The untold story of Ethic, the founding fathers of Gengetone

Ethic [Photo: Courtesy]

Last Saturday evening, a small boy, 3 years and 3 months, wandered onto a rooftop where the four members of Ethic (Seska, Zilla, Rekless and Swat) were seated beneath a pavilion umbrella. “Si nyinyi na wale daktari?” the boy asked – and without further ado, burst into song. “Nimekucheki zamani/ juu unatoka na ndani/ unadunga daktari/ bazu, big man, bazu,” then hollered the climatic line at the top of his little voice, “BIG BANG BANG BANG, BABOON ...” When small children can recite your songs the way they do nursery rhymes, and this Seska assured me they do (even if in remix), then your lyrics have truly entered the national lexicon. It’s hard to believe that it is just two years ago, on the last day of May, 2018, that Ethic uploaded their estate/hood-made video (complete with boys sucking lollipops and hood gals twerking on tires) Lamba Lolo onto YouTube and both changed - perhaps even, rescued - Kenyan music.

“Lamba Lolo ilikuwa tu for fun,” Boniface Mwangi, the baby-faced boy called Swat (as opposed to the baby-faced activist and ex-Pulse photographer) tells us. “In fact nilikuwa Form 3 April holidays tuki-shoot hiyo video,” he adds.  So not serious were they, says Thomas MacDonald (who was then a hip-hop artiste in the estate) that he changed his name to ‘Rekless’ just for the ‘careless’ song, intending to revert to his stage name - Cray Tom - once it had flopped on YouTube, and sank into the millions of videos that lie there - unviewed, unloved, unknown ... and anonymous. (Incognitube dedicates itself to least viewed music groups like ‘BlueMoon’ whose ‘songs’ seldom get a thousand views, or a random ‘news’ channel called Koox that attacks meat-eaters with stories like ‘Goose was Murdered.’)