Nairobi, Kenya – In April 2022, Kenyan various music collective Just A Band launched a comeback single after a six-year hiatus and 12 years after it first shot into nationwide reckoning.
The return got here as Kenya’s music id was present process an evolution; after the COVID-19 pandemic, various music discovered new roots amongst listeners keen to flee up to date African music to sounds they thought of extra reflective of a world turned the wrong way up.
The four-man band first burst on the scene in 2008, with a novel mix of digital, funk, jazz, and hip-hop sounds— all with an African inflexion. Their first single Winyo Piny, which launched their first album, Scratch to Reveal, confirmed Just a Band as a geeky ensemble with little regard for the standard.
By March 2010, Makmende Amerudi (Swahili for “Makmende Returns”) – a promotional video for the band’s single, Ha-He, from their sophomore album – grew to become Kenya’s first video and meme to go viral. In the video, Makmende, a fictional Kenyan superhero-inspired protagonist wearing bell-bottom pants, dangling gold chains and an enormous Afro coiffure singlehandedly rescues a kidnapped girl and defeats the town’s most infamous thug by means of his mastery of kung-fu. The fictional character grew to become such an vital second for the nation’s web tradition and finally acquired a Wikipedia web page.
“[We were] curious and not under any pressure but making something that [we] absolutely loved,” Bill “Blinky” Sellanga, frontman of the group, tells Al Jazeera. “For us, the band was an imagination portal. It was a space where we were not even seeing ourselves performing or any of the stuff that typical bands do. This was a space where we could create ideas.”
Sellanga, a singer, producer, DJ and multi-instrumentalist is sitting in a glass-walled lounge space on the second flooring of Baraza Media Lab, a coworking house for media and creatives in Nairobi. It is early within the morning however the 41-year-old has hardly slept a wink after being featured in an commercial for an unnamed model.
“The ad shoot went late in the night,” he explains as he orders a cup of espresso. He is wearing a plain white shirt beneath a black denim jacket and pants with a multi-coloured flowery cap protecting his dreadlocks.
Early days
Born in 1982 because the eldest of three kids, Sellanga grew up within the Eastleigh neighbourhood – east of the capital’s central enterprise district – the place many Somalis and Kenyans reside.
On his solution to faculty as a baby, he would take heed to songs being performed within the matatus – RnB within the morning and hip-hop within the night. It was on these day by day commutes that he fell in love with Tupac, Biggie, Mary J Blige, Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliot.
“I think that’s why I have such deep respect for those guys, particularly Busta and Missy, because those two were so ahead of their time,” Sellanga says as he recollects how he cried when he Busta Rhymes at a live performance lately. The rapper’s use of heavy African drums had stayed with him from that tender age.
Back at residence, his father listened to music on a regular basis. If it wasn’t Luo music enjoying, it was Congolese artists comparable to Diblo Dibala, Franco to Awilo Longomba and TPOK Jazz. His mum, an avid Christian, was at all times belting or buzzing gospel tunes.
It was in highschool that he acquired the nickname he would later undertake as his stage identify. The enormous and thick eyeglasses he wore reminded his classmates of “Blinky Bill” in an eponymous Australian cartoon. But it was not till after a 2009 newspaper evaluation of the band’s efficiency that he adopted it, after seeing how “accountant-like” his actual identify sounded.
It was additionally at highschool that Sellanga and Jim Chuchu met. They have been each in the identical yr and shared a dorm home. They have been additionally within the faculty’s choir; Chuchu performed the piano whereas Sellanga who performed no instrument, was a composer and the musical director.
The indisputable fact that Chuchu knew how one can play the rating to, the Prince of Egypt, fascinated Sellanga and that helped them bond. “I’d write music and he’d play the piano arrangements.”
They composed and taught the brand new songs to the college choir.
After highschool, the 2 misplaced contact. With a two-year wait to hitch school and little else to do besides lounge at residence, Sellanga took his mum’s guitar which had been accumulating mud in a single nook of the home and taught himself how one can play.
“I’d listen to songs I liked, then I’d start learning them on guitar.”
He additionally started composing once more.
