PAM awards should have died quietly, dignity intact-ish

              The pearl of Africa music awards had gone through so many postponements and controversies in the last two years that even if one wasn’t a fan, one just had to tune in to see how it would all go. Early discontent among musicians in as far as the categories were concerned should have warned us of things to come, but we were determined to hope for the best so we continued to look forward to the show.

 Roger Mugisha and Kazoora as MCs allayed some of our anxieties. One may be a shady pastor and the other an all around annoying Jam Agenda presenter, but at least they were capable of pulling off a classy show. That was before the third presenter made a grand entrance in the form of the ever controversial Straka, channeling Molly and Paul nursery school children in a lime green pinafore  uniform complete with white socks pulled up to her knees. From there, the show did not just go downhill; it galloped down the slopes like the devil himself was after it.

Straka decided early on that she was the only person worth presenting and went on to hog the MC-ing duties for the rest of the night. With no Roger and a struggling to be noticed Kazora, the show quickly turned into an Ekigunda of sorts. Then there was the disturbing issue of absenteeism (is this an English word? sounds wrong to me) of most of the musicians who am convinced made up trips abroad so they would not have to attend. At least they were polite enough to send representatives in case they won, with the most bizarre of them all being Lilian Mbabazi who helped Radio and Weasel collect their award. I mean, it’s one thing to be impregnated by one of them, but to actually be proud of it?( Also, thanks for spoiling the song Vitamin for me forever. Every time I watch it these days am always wondering, is this when it happened?)

And don’t get me started on the technicalities of the show. The sound-horrible; the picture quality-embarrassing; and as for that curtain that separated the stage and back stage…At least it kept giving us the giggles as people would get entangled in it. Also, was there no easier way to get to the stage? Was it really necessary for people to go all the way to the back, climb up those unbelievably steep stairs (by the way people kept climbing them, they looked stiff) and then get stuck in the said curtains before finally receiving their awards? It would have been so much easier if they had just jumped down after.  Seriously, what’s a broken leg here or an imputed arm there compared to the risk of breaking one’s neck in case one stumbled down those steps?

I watched about four or five of the performances- Navio was alright(and am still pissed that he was not nominated for artist of the year,btw); am sure no one was impressed by Cindy’s outfit-if you decide to wear overalls for your performance,then please do us all a favor and refrain from  a sexy dance routine; Namubiru, all pregnant and gyrating left, right and center with her legs apart was just a disturbing sight;  a gorgeous and  made up Judith Babirye gave a heartfelt performance, which would never have been witnessed at PAM awards had she decide to remain with the psycho ex husband of hers.(This isn’t strictly related to the topic but I find the fact that Judith Babirye once had  a vision about her ex husband turning into a blood sucking vampire-the blood being hers-very interesting. This was during their engagement period. And she still went ahead and married him. The power of love, eh?)

Judith Heard-forever 21, or is she 24 these days- wore a white jumpsuit and because no one gave a rat’s ass,  decided to become one of Irene Namubiru’s queen dancers .We still didn’t care. Jamal, for whom I am a great well wisher, disappointed me when while accepting his award, decided to go the way of the Jamaican accent that so many of the dreaded artists think is fashionable. We all know you’ve never gone to Jamaica so stop annoying us. On a related note, this is why I like Rabadaba. He has dreads, his songs are obviously influenced by Jamaica, yet when he speaks English, there’s no pretentiousness. Not even a hint of the American-ish accent that Jam Agenda presenters are ever so fond of. Except Charles Oimuke.

In the end, even I couldn’t sit through that much amount of BS as some parts of that show were truly cringy-like when Straka had the humpty dumpty fall.

Ps-what happened to the Vision Music Awards? Were they ever real or was I so desperate for a legitimate music awards show that I made them up?

Pps-Apparently I love being appalled, so, can someone please tell me when Uganda’s Next Top Model airs, and on which channel?

Pps-another Ugandan show worth checking out is Mukyala Mugerwa (spoiler alert-lots of kissing. Not that am into that stuff. Aren’t you curious about how a make out sesh between Ugandans on TV goes? No? Oh wells, just me then..) .it’s on Tuesday 10:30-ish on NTV.