There has been a lone but significant protest at Intervention‘s wonderment if Angelique Kidjo’s Grammy award winning ‘Mother Nature’ could upstage her ageless number, ‘Agolo’.
This lone voice of an elder in this matter as sent to Intervention goes as follows:
Mother Nature’s lyrics are powerful but it doesn’t come close to the rhythmic beauty of ‘Agolo’. ‘Mother Nature’’s beat is a bit too Western, which perhaps may explain why she won this year’s award. The Grammy judges must be largely white Americans. I only hope Kidjo is not reorienting her music to suit Western tastes. Kudos to her though for winning it for the fifth time. But she should stay with the rhythm and soul of Africa.
The protest is conveyed in few sentences but it is enough to send music critics and art historians back to their research labs. Below is a reproduction of the original piece on Kidjo’s fifth time winning the Grammy award:
This is her fifth Grammy win, this time with her ‘Mother Nature’ album. ‘Mother Nature’ is a typical Angélique Kidjo outing: no narrative of victimhood, no crying over colonialism but always one clarion call or another.
Listening to this outing, one hears such striking lines as “Mother nature has a way of warning us”; “Don’t let them hurt you in any way” and “Don’t let them take away the best of you”. And then there is the commoning tone along the line: We need each other”. By the time the entire lyrics is printed out, the message in ‘Mother nature’ would be found to speak to a certain spirit of resistance.
It is not surprising ‘Mother Nature’ has won this year’s Grammy award for best Global Music, beating some Nigerian superstar, Wizkid whose “Made in Lagos” reviewers had speculated to be the winning stuff. It turned out the opposite in favour of Kidjo. Some of her listeners are subsequently calling her “the Queen of the Grammies for the World Music category” and a remarkable woman.
Some observers would be watching if ‘Mother Nature’ will upstage or come near some of her numbers which have established themselves as her most memorable, particularly ‘Agolo’. ‘Agolo’ is tipped to be the signature tune of the first African global Television Channel which never comes!
Angelique Kidjo once told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that “all today’s music comes from Africa”, meaning African origin of classical/Jazz, disco and what have you. No art historian has challenged her on that which is to suggest that they have no contrary view.
