In 1983 the video game industry crashed, leaving in its wake the financial ruin of countless firms and individuals. The industry went from making 3.2 billion dollars in 1983 to 100 million dollars in 1985. What does that have to do with Gengetone?? A lot actually, especially if you draw the parallels that led to the crash.
Much like gengetone today the video game industry in the late 70’s and early 80’s was an unregulated mess with zero barrier to entry and a large number of completely unqualified individuals who flooded the market with hastily made, piss-poor garbage that the market could no longer sustain itself and eventually crashed. Just like video games back then no one expected gengetone to be this big when it first started out, when we first listened to lamba lolo no one could imagine that 18 months later the sound dominating the Kenyan airwaves would be the one pioneered by the group that would come to be known as Ethic.
Gengetone is interesting because it represents the first time in Kenyan music history that the barriers to entry into the music industry have been removed. If you have a beat and a camera you can record anything, anywhere at anytime and have it ready for release immediately. The beat doesn’t even have to be original, with most artists resorting to stealing dancehall riddims, case in point here, here and here. Removing the barriers to entry into any industry is essentially a double edged sword.even though it affords opportunity to qualified individuals who might not have had it before it also means that wholly unqualified individuals are also able to enter the industry.
Therein lies gengetone’s most pressing issue, while there are acts like Boondocks Gang and Ethic who are consistently putting out great music there are way more acts that are piggybacking on their style and trying to get the same come up. The logic here is that if Ethic could make then if these groups do the same thing it will work for them. That’s why every week there’s a new gengetone track by a group calling themselves Team something or the other and its always about the same thing. At this point you don’t have to listen to a gengetone song to know what it is about, the content has been recycled way too many times and very few acts are putting an original spin to it.
Audience fatigue has already started to set in, with more and more people complaining that the genre is now more tedious that entertaining, with gengetone artists constantly putting out music at a rate that would give Diamond Platnumz a wet dream. The novelty is wearing off and the audience is slowly desensitizing to the complex sheng and constant gyrating asses. While the audience is starting to tire the music industry is in overdrive churning out track after track. Financiers, producers, established artists and record labels are all trying to get a piece of the pie before it all ends up gone. This version of gengetone is on its way out, you can hear the death knell in the distance. With a waning audience and an over-saturated market a crash is imminent.
So back to the video game industry crash, in 1985 the industry only made 100 million dollars compared to 2019 where the industry made 120.1 billion dollars. From an industry that was nearly dead 34 years ago to the biggest entertainment medium in the world. Between then and now the industry changed how it operated, with emphasis on quality and longevity over a quick buck. The companies that survived the crash came out the other side more successful in the long run because they learned from the mistakes that they made. Gengetone is quickly approaching its crash, at which point no amount of smoke and mirrors will be able to hide the poor quality of music that is being produced. Gengetone will not die though, the acts that are able to weather the storm will move on to a new generation of gengetone which will not suffer the same problems that it is being experienced right now.
After all, even though the video game industry crashed in 1983 I am writing this with a PlayStation 4 next to me.
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