In the early years of the new millennium, a youthful musician from Blantyre takes the music fraternity and the country by storm. He has just released an album off which a couple of songs become instant hits. But one song becomes an outright anthem amongst an audience that cuts across generations and classes.
It’s a song in which the musician, with his husky voice on quasi-reggae instrumentations, talks about the fascinating shenanigans of a certain man and his family. The family’s never-ending scandals interestingly mirror the man.
He has a picture of a naked woman on the dashboard of his car, this man. The song starts. He loves to admire the picture whenever he is driving, as love songs lowly play from the sound system. The narration goes.
Long story short, the promiscuous man is grappling with sexually transmitted diseases – a menace to the nation at the time. It also turn out that his son has just mistakenly given the neighborhood’s pastor a pornographic video tape. The pastor had sent his son to the family, to borrow a tape of something to do with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Poor kid.
And the wife, well, she also has her issues at the antenatal clinic. Her sense of fashion, deemed too exotic for a Malawian expectant woman at that time, is causing pandemonium, to the dismay of the midwives at the clinic.
The title of the song was Pelemende. The name of the artist was, well, you guessed right; San-B. (Real name San Bennet Msokera).
It was not his debut project, this album that had other notable songs like Dzila la Njoka and Dzina Langa. He was already a household name, San-B, having made a name for himself with a song titled ‘Amake Junior’ a few years before. But there is no denying that Pelemende catapulted him to unprecedented stardom.
As a result of scaling these new heights, in the years that followed, the artist was to collaborate with giants that many young musicians in the country could and can only dream of. Lucius Banda, already a giant of the industry at that time lined up to have the self-styled Honjo king featured on his 2003 album: ‘Not an Easy Road’. The album had hit songs, amongst them, Wandidolola and Maliro a Mwana wa Masiye. But it is hard to argue with the fact that not one song on the album matched the popularity of Kennedy. Kennedy was the song on the radio and in wedding ceremonies.
In Munyarazi, San-B managed to coax the legendary Saleta Phiri into a collaboration that fused the old and the new. San B was a part of the cohort of young artists that were beginning to elevate the popular culture music in the country. His music appealed more to the youthful listeners, more because despite the artist calling it honjo, the genre was just a simplified version of dancehall. And Saleta, heading towards the twilight of his life, was a relic of the fast-fading high culture music at a time that Balaka reggae had completely overtaken the industry.
San B also managed to collaborate with Stonald Lungu, just before he passed, in a revision of the philosophical and timeless masterpiece, ‘Za Padziko’.
No one artist still active in the industry today can claim such a privilege of having actually worked with Lucius Banda, Saleta Phiri and Stonald Lungu. And any artist that can claim to have actually worked with Stonald Lungu on a song titled ‘Za Padziko’ should already be declared a legend. In essence, San B can be argued to be the pioneer of the trend in which contemporary artists collaborate with, or re-create the works of, well-established and respected artists.
San B was later to become a born again Christian, and automatically departed from secular music. He has for the better part of the past 15 years identified himself as a gospel artist, and his name has continued to be a main feature in music circles. Though he has never been able to recreate the success of ‘Pelemende’ his journey on the gospel music road has seen him release songs like Halleluiah, Yenda and Gospel Honjo, that have enjoyed considerable levels of success.
A few years ago, San B released Nsanje, which could be argued to be the best yet in his gospel journey. Though the song cannot claim the popularity of Pelemende, it is at many levels an indication of how much the artist has grown as a musician. Nsanje is both a reminder of San B of the old, and a crescendo of the journey the artist has undertaken. And perhaps a suggestion that the artist is yet to be done, almost 20 years on from the time he arrived on the music scene.
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