Its better to be a bad artist than to be a boring artist, people remember bad but no one remembers boring. IceJJFish was absolutely garbage but people still go to stream his videos on YouTube, if only pushed by a case of morbid curiosity and schadenfreude. Bad artists need to exist to draw a contrast to all the good artists out there. Boring artists exist somewhere in the middle of this, blurring the lines between the two and muddying the waters to a point where the audience has to ask themselves whether they like the music or they think that they like the music.
I first heard of Kahu$h from a 21 year old neighbor of mine. Life had gotten in the way and I hadn’t really kept up with a lot of the scene at the time. So I listened to Mi Siwezi and I immediately liked it. It has a fun and laidback vibe that lends itself well to any smoking session ( I would assume, I don’t smoke). I then went to look for more of his music and I was disappointed. Mi Siwezi is a flash in the pan, an exception to the rule, his music can best be described as generic. An assortment of 808s and keys that have been heard before and some of the most basic and cringworthy lyrics that I’ve heard i quite a while. The best way to describe his music is bland, yes it can be consumed but at the end of the day you won’t remember any of it.
As bland as Kahu$h is he is probably one of the better artists out here. As the technical barrier to entry in to hiphop became lower and lower there was an influx of “rappers” into the industry who built careers off everything except actually rapping. The short of it is that you don’t actually have to know how to rap to be a rapper. Rappers who don’t actually know how to rap actually succeed because of all the non-technical factors, they tend to be larger than life personas who have charisma by the bucket load and are able to draw in the audience by their sheer magnetism.
Kahu$h can’t do that, Jovie Jovv can’t do that, Tokyo Sauce can’t do that, TnT can’t do that and the myriad of other shrap and hiphop artists can’t do that. They have no redeeming qualities, they are a pale imitation of artists who have much stronger intangibles. Its easy to sound like Lil Uzi Vert, easy to dress like him and easy to get the same beats as him but that doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t as creative or genre-defying as he is. With the proliferation of the music industry to include so many new parts there has seen a rise in the number of artists who can meet the low technical bar but lack everything else that goes into being a good artist. Zero performance, zero emotion, zero charisma and most importantly zero fun. What’s even more worrying is the established artists who are slowly turning to this style of music all the while claiming it as reinvention. It can’t be reinvention if there was never an identity to begin with.
Shrap is the sound of boredom, the 808s are repetitive, the keys are generic and the lyrics are imaginary tales of crime, women and drugs ( also I don’t believe that Runda boys have ever committed a crime except for that one time they beat up Barak Jacuzzi in his house LMAO). The problem isn’t shrap itself just the people involved in the music, they’re all okay with making uninspired music and that’s all they’re gonna keep making. Nairobi’s new boring has kicked out its predecessor and is here to stay, until something even more boring and uninspired takes it place. For now shrap wears that crown firmly on its head.
Anyway, listen to this
kenyamusicreview 