The boys reconnected in 2003 at Kenyatta University the place they met Dan Mlui, who grew to become the third member of the group. None of them was thrilled with their chosen programs. Sellanga pursued sports activities science and his mates typically teased him for learning to grow to be a bodily train (PE) instructor. The different two have been each pursuing levels in telecommunications.
So music grew to become their escape. The trio spent their free time on the school’s eating corridor, daily jamming. “We were these frustrated college students who wanted to make music but were stuck in courses that were really not the right fit for us,” Sellanga remembers.
One day throughout certainly one of their jam periods, somebody prompt that they begin a band. But there was a difficulty. Though their love for music is what introduced them collectively, their pursuits have been assorted. Muli was entering into animation whereas Chuchu was into videography, pictures, songwriting and visible arts.
Still, they fused their particular person creative expressions into making their first album; Sellanga was the lead songwriter and vocalist; Chuchu who dealt with the musical preparations and wrote songs with him, additionally produced and directed all of the movies whereas Muli created muppets and animations for some movies.
It was throughout their album launch live performance in Nairobi that Mbithi Masya, a filmmaker and author, so blown away by their efficiency, provided to assist with distribution, gross sales, advertising and marketing and video manufacturing. He grew to become the fourth member of the band in 2009 and went on to supply their movies together with Makmende Amerudi.
Seeing how his bandmates introduced of their different creative expressions into the songs fascinated Sellanga whose focus was songwriting, singing and producing. “I was like a sponge,” he says. “They are such intelligent people.”
The period of cool
From the beginning, the band’s self-effacing identify has puzzled followers and onlookers. But the historical past behind it’s anti-climactic.
“When you start with a name, you’re never really thinking about the future,” Sellanga says, leaning again on the sofa. “We thought, well, we are technically not that good, we’ve seen other bands, and we don’t feel like we are that good in that sense … so we are just a band.”
But their followers, who have been entranced by their music and the cool aura they radiated, disagree.
“As a young boy living in Nairobi, Just a Band defined my adolescence, teenagehood and early adulthood,” Eddy Ashioya, a inventive storyteller and newspaper columnist primarily based in Nairobi tells Al Jazeera.
For a band creating what its members describe as “super-nerdy” infectious music, their philosophy round creativity has been that of making issues they wish to see.
“I think that Just A Band really embodied the freedom of not being tied to what everyone says you should do,” Sellanga explains.
The band’s early work had loads of digital musical affect. Sellanga describes it as “always up in the clouds” and being bandleader, he needed to provide their sound an indigenous spin.
So they started including native languages – Dholuo, Kiswahili and Sheng (the combo of Swahili and English spoken in Nairobi) and bits from the Kenyan songs they grew up listening to. This distinctive mix may be heard in all three albums; Scratch To Reveal – launched in 2008, 82 – launched in 2009 and Sorry for the Delay – launched in 2012.
The band’s legion of followers embody Karungari Mungai and Mwangi Kirubi who say they’ve attended all of the band’s performances in Nairobi since inception.
Mungai, who makes use of the stage identify Karun, is a Nairobi-based songwriter, and producer, who was a member of the group Camp Mulla, one other Kenyan favorite that has since disbanded. She first heard their music whereas she was in highschool.
“Just a Band’s music is timeless,” she states matter-of-factly to Al Jazeera. “I think all of us that are day one fans, we have just been waiting for them to come back because their music was so wholesome … when they were performing live, they had created such a nice community of people who would show up for them. So anytime they announce anything, all of us are so happy that they are willing to put their music back out again.”
Others say the music was a bookmark to a contented period.
“They made it cool to be different before it was cool,” Ashioya, tells Al Jazeera. “Growing up in noughties Kenya, with President Mwai Kibaki taking over from the near-dictatorial era of the late President Moi, we believed we could be anything we wanted … Just a Band redefined what it means to be an urban Kenyan. I didn’t need anyone to tell me how to be cool, I was cool. Their music gave me the confidence to live it out. ”
Things disintegrate
“When Just a Band took a hiatus, they not only left a gaping hole in my soul but one in the Kenyan music space, as well,” states Ashioya.
Samuel Mbugua, one of many faces of their fan-generated music video, Probably for Lovers, describes his emotions on listening to information of the band’s break as much as Al Jazeera as a “mixed bag”.
