Meaningful conversations on music and pop culture.
Music has been around for aeons now. The art has grown to be an integral part of man’s life. Imagine a week’s trip to your favourite destination, but without music. That would be a boring trip, right? Or imagine that the world has hypothetically lost all of the recorded music and starting today we won’t have access to all of the old tapes.
Damn. Shall that be the end of the world?
We all grew up listening to certain genres of music — whether that was a lullaby, folk, classical, soul, house, funk, ambient, rap, or whatever genre it was. And here you are, proud of your one or two favourite genres of music.
What particularly drove you to fall in love with your favourite genre of music, if I may ask? For me, it was a friend of mine whom I attended the same primary school. Actually, before I was introduced to rap music by the friend, during my childhood, my grandmother shaped my taste of music. I vividly remember those days; the moments are still crystal clear in my mind. My grandma used to listen to a lot of zilizopendwa and Dholuo songs on her coolest radio stations, among them BBC Radio Taifa and Ramogi FM.
As a young boy, I couldn’t deeply relate to the kind of music that grandma listened to. Furthermore, due to peer pressure, I couldn’t resist enough to not join my age mates who were listening to then latest and trending music — rap, benga, ohangla, and bongo.
After trying out different music genres, I decided to choose rap as my favourite music genre when I was in high school.
After settling on rap, during and partly after high school, I struggled to find someone whom I shared the music taste with. Until I met Zack, a friend of mine. Unfortunately, I can’t remember my first discussion with Zack on music. So embarrassing. Soon we’ll try to apply the carbon-dating technique to find out :).
Literally, over the past one year or so, there’s no one whom I’ve storied with on music more than Zack. Never have we ever lacked a topic on music to discuss. We discuss old school hip-hop, RNB, new school rap, local rap, even gengetone. Jay-Z, Nas, Eminem, Wu-tang Clan, NWA, Snoop Dogg, Lauryn Hill, Andre 3000, DMX, Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole. These are some of our favourite rappers. We find ourselves listening to their music and discussing them. Don’t assume, we also listen to some dope new school rappers; among them Rapsody, JID, YBN Cordae, Earl Sweatshirt, Boogie, among others.
After spending 8+ months discussing music, we thought that other people might be interested in hearing our conversations. What, then, if not the internet that can help us to achieve this?
Last weekend we recorded hour-long audio discussing how we were introduced to music, our favourite musicians (rappers), our favourite albums, among other few topics. You can listen to the audio below. We’re looking forward to recording more of our audio conversations! Let us know what you think of this first recording.
