It's either make or break for Miss Kedike in 2017

While going through my notes for the year, there’s one dark far flung corner of my papers that contained the magical name: Chidinma. Miss Kedike, the one lady who had it at one point, but via laziness, and a refusal to record new music the right way has slowly dropped the ball, until it appears she is too far gone to pick it up any more.

These are uncertain times for Chidinma who spent 2016 leaving the few who cared about her second guessing about her business, and when she would come back with new music. That lasted for all of the year, a crippling, needless game of hide and seek, which began with her exit from Capital Hill Records and The Maria Goretti Company. Nobody cleared the air on that one. No one made the exit appear to be the start of something good for her. No one tried.

The rest of the year was dominated by slipping details of a romance with Flavor, which morphed into a little business together.

And so far, Chidinma has still not returned. She thought she did when she came up with the single  ‘Fallen in love’ and ‘For you’. She did the usual; media rounds to get her face in the open, and some pictures to complete the branding of the new Chidinma. But hindsight has shown that it never did work. Chidinma’s progress after the release of those singles is still negligible. There’s no resurgence in her profile, no rapturous moment when the crowd stands up in a climax and applauds her for her work.

If anything, the reaction has been forgettable. Very little, and unworthy of coverage. Chidinma is still yet to make that comeback. She is yet to dominate in the way that she has done before.

Part of me believes that the singer, who is still relatively young, can still learn new tricks and come back with a new wave, not the hackneyed stuff that she puts out which pander to romance in a tiring way. That’s part of why she is yet to make a new mark in this dynamic space. She sounds like all that we have heard before, with very little in terms of artistic growth or evolution. Everything seems as it was for her, creatively. No extra sauce.

But it’s a new year again, the music is changing again. The boundaries of what we as a people enjoy as new experimental music continues to shift and move farther into newer sounds. We are currently enjoying more freedoms in the music we listen due to the internet penetration and more.

This is where Chidinma needs to take advantage. What she is clearly doing, is not providing results on a level that will sustain her career, or even make it thrive again. The industry moves quickly, and by standing still, she fell behind.

She needs to reinvent herself again, both branding and content. New producers are out there, with revolutionary material sitting in their hard drives. What she needs is to study and approach, and then make an effort at dropping new material consistently.

DMX has nothing left to prove. He has gifted the world classic albums, inspired future emcees, and is cemented in rap history—his name will live on within the culture long after his physical body leaves this world. But while he’s here, while he still walks amongst us with a passion to create, I hope he is able to step into this new era with the same vigor and zeal as he once did.

Chidinma needs to learn new tricks, and in doing so, dissolve the blueprint that made her blow up initially. She still has a lot to prove to herself and the industry.

It’s this year that she gets it right, or goes down the drain as an artiste who sparked but ultimately failed to deliver.