When I first encountered Odi Pop, the now-popular genre of Kenyan music, I was writing about Nairobi, but feeling very disconnected from it. I was in Central New York at the time, terribly homesick and struggling to remember what the city smelled like, what it sounded like, for a novel I’ve been writing.
Then a friend introduced me to Lamba Lolo by Ethic. Somehow, this music video kept my imagination connected to Nairobi.
This is how I first experienced Odi Pop; as someone who was removed from the Nairobi scene, but who was longing for it.
Odi pop is a genre that’s been described as lewd, offensive, pornographic, and dirty. It has been called the Wamlambez craze, after the Sailors song. It has been accused of degrading the “moral fabric” of the nation.
How dare they? How old are they? Do they not have parents? Must they sing about sex and twerking? Aren’t there more urgent things to sing about? The newly released Ethic track, Tarimbo, perpetuates this conversation with its problematic, sexually violent lyrics.
But even as Odi pop is publicly rejected, it continues to proliferate in the different pockets of this city — from Pangani to Karen, to Umoja, to South B, to Jericho, — and beyond.
Recently, on a rainy morning in Kangundo, I listened as school children danced in the rain to Pandana by Ethic. They couldn't have been ten years old yet. I wondered if they knew, if they cared, about the song’s questionable lyrics.
What you see first in most of these videos is the audacity of the young. In Na Iwake by Sailors, a young woman twerks with the Kenyan flag wrapped around her. Then, chaos: the scream at the beginning of the video, the crowd dancing as if fighting for a chance to fit into the frame, the quick cuts that focus on the group as opposed to an individual singer. It’s hard to commit a single face to memory.
It’s a genre that prioritizes the group over the individual. It’s about young people in a Kenyan neighborhood having a good time, creating with the language and tools available to them, in a place where there isn’t much support for the arts. And, perhaps, the group is prioritized over the individual because it provides both power and anonymity.
The ‘viral’ internet aesthetic in these music videos is hard to miss. There’s no visual sophistication. The resolution is poor. The videos defy the image quality of their Genge predecessors. One gets the sense that those in the video were on their way to someplace else before they decided to film a music video. This is not to say that the music shouldn’t be approached with seriousness. However, judging from some of latest releases, Odi Pop appears to be moving towards a shinier and cleaner aesthetic that’s packaged for the money market.
The genre also relies heavily on shared language, knowledge of memes, and shared Kenyan experiences. How quickly can a phrase from a song become a catchphrase? How far has it travelled? How many mouths carry it? Zangu zimenice. Pekejeng. Rombosa. Drinks na Mayenx. These are just a few examples, and I’m hesitant to translate them.
A clip captured from the evening news quickly becomes a song. Consider Kaaa Na Mama Yako (stay with your mother) by Ochungulo Family. The original video was a speech by the Governor for West Pokot, Prof. John Krop Lonyangapuo. The rest of the song has nothing to do with that speech. Their other song, Mbinginjii Imekulwa na Ndogi (the dog ate my chewing gum) was originally an audio recording of a child shared widely on social media. They picked up the recording and made a song out of it. I can’t help but wonder about privacy here.
The sound and the beat might be different, but Odi Pop’s themes do not depart from what has been there before. Like many Genge musicians who came before them, theirs are litanies of machismo. They are bragging about how much sex they’ve had, how good they are at it, how they bend them over, the women they have raped. The response from some Odi Pop fans about the nature of these lyrics has been that ‘they’re just kids’. Since the release of Tarimbo, Ethic have issued an apology. But if we are going to have an honest conversation about Odi Pop, it’s worth expanding it to consider how violence against women is woven within this (moral) national fabric, how the threads that hold Kenya together sometimes do so at the expense of women.
Nevertheless, Odi Pop is here. It is audacious in all the right and wrong ways. Those looking for an antidote to the times might only find a momentary consolation in it. Even as I write this piece, I sense my desperation to consider this genre as something that’s morphing into a creative movement. Perhaps, it’s enough to think about pleasure, about those trying to find ways to inhabit this country, to survive it, to weave a new fabric for themselves, to dance, regardless. In a city like Nairobi, pleasure is a necessity, even when it’s often criminalized for the young and the poor. It is, to borrow a Carol Maso expression, “a small protection against these hopeless times.” We seek pleasure to transcend. And so we fling our limbs and we dance. For now.
