VETERAN musician, Leonard “Karikoga” Zhakata has broken a decade of no musical video, releasing a low-budget production video of the song Yarutso off his 2011 album, Udza Vamwe.
BY ANESU MUSHAWATU
The Upenyu Mutoro hitmaker is a man who was one of the versatile producers of musical videos in the late 90s, and these productions competed for the first position in the year-end charts.
After a long dry spell without a musical video, and having changed his sound from traditional fast-pace sungura to some semi-gospel music, with a much slower tempo, Zhakata has disappointed on the production of the video.
For someone who had set the bar high in terms of video production, Zhakata did not do justice, and instead, produced a rather cheap quality video that appears to be a hurried project.
Produced by Angel Arts, renowned mostly for doing Zimdancehall productions, Zhakata’s video is by his standards, very basic, and features him and his band in what looks like a workshop, each band member on their instruments, playing the song as if they are on a live show.
The set is distracted by cut-aways that portray what looks like a young boy playing soccer.
In other words, it is not anything more than a recorded live show that has studio sound.
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But to his good, it is a positive move that perhaps as one of the veterans of Zimbabwean music, has once again realised the importance of visuals to support his music.
Zimdancehall artistes are advancing their music through low-budget, but well-thought out video concepts and that is exactly what Zhakata and other artistes need to do, to capitalise on the affordable digital devices to produce captivating videos.
Videos are powerful, not only in marketing music, especially in these days where they can be shared on social media, but also in preserving history.
If the late greats like sungura kingpins Leonard Dembo, John Chibadura, and others had left behind many musical videos, that would have been a powerful way of preserving a memory of their works.
This is underlined in Zhakata’s manager, Ben Zhakata’s words that the idea behind producing the video for such an old song was to remarket the song.
“We are happy and pleased with the positive feedback that we have received as Yarutso video has been loved more than our previous works”, he said.
Far from that though, it is also much to his comfort that just about two weeks after it was uploaded on YouTube, the video as of yesterday has been viewed more than 20 500 times.
