By Takudzwa Hillary Chiwanza & Takudzwa Kadzura
There is music, and then there is
timeless music. Any Zimbabwean accustomed with the relentless permutations of
the country’s urban music dynamics will attest to the fact that Dobba Don is
the checkered embodiment of timeless and fearlessly candid music – this being a
general collective consciousness that permeates even the sonic tastes and urban
sounds familiarity of the rural peasantry.
Dobba Don is an acronym for Dancehall
Original Born Badmind Artist Don; a creative name adding to a list of major
talking points that have never been spoken about when it comes to this genius.
That has been the story – his
predicament in listeners not properly and fully understanding his artistic
provenance and prowess.
It is obviously beyond any reasonable
doubt that Dobba Don’s vast discography (ever since he was enjoined to
countrywide renown) mirrors the personification of eternally blissful
sounds.
It is a given; even though recent
developments – those that Dobba can and
cannot control –have threatened to strangulate the artiste’s enduring
artistic and moral reputation.
Bona fide followers of ZimDancehall can testify
to the concrete material reality that Dobba Don shares/shared with the late
iconoclastic luminary Soul Jah Love a troubled existence in which riddims have
been a blissful solace, even though sometimes such sounds unceremoniously fail
to withstand the pressures they face.
Unlike the latter, Dobba Don is a tad
reclusive with his issues, though voicing them fervently in his music, and he
still portends a talent that is yet to be fully identified so as to reach its
maximum potential.
And this leads us to the ineluctable
and thorny issue of the daily inner contradictions afflicting gifted artistes;
probably why people christen them ‘troubled geniuses’.
Any person who lays a genuine or remote
claim towards proclivities for artistic crafts – as a pastime, means of
livelihood, or both – is a crass, raw, and sentient walking paradox. An
artiste.
The internal contradictions boiling
within (to borrow from Cabral’s Weapon of Theory) are too an enormous
battle for artistes to tackle with sober reflections, away from the intrusive glare
of the world. It is as paradoxical as it gets. In the crudest sense of the
word.
Because the artiste seeks to inspire
the people; while fixing his/her own issues; and the people being inspired
simply can’t resist the all-too-humane impulses of passing harsh judgments
regarding that artiste’s moral stature. Aggravated by a rabid cancel culture.
Yet, this gargantuan monstrosity of
self-contradictions – which have an inverse relationship with the
contradictions of the public’s national collective consciousness – is a
double-edged sword.
The most captivating, breathtaking,
exquisite, pristine, timeless, and soul-touching art comes from a place of
raging contradictions; a place of pain.
Genuine art that retains many elements
of the class consciousness it had when first produced brings forth immense joy,
nourishment, fulfillment, solidarity, emancipation, and edification of the
mind, body, and soul; and with other people in communities; with a place of
pain as its provenance.
An artist who organically exudes inclinations
of real art lays bare their soul for all to see. They become naked, and the
very same art they produce and disseminate (which makes them naked in the first
place) is their source of refuge from all the pain in the world.
The soul of the artist is a beautiful
torment. And where the writer no longer lives – when the legend of his
character arc transcends the tactile bounds of empathy – he has to die in order
to become a writer.
At least that’s what Zimbabwe’s
inimitable literary iconoclast Dambudzo Marechera emphatically said with
unmatched poignancy.
(Let’s hope these literary allusions and parallels
will help vindicate Dobba Don’s legacy with a pressing sense of urgency and
empathy. Marechera was himself a
haplessly willing and unwilling victim of his own eccentricity – his eccentric
ingenuity stemmed from a hotbed of beautifully innocent and monstrously hideous
contradictions.)
Dobba Don – the [in]famous Mudendere and Mukuru hit-maker – is an enduring household name in Zimbabwe’s
music landscape; having forged his niche among ardent ZimDancehall loyalists. He
seems to have forged a permanent residence mudendere, a signature
feature of his art and lifestyle.
His breakthrough, which came circa
2015, astronomically catapulted him to that sanctified list of the greatest
Zimbabwean musicians of all time.
In as much as those discourses are
arguable and moot, often without informed context and nuance, the name Dobba Don is
inescapably evocative, even though vile aspersions have been cast on his
character and persona.
Don Dobba, an
affectionate name among his enclave of unwavering ZimDancehall loyalists, is a
walking paradox – a self-destructive, eccentric genius with a heavenly baritone
and bass voiced through his soulful vocal projections; his name now echoes a
hushed public opinion consensus that the ZimDancehall chanter is an artistic
relic that must be shoved into nostalgic antiquity.
This is the prevailing wisdom among
those who have a lot (mostly uninformed] to say about Titus Mukwevo and his career.
And the following assertion is not
cliché: those who have the most to say about artistes, are oftentimes the
serially least informed people to pass any opinion to that end.
They are frustratingly and obstinately not objective; their [misinformed] analyses and remarks reeking of superficial and narcissistic appreciation of art. No context, no nuance.
Just a heap of damned expectations
piled on the artist before that unanimous verdict marking the total
obliteration of the artist is passed – apera;
haasi kurira; haana mahits; he will never repeat the success of his
yesteryear hits; he must leave these substance [moral] vices. The icing on the
cake? Dobba is insane; Dobba is homeless…
It is always remiss for the court of
public opinion to excessively push tired tropes about an artist’s lifestyle
choice and its attendant effect on the said artist’s economic fortunes and
career prospects. Yet this is unavoidable.
The intransigence of certain biased
opinions about high profile figures is like an impenetrable fortress. A bulwark
against organically progressive art. Certain stuff about an artist will be
said; and in the process, the artist’s art is seemingly inconspicuous.
2022 seems to have been tempestuous for
Dobba Don, given the prevalence of recent news in past months about the
ZimDancehall chanter’s propensity towards frequent episodes of insolvency and woeful
economic fortunes.
This is not to say there is a dearth of
genuine concern for his welfare as an artist — it is only that such concerns
come from a point of moral judgments, and less of altruistic moves to alleviate
the artist’s dire circumstances.
The fact that Dobba Don has been
releasing songs throughout 2022 is an obfuscated reality exacerbating the
artist’s ostensibly perilous material realities – his daily lived reality,
where he probably longs for a warm embrace from a long lost fan in a remote
part of the earth.
He has never ceased doing what he loves
the most: making beautiful, melodious, angelic, soulfully recalcitrant,
resilient, and uplifting music.
Yet, the concrete realities of a
society that is averse towards organically taking care of its artistes – a
society that now grapples with appreciating the selfless works of its organic
intellectuals – threaten to stifle his career.
It is not amiss to proclaim, with the
highest degree of confidence, that Dobba Don’s existential malaise is a manifestation
of an artist teetering on the precipice of holistic artistic freedom; he can
cast furtive glances inside his salvaged soul, promising it unhindered musical
independence.
Yet he cannot throw the entirety of his
consciousness in the haven of artistic freedom – the unrealistically perennial
demands for him to slavishly conform to societal conventions on how to do
acceptable ZimDancehall is a yoke encumbering him from what he envisages.
With Dobba Don, the dominant angle
(that self-proliferates on social media/online media, radio, and print media, leveraging
on ghetto rumour mills on which ZimDancehall, and all other genres in Zimbabwe
thrive on) is that of an eccentric, self-destructive, intransigent genius who
just needs a promoter, the latter who must empower Dobba Don to renege his
rather incurable disease of substance use problems.
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