December 12, 2024

Nexdim Empire

Camer Entertainment House

CONTROVERSY: Is Jovi ‘s ”Don 4 kwat” a sample of Red Café’s ”Hottest in da hood” ?

Remixing is a derivative art-form, meaning music built from a recorded song either  by copying the hook, chorus or an element of the instrumental which appeals to you  . Remixing instrumentals have become a norm in contemporary urban music with the fluid evolvement of  heavily synthesized digital softwares . US artist Girl Talk is the most famous for creating an entire album using sounds from other music and cutting it to his own. Criticism and controversy on P-Square has been outrageous as a majority of their hit songs have been derivative forms of other recorded music or a mere sampling of western songs;,  Last night  ,Get squared , Game over,  ”Bizzy body’, Danger ,  ”Omoge mi”  , just to name a few are quintessences. Remixing and sampling is used by artists as an easy strategy or short-cut to garner quick attention and popularity. As this strategy worked like magic for P-Square  and  ” now the don di troway”, budding Cameroonian acts seem to have plunged into the same pool . Big Bzy remixed Akon’s ”Belly Dancer” , Steveslil remixed T-Pain’s ”Buy you a drank”  to ”Buy you shack” , King Aluan recently  remixed ”Chop ma money”  to  ” mange mon argent” , ”Don 4 kwat to ” Pa 4  kwat ” etc and criticism gets rave as pundits consider this a  non-creative  aspect or ”gate-scratching” on another’s success.  Are these all acts of plagiarism ? . On the other hand,  some artists remix or sample songs just to increase fidelity on the older song which may have degraded. Variety of reasons flourish.

Red Cafe

If you are keen enough, you can rightly say without fear of contradiction that Cameroonian mainstream song ”Don 4 kwat”  by JOVI is a derivative song from  US rapper and Konvict’s Red Cafe 2009 single ”Hottest in da hood” or Is it just a translation of title ?

Listening to the ”Don 4 kwat” instrumental, you get some musical components that are derived from ”Hottest in da hood”. ”Jovi simply added  spicy melody like the whistle and hit strings to make it different” someone told me yesterday. ”The rap style equally sounds similar” he continued . Can the assertion that no contemporary urban music is original be justified ?.

Listen to this ! .

And compare with this