Do you remember when you were a toddler, in those formative years of kindergarten? You were very young and naive and unexposed. It showed in the kind of conversations you had with friends, where you bragged about how you have a coloured TV screen at home while your friends had only a black and white TV set, or, how your father was the strongest and biggest man on earth and that he could knock out your friend’s father in a punch-out.
Somehow, you managed to outgrow it. You are now an adult who when pressed with a massive need to gloat publically, will, for the sake of good manners, either bottle it up or do it slyly, with a measured sense of style and wit.
There is a group of people, however, who simply missed this key stage of human development. They are Uganda’s musicians. What else can explain this overwhelming exuberance of self-importance? We can understand acts of self-praise; there is a vanity license that can be granted for that.
It however takes on a totally childish roll when such vanity starts to include cheap shots at what assets or wealth a rival has or has not. Okay fine, this is music, and music being music, we can stand an exciting catchy piece of sound even if it is full of such. But if it is the like Bobi Wine’s By Far, it becomes had to swallow.