“On one hand,” Mbugua explains, “it was sadness because the lads had created such amazing art and music together. On the other, it was a mix of pride and gratitude. Listening to their music, I felt that that they may not have been creating in a manner I had been used but they were creating. It grew on me and stayed.”
No sooner had they completed producing the Scratch to Reveal album than they started engaged on their subsequent album, 82. They by no means stopped to take a break then and even following its launch a yr later in 2009. Soon, the fatigue caught up with them after which broke them after the discharge of their final album, Sorry for the Delay.
Chuchu was the primary to go away the band in pursuit of his solo tasks – producing function movies and pictures. The band introduced his departure in October 2013.
The remainder of the band tried protecting it collectively and even launched a single, Winning In Life, off their fourth untitled album in 2015. Eventually, issues floor to a halt as his lacking sound was noticeable.
That, Sellanga states merely, is when he started engaged on his personal music. The home the place that they had all been dwelling collectively in – Just a House – “became too confining”, as they every wanted their house, he provides.
“It became like living with your parents,” he explains, “ you love them but any small thing became a big thing. And I think anybody who’s ever been in a band knows that feeling where it just feels like you want to pursue your own thing. You want that independence.”
In April 2016, the band introduced they have been taking a two-year break to pursue solo tasks.
Chuchu has been championing the rights of creatives and the LGBTQ neighborhood by means of his tasks. Muli – probably the most elusive within the group remains to be a a lot sought-after animator and graphic novelist. Mbithi continued with filmmaking. Sellanga is the one member who remained in music.
It was a pure development, he tells Al Jazeera. “I think it was better for all of us that it happened that way,” he says. “I don’t know if I’d have been able to do the things I’ve done as a solo artist while still also pursuing that collective vision.”
The solo journey
Leaving the band, Sellanga explains, led to loads of self-discovery as he didn’t wish to lean into the band’s legacy an excessive amount of.
“I wanted there to be a clear difference between Blinky and Just a Band,” he says. “There’s a DNA in the way that we make music as Just a Band,” including, “There’s a feeling that the music gives you. I didn’t want to recreate that.”
With the collective splitting, Sellanga noticed it as a chance to check out all of the loopy concepts he had and pursue a unique imaginative and prescient with laser focus. But that freedom was not completely unfettered.
“I never used to have to think about anything outside of the music”, he recollects. Now on his personal, he needed to be taught every part concerning the visuals, the packaging, the distribution. “ Things like posters, I couldn’t just go to Jim [Chuchu had handled all the band’s visuals] to ask for them,” he laughs.
Sellanga, having seen the affect of the Makmende Amerudi video, wanted to determine how one can nonetheless make the music partaking by together with robust visible elements.
This collaboration led him to work with visible artists like Osborne Macharia, with whom he’s created two music movies. It additionally impressed him to discover pictures, and he’s set to host a solo exhibition in early 2024.
Sellanga’s first solo venture was, We Cut Keys While You Wait, in 2016. The prolonged play (EP) was a six-song providing together with collaborations with soul/jazz singer Maia Von Lekow, ShappaMan previously of rap group Camp Mulla and Kenyan Soul singer Sage Chemutai. The EP led to Sellanga securing offers with Sony Music France, which distributed his first album, the 12-track, Everyone’s Just Winging It And Other Fly Tales.
As a producer, Sellanga has been a inventive power behind many Kenyan productions. As a DJ, he has performed units in nearly each continent and hosted interactive musical performances at TED2018 and TED2022.
Sellanga’s third album, We Cut Keys 2 is anticipated earlier than the tip of the yr. Dracula, the primary single launched in mid-November has been described as a “masterpiece” and a “sonic revolution” by followers and critics on-line. The album options American rapper Goldlink, Ghana’s Fuse ODG and several other Kenyan acts like Muthoni Drummer Queen, Jovie Jovv, Kasha and Idd Aziz.
Sellanga believes that he has grow to be a greater musician. After beginning out listening to loads of digital music, his musical tastes and influences have grown to incorporate artists comparable to Yasiin Bey (the artist previously often known as Mos Def), Hugh Masekela, Fela Kuti, Omou Sangare, Jacob Collier, in addition to funk and soul artists.
