs and took their time to cook magic. Now though, it’s just love, sex, money, and haters. And not necessarily in that order. But it’s sad to note that it’s what music of our generation has been reduced to.

You see, this weekend, while I was walking across the streets of Facebook, I stumbled on a reel, it was a lyric video of the popular song Murder She Wrote by Chaka Demus and Pliers. This was a reggae song that back when it came out was the rave. It was a dancehall song that got us due to the impressive beat and the fact that you could easily start moving in sync once it came on. Maybe that’s why we missed out totally on the message that the song was trying to tell us.

It centered mainly on cheating, and how some women (according to the song) would go around cheating and then aborting the fruits of the illicit acts. Being pretty but having ugly characters was the main theme of the song, and it was all good. But then to me, it came off a bit bent because the song started getting a misogynistic. According to them, a bad woman sleeps around and aborts her babies, but a good woman cooks and cleans. That’s kind of a very small box to fit in an entire gender, don’t you say? The equation just isn’t balanced.

When you remember how hard you danced to this song, learning the lyrics might make you wonder what you were thinking. But then, that’s how it is. There are so many songs from the old days that if we listen to them today, we’d wonder if the artists were high on Cana when they wrote them due to how raw the lyrics were or the suggestions that they entailed. But the beats and the rhythms distracted us and we were all busy dancing and feeling good.

So, maybe in a way, it’s our fault that we have all this kind of music today. Maybe we’ve shown that we don’t really care about the lyrics, just about the “feel-good” it provides for us. Maybe if we started demanding more from our artists, they’d begin to put more effort into creating icons and we wouldn’t be getting the same generic songs—all the same but in different voices and on different beats.

This is not me saying that there are no exceptional songs out there, of course, there are, I can count lots of them for you right now. However, the generic ones are the ones that have oversaturated the market. But what do I know? I’m just an upcoming engineer and an awesome writer.