CELEB BUZZ: Why Arrow Bwoy needs to be more creative

Dancehall artiste Ali Yusuf popularly known as Arrow Bwoy. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Identify a simple noun then add ‘boy’ next to it. Like Candle Boy. Or Sufuria Boy.
  • The possibilities are endless. You will be selling out arenas like an EDM deejay.
  • Do you have feedback on this article? E-mail: [email protected]

Aaaah…Arrow Bwoy. Where do we even begin? First of all, that’s a very good stage name! There’s evidence to prove that if you include the word ‘boy’ or ‘boi’ or ‘bwoy’ in your stage name, you are very likely to be a star. See Burna Boy, Arrow Bwoy, Naiboi, Sudi Boy etc. 

Dear upcoming artistes, this might be a good time for a name change. Drop that tough name you thought was cool because your friends lied to you. Your friends don’t want to see you shine.

Identify a simple noun then add ‘boy’ next to it. Like Candle Boy. Or Sufuria Boy. The possibilities are endless. You will be selling out arenas like an EDM deejay. You won’t be able to walk two metres without a request for a selfie. Willis Raburu and Amina will be calling you every Friday to appear on their shows. And sometimes you’ll turn them down because you can.

A-LIST STAR

Aided by a good name choice, a decent voice and other factors, Arrow Bwoy has quickly shaped himself into an A-list star over the past two years. When you turn on the radio and hear the words “They call me Arrow Bwoy”, just when a song is about to start, you know awesomeness is coming. It’s his signature introductory phrase and it gives people immeasurable euphoria.

He puts in the work. You can never stay for too long without hearing a new song from him. Most of his songs get plenty of airplay. He makes music that seems precisely and keenly calibrated for club and radio speakers. Most recently, he has even been in studio with top Jamaican artistes Cecile and Demarco. Life is good. 

However, it is becoming easily noticeable that Arrow Bwoy’s songs sound the same. Ever since he started out, we’ve been ingurgitating slabs of the almost-identical bangers from him. His songs all have the same chord structure, flow and lyrical content. All of his tracks also operate within the same tempo range, mostly circling between 90 and 110 beats per minute. I don’t know if it’s something he does intentionally or he simply just doesn’t have many ideas.

You might not have noticed it but in nearly all of his releases, Arrow Bwoy is usually praising a girl promising her something. That’s it. In the exultant head rush that is “Digi Digi” he promises a girl how he will take her shopping in Bangkok among other things. In “Shikisha”, he promises (or rather lies to) a girl he’ll take her to Banana Island. ”In “Jango Love”, he promises a girl a type of love she has never seen before while praising her bodily features. It’s all the same.

At this point, I can even predict what Arrow Bwoy’s next song will sound like. It will be about a woman. He will promise to buy her a car or take her to Budapest and the video will involve him dancing with a vixen (or by himself).

There are also no “quotables” in all of Arrow Bwoy’s songs. In music, a quotable is a slang word used to mean a lyric or lyrics that you can remember later on when the song has stopped playing and still be awed.

Even as bad as someone like Timmy is lyrically, he has quotables. Everyone remembers lines such as “Sijui nikuite butchery vile una nyama.” See? Even if you don’t like the song or you are holier-than-thou, you can agree that that is a clever line. For Arrow Bwoy, there is nothing.

Criticism aside, we can at least accept that Arrow Bwoy’s dogged devotion to a similar sound has somehow paid off. At least, he’s copying himself, not copying other people like many other musicians like to do. They say if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, but if it’s too common, change it.

With time, his redundancy will eventually become tiring, joyless and cause the appeal to fade. Arrow Bwoy needs to get a little creative. He doesn’t need to think outside the box, he just needs to explore all corners of the box because right now it seems he’s just stuck in the middle. If he can’t improve, then I’ll just say one thing – Kenyans are pretty good at moving on.

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