To Be A Singer, Writer,Player And Producer In A Blink!

Music in a Blink

No way. I am not selling any such service. But, it was the heart of a tweet I got from a friend from a faraway land recently. It impressed upon me how lightly, people all over the world today, have taken the art of making music. Somebody just wakes up, in mid-course and decides he or she wants to write, sing and produce music; and tries picking your brain how to achieve it. And of course, because of the prevalent can- do philosophy presently driving the world, I am supposed to encourage, rather delude, them into thinking they can!
While I want to encourage visions, I won't join any one to forecast that Rome can be built in a day. Usually, music is a bug that catches one while still impressionable, while you can believe that standing on earth, you can just stretch your arm and touch the sky. A time when the power of reason has not began to work on your psyche. Now, if you don't start to play music at that time, you never will.
I don't mean to discourage any, but the music madness is such that catches you early so that it can disorient you permanently if you don't have very good and strong parental control. It's not a vocation you go into when you have acquired 'sense',  as it were. So that in your foolishness you can make believe that you rule the world.
But, so called beat makers assist many people to gate-crash into the music industry. They lead them to believe that songwriting and music making is about just doing karaoke on somebody else's music ( the beat ) until you get something unique that entitles you to claim ownership of the music. Songs are not used to make music anymore, rather, synthesized music is being used to 'fabricate'  songs.
And that's how you have formulated beats driving a trend just for the purpose of supposedly making people dance. And music has been taken up by people who feel nothing for it. Even when they show flagrant incoherence in the resulting 'songs' from such strategy, nobody critiques the travesty, but rather it is passed off as a trend of a generation!
So, we have people who believe they can just wake up one day and want to be singer, songwriter and producer in a blink of an eye without caring a hoot about the basic rudiments of music. This lowers the art of music making to such as carpentry or butchery. The practice is really rife here and I fear for the future of music in Africa. First, it started with many musicians rarely learning to play instruments. Now, people are making recording without taking time to write songs properly. They just walk into the studio, buy a beat, mime and patch-record a number of fad phrases, copy and paste them as many times over; and there you have your 'songs'!
Even the foreign singers are not doing greatly either. Today, I decided to check out my songs on the online stores that were supposed to be selling them. I seized the opportunity to listen to  a number of 'big names' featured on their lists and Lord, was I disappointed ? Their production was nowhere near mine. Their songs, the melodies, the singing - nothing exceptional. My songs are Bach and Beethoven compared to their best. But who am I to ask them to play my song  for the paltry 99 cents a song. Oh, poor African singer/writer, if they did they'd make me rich! And they wouldn't have that, would they?
They say they sing love songs, they don't know squat about love songs. I am cooking three awesome love songs in the studio for next release. And when it's done, by God, they're gonna know what love songs is really all about. They're gonna have to go revive the greats like Kenny Rogers and Bob Dylan, J D Souther and Lionel Ritchie! Them are the ones, not these ones!