This, Sellanga says, has not solely widened his scope and understanding of music however has additionally seeped into his music making it richer. He has additionally remained outspoken concerning the significance of freedom and experimentation to artists.
“I just never want to be shackled in the chains of what everyone expects me to do,” says Sellanga who has lately been experimenting quite a bit with the drums of his folks, the Luo. He hasn’t cracked it but, he admits however is motivated by the problem.
The reunion
The band’s break lasted six years.
On May 16, 2022, it introduced its comeback on X, the platform previously often known as Twitter. There was a direct outpouring of fan love as Kenyans replied with memes and gifs expressing their pleasure and welcoming the group again.
🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 pic.twitter.com/UzjqHKxEN3
— Just a Band (@justaband) May 16, 2022
“Been waiting for this moment for years,” Kenyan rapper and songwriter Papi Subu responded to the put up. “Can’t wait to see you guys again soon.”
Although the band didn’t publicly clarify the explanations that led to their comeback to their followers, Sellenga provided some solutions.
“When we come together and make that music, the people who have loved it for a long time and the people who say we made them dream, emboldened them, gave them the energy, we felt we still wanted to do more for them,” he explains.
For Kirubi, a Kenyan photographer and aspiring filmmaker, “JAB etched for themselves a place in our hearts that no other music group can replace,” he instructed Al Jazeera. “They feel like brothers you want to keep rooting for no matter what. It’s great to see them back together again.”
When the band launched their second album in Nairobi in 2009, Kirubi captured the moments as a present to them, and to doc their journey to stardom.
A altering id
Just a Band’s return comes as Kenya navigates a crossroads in its music id.
In different African nations like Nigeria and South Africa, the music sector has grow to be a multibillion-dollar earner and their sounds are presently in large rotation on dancefloors of Europe, Asia, and the United States.
In Kenya, that isn’t the case.
Despite its range and potential, Kenya’s music trade is seeking a musical id whereas its artists grapple with piracy, low streaming revenues and an absence of assist from its residence followers.
Critics have mentioned the Kenyan authorities has uncared for arts growth within the nation, leaving no infrastructure or assist channels for artists.
The Music Copyright Society of Kenya, a authorities physique overseeing the royalties from airplay for artists in Kenya has been embroiled in a court docket battle since 2018 over alleged misappropriation of funds.
Regrdless, Gengetone, a style closely influenced by reggaeton and dancehall started dominating Kenya’s music scene between 2018 and 2022. At its peak, various Kenyan music started effervescent once more having disappeared from the airwaves following Just a Band’s exit.
But then Nigeria’s Afrobeats and South Africa’s Amapiano punctuated that rise as each genres hypnotised audiences in Nairobi, as elsewhere throughout the continent. On the radio and within the golf equipment, these are actually the music of alternative.
These days, fashionable Kenyan artistes have begun gravitating in the direction of the 2 fashionable genres to safe airplay on native radio, in golf equipment and get onto probably the most listened-to playlists on Spotify.
To this, Sellanga is scathing in his critique.
“We are a very pop market. It’s almost like, we all just like pop music,” he sighs. “ The space’s open nature and willingness to give music from outside an audience, something that other countries don’t, is both a curse and a blessing. We can’t all be making Amapiano or Afrobeats.”
“We don’t have a music industry,” he provides. “We have a music scene. Every single artist has had to build their own rail. This is not enough to properly sustain the auxiliary services that really take it to the next level.”
He attributes a lot of this failure in constructing an trade to the federal government’s lack of assist for the sector particularly relating to the gathering and distribution of royalties.
“Kenya is getting there, but it’s through a lot of sacrifices on the part of the artists,” he says.
Meanwhile, the band can be navigating its personal id in its second stint to create a steadiness between collective tasks and the solo careers of every member.
“We have created worlds outside Just a Band and so the question in each of our minds is, can we successfully do both,” Sellanga says, then pauses to replicate. “ How do we split ourselves if, say the band drops a project that does well and at the same time, our solo projects also take off?”
There’s not sufficient house within the room for such a heavy query that clearly has no reply but, not less than publicly. “I feel like we will just see how everything unravels,” he says.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/8/blinky-the-kenyan-bandleader-whose-crew-shaped-cool-nairobi-music-scene?traffic_source=rss
