Written By: KEVIIN
Annually in Africa there's that musical battle within multiple artists around Africa in the form of Award shows. The competition is mostly seen in the Hip Hop scene, the genre on its own revolves around who's the best or rather who owned that particular year,but over the years even though the genre is growing throughout Africa we've seen our own South African artists on numerous ocassions not winning against other Hip Hop artists throughout the continent and personal opinions on who seemed to have deserved an award have been shut out by the simple response that " South African fans do not vote they only complain".
So is this really the case, do we just applaud and marvel at the fact that our favourite artists have been nominated for awards and hope that they'll win the category even though we haven't voted? Arguably the growth and connection to our local artists has grown immensely and we've probably reached a point where we are no longer satisfied by the fact that our favourite artists is nominated and placed in the same level as other African artists. We need to prove that they did put in the work and jump at the opportunity to quickly vote for them to walk away with the award.
So what happens when there's the high probability that we're out numbered in the voting stages? This happens when a local artist is in a category with artists that have a larger population than ours,resulting in the competing artists having a larger fan base than our own. When our best local artist asks his 400 000 followers to vote for him he is likely not to be any match for his other African counterparts with 1 million followers. It was really amazing to see our own artists truimph over these statistics at the MTVBase awards and win against these odds. Now that we've seen it happen we need to maintain it.
In future I suggest we vote more than once just to see our own artists flourish especially considering the numbers that their foreign counterparts have. One vote is not enough to say you supported your favourite artist but a couple will.
