Will grammatical blunders ever end in music blogging? By CHINEDU HARDY NWADIKE [@hardynwa]
Friday, January 10, 2014Omoba
I have always
acknowledged that the things we see as easy from the outside will never be the
same from the inside because the player is mostly faced with anxiety, opposition
and even fear of the unknown.
Welcome to 2014, and I
should have started with a happy new wish, but I know someone will be reading
this in November.
In 2013, I wrote more
on things that would change the industry especially where it involves the
artistes and their promoters [the so called bloggers], and the funniest part is
that I am both [artiste and blogger] and even as unknown as I could be I am not
happy the way things are run in Nigeria in music blogs especially.
Teachers and Preachers
Musician and supposed
to be preachers, while bloggers are meant to be teachers. I remember one my
bosses saying the media is where people come to learn English.
Who can attest to that
today? How many artistes are preaching and how many bloggers can teach you a
new world or sentence structure from their posts.
I hope to carry over
my 2013 apologies into 2014, so if whatever I am going to say here will ever
offend you, the apology has already been tendered and I bet you, it is very
sincere.
I stayed away from
music blogging because I never understood the entire concept until I realized
it is something I must do to stay afloat as a blogger.
But while it takes an
average Nigerian blogger a very short time to post a song, I spend time on just
one especially those ones that will come with the entire history of the
artiste.
I see the kind of
grammar that will never pass a ‘Junior WAEC’ English examination, yet it will
be written there that the artiste is a graduate of one Nigerian University.
Shame! How can someone who
cannot put down a straight sentence in a plain English be a teacher or
preacher? What medium will he use to communicate with the people he is teaching
or preaching to? No wonder titled of songs in Nigeria today are either our
native dialects or ‘nothing’ dialect.
It is only in Nigeria
that a man who returned from China after five years forms American accent while
the Chinese man cannot even speak English. Ok na!
A certain blogger who
wrote an article with lots of f**k, wanna, goona, sh*t and the rest of it ,
claimed he writes like that because he was not born in Nigeria and when I
investigated, I found out he was born in Malaysia. Is Malaysia closer to
America than Nigeria? Do they speak English more than Nigerians?
We often defend these
things calling them the ‘street language’; my brother get over it, every reader
is not a ‘street reader’.
Every Nigerian who can
read and write attempted West African Examination Council (WAEC), so it would
be better if we continue with that language that has been the standard.
The question is this,
who writes those blunders that are attached to songs that end up being posted
on blogs around the country, the artiste or the blogger?
The artistes write in
most cases because they believe no one knows them better and they go on writing
everything they can remember. At times I ask myself if one must finish those
long articles before he can download the song.
The blame
I blame the bloggers
because they send it out and they post it as well. It is funny to note that the
so called big music blogs in Nigeria do not care about the grammar attached to
most of their posts. They just care about the songs and video. A blogger can
play a song five times just to be sure it meets his standard but will never
take time to read through what has be written. Like this we flood the internet
with our misfit English, telling the whole world it is our best.
Will these grammatical
blunders vanish someday from our blogs? Somehow I see this happening when
Nigeria starts having steady power supply [which makes it possible]. In a
country where no one cares about what you know but how much you have in your
pocket or bank account, how can knowledge help again?
It is time for
bloggers to start typing with a standard Word Processor like Microsoft Word
which will detect their errors free of charge and not the usual typing with
Notepad because we fear our errors.
Someone will say it is
unfair, but soon, bloggers will rise and reject songs because their press
materials are not well written.
We should also avoid
copying and repeating because at a point people are tired of seeing ‘After
releasing his last single, he is back again with another club banger and is
ready to tear the clubs in the country”
We can actually avoid
words like ‘After, returned, back again’; they make bloggers look like fools.
Have it in mind that a
blogger is the editor of his site, whatever you post is the best of your
ability at the moment and it is internet where things remain as long as your
site is still on.
Bloggers must not do
the bidding of artistes by accepting to post their black American ‘wanna,
gonna’ accents just the same way they have sent it.
I know Nigerians are
tired of seeing these things.
Complete your words
and avoid substituting d for the; u for you; de for they etc. I can still bet
that some people do this because it is their best. How can you then write your
songs? At least you have Igbo, Housa and Yoruba languages to make it up and no
one is complaining of grammatical blunders there.
2014 is time to bring
in intellect into blogging and music, remember bloggers and artistes are
Teachers and Preachers.
Bloggers should bring
in creativity into what they are doing, giving time as well to what is written
and not just certifying the attached materials.
Everyone has something
in them, but until they make a move to use it, they will never know what they
have.
Chinedu Hardy Nwadike
is writer, blogger, singer; he writes from Owerri, Imo State Nigeria. You can reach him on chikinow@yahoo.com
08038704454, Twitter: @hardynwa; BBM;
222E7850
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