admin
Rumbidzai Mhlanga, Sunday Life Reporter
With recent wins by artistes from urban genres at the National Arts Merit Awards, the rise of Zimdancehall and other genres might be taken by some as acknowledgement that they have eclipsed sungura.
Even though the genre has lasted for generations it appears as if time is catching up with it. Over the years, all National Arts Merit Awards outstanding songs and outstanding male musicians’ awards have been bestowed to music that is followed by the youth. Nama and other award nominations have given a blind eye to the likes of Alick Macheso who it now seems is fighting a lone battle to keep the sungura genre significant.
At the 2019 Nama event EXQ walked away with two awards, Outstanding Male Musician and Outstanding Album. The outstanding song came from the Zimdancehall genre scooped by Enzo Ishall for his song Kanjiva. The Nama and other nominations are thus painting a picture that the genre has reached its peak and the sound of sungura is slowly fading.
Winky D’s manager Jonathan Banda however, said that the categorisation of music was hard as there are blurry border lines in between and across genres.
“I’m not very much privy to how Namas come up with nominations or awards but I know for the People’s Choice Award they give the general public the liberty to vote for the Album of the Year, so for such awards people would have voted for the person they want,” said Banda.
Veteran Nicholas Zakaria said it was hard to separate sungura from Zimdancehall or any other genre, as according to him all genres share some musical beats.
“All the artistes were born from sungura. They change one or two things making it slightly different from us but nothing has really changed, that is why we do shows with these young artistes,” said Zakaria.
“What I can say is our fans do not really know what they really want because there are some who attend all shows both for dancehall and sungura therefore attendance in our shows hasn’t changed which means we still have fans, attendance is sometimes determined by the fact that people have money or not,” he continued.
Online Reporter