Uganda: 2007 Music Review - New Song, New Lingo

Uganda: 2007 Music Review - New Song, New Lingo

New Vision (Kampala)

MUSIC REVIEW
29 December 2007
Posted to the web 31 December 2007

Moses Opobo
Kampala

The new trend in music that 2007 brought was the emergence of words hitherto unknown to the general public, or altogether non-existent, as catchy refrains to some of the year's biggest hits.

This was a departure from the earlier form of the trend, which was popular with the fellows that do local country music (kadongo kamu). In the latter case, it was simply clever, sometimes outright vulgar, sexual innuendo.

Gerald Kiwewa can be said to be a granddad in this field, (Egaali Ekozeeko, Akameeme, and the extremely vulgar Akabimbi). Fred Sebatta has been there too, (Dole), as has Abdu Murasi (Farm), to mention a few. Well, these were not exactly new words created by these musicians, but powerful refrains that the public picked up and adopted. The only hitch is that your grasp of Luganda had to be good enough to decipher the messages veiled in the thick imagery. For instance, if you did not speak good Luganda, you only got to know what Sebatta means by "Dole", or Gerald Kiwewa by "Egaali Ekozeeko" through a third party.

Enter the younger generation of pop musicians, and the trend had to be modified to suit their more varied audience.

Convinced that a double bed, rather than accord couples the ultimate comfort, actually ruins love affairs, musician Dr. Hilderman took to exposing the hazards of a double bed through song. Armed with enough info about the ravages of a double bed, Hilderman went scavenging for a word that would best summarise his problem statement. The word he picked up was "Mavolongoto" which, he says, is Luganda for "something that is negative and unacceptable in society." To personalise the word and make it forever synonymous with his song, Hilderman modified it to "mazongoto". And boy, did it do the trick! Soon every single one of us had incorporated it into our street lingo. Suddenly, describing anything extremely large as mazongoto was all the rage. There is actually an ad on radio in which a certain hotel boasts of rooms that are mazongoto, to mean spacious!

The self-acclaimed queen of Ugandan dancehall, Bella certainly knows what it takes for a musician to silence critics when they start to throw words like "one hit wonder" carelessly around. It does not take a verbal assertion of one's supremacy. It takes another hit. Aware of talk that she had burned out after her first major hit, Faasi, Bella knew it would take nothing short of an even bigger hit to silence the doomsayers.

Something that is "fab, that is mega, that is huge," which is her definition of "Ddoddo". Rather than put out a song and let the public determine how "big" it was, Bella took it upon herself. In other words, Ddoddo turned out to be a song about itself! It picked up slowly (the word, not the song), with people variously calling it doodo, ndodo and doddo, and this slang word died in its infancy.

For Bobi Wine, it was continuation of a trend that he opened with "bada". Remember bada? Yes, that word that turned out to be a kiwani after all? Easily the most street savvy of our local artistes, Wine has exploited this thing of coining or popularising new words to the best effect. Within so many days of the release of the song Kiwani, it became acceptable to all Ugandans of any stature as a reference to anything deceptive, fake, or a hoax. The tsunami that was to follow spared no pastor, Member of Parliament, doctor or even non-Ugandan without the slightest knowledge of local dialects.

If God were to punish everybody that ever made mention of this word, we would probably all look conspiratorially at each other, tell one another "we're in this together," and wait to all burn in hell!

Even music journalists seemed not to care any less for the foul play allegations brought up against Bobi Wine by Street Voice, a Kisenyi-based group of six artistes who claimed ownership of the song.

Bebe Cool can be said to have invented the word "baffudde" in the sense that he turned it from just a luganda word to a noun of sorts. But, truth be told, what actually turned this innocent Luganda word into a noun, was the car, not the song. It was clear from when Bebe pimped up his 4.6 Horse Range Rover and customised its number plates, that it was all to promote his August Baffudde concerts in August. And promote the shows it did. However, the trickle down effect of the word baffudde can only be credited to baffudde the car. This is why the only new dimension this word assumed was people referring to the other Range Rovers on Kampala's streets as "baffudde".