Music and me....verse 2 (or something else)

One of the beautiful things about working in Lagos , is how time goes by quickly especially when you spend a chunk of it in traffic commuting from the Island to the mainland and even within the island. The flip side is that if you are like me who uses the staff bus or catches a ride with colleagues occasionally you do not have a choice than to listen to some program or the other on the radio. A popular choice these days is the Lagos Wazobia fm . I have to confess that though it is fun to listen to i tend to worry about some of the flipsides of an all pidgin radio station. For one while it's nobodies business apart from your own when adults spend the entire day listen to bad/pidgin English, for a primary/secondary school student it would have its repercussions in a society that has accepted English as its lingua franca.
My other major concern with this station and some others is that it encourages some mediocrity within the music industry. While i have enjoyed listening to music which would not have gotten airplay on conventional radio stations,the majority of the local content music is especially on the chart show (this has a particularly unique concept- There's no climbing, you can only be on it once and then you're out) is characterised by poor production, poor lyrics and poor content.
While understanding that these happens everywhere on the face of the earth, i would hope that local musicians aspire for more than the underground beat and do something that just wows everybody.

About 3-4 years ago, a friend of mine bought some tickets to a comedy concert where a dreadlocked Nigerian female guitar playing musician graced the audience as one of several artistes sidelining the show. The audience was largely non-committal on the music and my friend wasn't left with much of an impression. Fast forward 2 years and the artiste is revealed as Asa, one of Nigeria's better known musical exports.I must confess that i am a FAN, and that i had to chase up some Alaba based sales people to monitor the market for a copy of her CD, which i finally got one lucky sunday morning. At my last check Asa has two CDs in the market one released by her former Nigerian label- Questionmark (There's a story to her exit) and the other by her current label( remarkably both contain some of the same tracks). I must confess i have both locked on in my ipod and have spent hours listening to them side by side. While the Questionmark effort is gritty and could pass for a pseudo acoustic recording with attempts to sell Asa as a reggae com artiste, the other one is more refined and has it's great sides with the studio feel, all the instruments in shape and all that for me its been challenging picking a winner between both efforts. The telling point for me is that even the locally made first effort by an almost defunct label was good because of the lyrics, attention to detail, rhythms as opposed to the largely video generation.

PS: The nominations for the hip hop awards 2009 are out you can catch it on http://www.bellanaija.com/2009/03/10/hiphop-world-awards-2009-nominees-announced/