A couple of weeks ago, 5 Star Music artiste KCee released his latest single titled “Tinana” and purists were immediately turned off by the simplicity of the record. But there was no denying that the record was catchy and loaded with hit potential. There is a skill that KCee (and Harry Songz) seem to have mastered and you can turn your nose up at it all you want but it’s obvious that they’re doing something right.
The style is an upgrade of the downright infantile approach to writing music that KCee and his former partner patented specifically towards the tail-end of the KC Presh era (read my review of their 2010 album Swag Ministers here) but it’s only an upgrade and not a total departure. If lightning manages to strike twice and “Tinana” climbs the charts like its older identical twin “Limpopo” did 3 years ago, then we cannot just call this thing a fluke, there has to be a method, an approach, a consistency. That’s what I try to examine today.
What’s In A Name?
100’s of songs get released everyday. When presenting a song to the public, the more memorable and eye-catching the title of the song is, the better. A song’s title is to a singer what clickbait is to a blogger. “Bureau De Changer”, “Baba For the Girls”, “Talk and Do” etc – 5 Star’s song titles tend to stick with you even when the music doesn’t, and that title is linked to a catchy melody on the record. But with KCee in particular, If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn the singer had a thing for geography because “Limpopo” is the name of a river in southern Africa and Tinana is a part of Australia.
But I feel like those choices are more strategic than academic; KCee chose short, made-up words to title “Tinana” and “Limpopo”. The titles roll off the tongue easily, yet the actual words are so unique that you’re unlikely to hear another artist use them, ever. Contrast that with a commonplace title like “Stand by you”. “Stand by you” is actually repeated in the chorus of “Tinana” with nauseating frequency (more on this later) yet it isn’t the song’s title. In the same way that the word “tonight” was repeated several times on “Limpopo” but wasn’t made the title of that record either.
Repeat After Me
If this music thing stops working out for KCee in the future, he can become a nursery school teacher, easily. When nursery students are being taught a new poem, they are made to repeat the lines over and over and over… and over. The 5 Star Music star employs the same tactic to make sure “Tinana” sticks in your head. The three words “stand by you” are part of the song’s chorus and form a line that’s repeated a staggering 37 times, more than half of the lyrical composition of the song.
The structure of the song is CHORUS / VERSE / REFRAIN / CHORUS / VERSE / REFRAIN / CHORUS. All that’s left after all that repetition is two short verses and it’s hard to fit any type of story line into that, so the concept of “Tinana” isn’t properly fleshed out but somehow, I do not think that was the aim either.
Keep it short and sweet
“Limpopo” is a longer record than “Tinana” but the real shocker is that KCee’s rhyme pattern on both records is actually more complex than you might think. On “Tinana”, the opening rhyme scheme for the first verse is the basic AABB but KCee not only rhymes at the end of the line, he rhymes at the start of the lines too, introducing a level of complexity that you might not have thought the singer cared for. He took a similar approach on “Limpopo” but goes with a bolder ABCCC scheme instead.
The kicker here is the use of vast spaces to separate short keywords to form easily memorizable patterns. Some of these keywords are so simple that they’re the kinds of words that we were told to associate with a particular alphabet when we were kids – “b” is for baby, “f” is for fight etc. To make things even simpler, sometimes he rhymes one or more of these keywords with themselves – repetition again. The music is also very direct, very literal. There’s no use of similes or metaphors, what you hear is what he meant. But that’s not a problem with only KCee’s music, in order to fit into a melody and put the message in easily digestible forms, a lot of Nigerian “pop” songs are made this way.
Both records are love-themed, club songs produced by Del B, “Limpopo” is marginally quicker at 125 BPM but “Tinana” is no slouch at 122 BPM. The quick tempo means that these are records meant for the dance floor, not background music while you’re working at the office. So, if you’re dancing and “Tinana” comes on, chances are that you won’t have time to dwell on the lyrics, so everything we’ve just discussed now won’t actually matter.
They say if it’s not broken, don’t fix it, so I cannot blame KCee for not changing a formula that has worked for him before. If it works for him again, we have no choice but to doff our hearts for a man who understands what we want to hear and finds the simplest way to tell it to us every time.