This is for you Sserumaga. Weebale Omwoyo gwa Buganda ogutafa.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join in me in welcoming yet a new release from Africa’s premier Record Label- Uganda, well known for its release/publishing of monster hit albums. True to its form, reminiscent of the 60′s into the 70′s, its latest album titled the “vAGARIES OF pOOR uPBRINGING” has success written all over it.

It opens with a cheesy tune titled Kimeeze. On this one the lead female vocalist, a princess in the Nyoro kingdom belts out a tune decrying the way ebimeeza are sabotaging the oil siphoning or pilferage schemas. It is arranged with electronic beats that you could hear on Philly Lutaaya’s Hanifa.

Incitement is the next track. Though it must be said that this review is more concerned with the lyrics especially that the reviewer comes from a Kadongokamu background. On this track, one erstwhile herds-boy insults a traditional chief again and again thereby precipitating a gradual resentment that finally results in riots, wherefore any kind of comment is deemed as an inciting remark. By the end of the song the question is, what is more inciting?

One gets the feeling that Broadcasting Council was a quick hash hash job done to raise he mandatory six songs to finish the album by the producer, a one Mutaabazi. A few radio stations are shot and disabled just like some rioters -suspended, while one is shot and killed. This one was becoming a malignant tumour. The question is was this a conduit or source of the incitement.

Scarecrow is a mid-tempo track, that begins with a choral intro, which choir seems to be composed of ghosts of the 1994 Rwanda genocide played on Radio Millie Collins. If taxed to storyboard the video for this song, yours truly would not forget to include something from the Mukura massacres, or better yet Atiak or Kichwamba massacres as a futuristic yet anachronistic way of showing the imminence of the genocide.

In a Lucky Dubesque style, poor on poor oppression, charts seeks to raise the way the rioters turn on each other forgetting the real enemy, they seem to desire to apportion blame for the poverty they are balls-deep in.

VERDICT: this is a nice album that of course could not run away from the now ubiquitous
auto-tune, yet remains true to the mould of the African dictator that gradually moves from being a blue-eyed boy of the colonialists to akabwa keweyolera.

Get yourself a copy at the nearest street corner, ask any red beret wearing salesman, they seldom carry clubs and assault rifles because of the now rampant piracy bedevilling the music industry.

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