by Simon Utsu
I first got to listen to Ben E. King‘s classic “stand by me” as a kid whilst watching the “Timon and Pumbaa” cartoon series which was a spin-off from the Lion King.
A cover of the song was performed by the two legendary animated characters in one of the episodes. I later got to find out it was an old school classic done originally by Ben E. King. I even read somewhere today that “stand by me” stands at no 5 in an all time list, of songs (singles) which earned the most royalties for an artiste. Ben King made 38 million dollars from that song alone between when it was released in the 1960’s and 2012.
This is why I was furious yesternite when Soundcity premiered Nigerian musician, Kcee‘s version/cover which he titled Tinana.
From the word go, immediately after mentioning his record label(5-star), screaming the name of the producer(Del B as usual) and giving the usual shoutout to his kid brother(E-money) who is also his sponsor, he went straight to the chorus. Imagine a song beginning with the chorus.
With the original rhythm and melody of the Ben E. King classic, Kcee kept shouting “Stand by you, I’ll stand by you….” till the song ended. The only few lyrics he added to this disgraceful song were the intermittent injection of phrases like “you go sabi de thing”, “your waist dey do me tinana-tinana”.
I’m a sucker for good art that’s why I keep hammering on musical flaws and calling fraudulent musicians like Kcee out.
I remember not too long ago, there was an American teenage girl, Rebecca Black by name who decided to go into music. Rebecca was from a wealthy background so sponsorship wasn’t an issue- the only problem was, like Kcee, she lacked the singing talent. She went on to release her debut single titled “Friday” which broke the Youtube record for the most disliked song on. She eventually stopped singing when people started sending death threats, threatening they would kill her if she didn’t stop singing!
Kcee, your latest ‘hit’ trash is one too many, do us a favour; stop singing!
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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
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