Long before Justin Beiber hit a billion views on YouTube, long before many Cameroonians had high speed internet, the most popular videos on YouTube were those of cats doing thangs that cats do which humans find funny. YouTube has since become a place where we go for many things beyond entertainment. For many Cameroonians, YouTube is just a music video streaming service. I am just saying all that to say, videos of cats, meanwhile they can give us that temporal comic relief, are not the most important thing we can get from YouTube.
The 237SHOWBIZ competition was not doubt a great initiative. That a collaboration with one of Cameroon’s most bankable artists was part of the winner’s prize made it all the more compelling. The competition boiled down to a choice between two artists- Kowan and Nivo T; a situational imbalance. I thought the fact that public opinion only counted for part of the final scoring allowed for the judges to use their ‘better judgment’ to offset certain technical irregularities but it appears the organizers did not reason things in my direction.
If you think for a second that Kowan’s virality did not stem from the fact that he is a kid, I am afraid but I have to say your sense of judgement is fundamentally flawed as a result of your ignorance in certain aspect of sociology and human psychology. If Nivo T entered the competition with the same songs as Kowan, he would never have made it to the finals of the competition. Nivo T definitely has a lot of work to do if he is to break into the A-list artist category of artists we have but when it comes to music, he is far ahead of Kowan, so far Kowan needs a big GOD to contest.
I like to say I am categorically biased because as humans we cannot refrain from all forms of bias. For those who do not understand what I mean by being categorically biased, let me help you with an example. Say for example I am the head of HR in a company and I have a job opening that requires participants to score 90% or above on a test in order to be considered for the position. I have two candidates and one happens to be the daughter of a friend of mine. If the two candidates score above 90%, I will go ahead and offer the position to the daughter of the person I am friends with because that is what friends are for and I am not breaking the rule. Now if my friends daughter scores a 89% and the other candidate with whom I have no relationship scores 91%, I cannot see myself offering the job to my friends daughter because I will then be breaking the rules in order to do my friend a favor. Hope that helped.
Back to the competition. I don’t think the organizers did enough to make it a fair competition. There is a reason why in sports, we always have categories. Boxers are paired by their weight class. You have FIFA U-17, FIFA U-21, female, male etc because that is how you can have a fair competition. So from the onset, the competition was designed not to be fair and for the sake of brevity, I will not talk about the other aspects that made it an unfair competition.
Just maybe Kowan deserved to win but his win is quite a waste of the efforts that went into the competition. I mean, as a culture, we are going to get less value from Kowan’s win. We had a video on Poise some days back; of two musical geniuses from Uganda, one on the keys and the other on the sax. Two kids showing an incredible degree of musical talent. If one of those kids were part of this competition and they beat Nivo T, I will not have this article to write. They are clearly highly talented and are on track to having great success in music careers. If Kowan wrote his own rhymes, I will not have this article to write.
Any-Ha!
We have been cold having this debate before the results of the competition came out and someone threw an example of a South African Kid DJ, using him to reprimand those who supposedly think Kowan should not win because he is a kid. What they did not say is that that Kid Dj actually does the deejaying live and we see it. Some other people quoted Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5, again trying to draw parallels between events that only have music as a similarity. They forget to know that Joe Jackson had access to the likes of Quincy Jones and the music industry in the USA even back then was light years ahead of what we have here.
I expected the judges of the show to implement some categorical bias and compensate for the advantage of youth that the likes of Kowan and Otang enjoy.I famously wrote that Kowan should be bought books and sent back to school. I wrote that because I do not see him as skilled enough to have to bet his future on a career in music. He might be gifted but he still has to work on his skills.
Do we actually realize that Daphne has to work with Kowan’s ghost writer and not Kowan. Let’s say the song makes waves and now Kowan has to skip school to go perform at shows, etc. What we are doing is grooming the next Bow Wow who is going to be hot as a kid and lost as an adult. Bref, the quality of Kowan’s music is not enough for him to have to miss a day of school for a show somewhere. As for NIvo T, he might not have the highest quality of music but he is old enough to skip school.
Kowan deserved the win. Nonetheless, the competition was not set up to be fair and that is why he won.
Like I said before, Kowan’s win does little for the culture compared to what Nivo T’s win could have done. I am assuming here that we are all doing things ‘for the culture.’ It might be hard for some you to make sense of this but I will leave you with this food for thought. Would you rather spend 10 million francs sponsoring 30 kids to the level of primary seven or spend 10 million francs sponsoring 5 kids to the level of PHD? Which do you think in the long run will bring more value to the community?
- Tino Foy