BY TAKUDZWA HILLARY CHIWANZA
What we love about the fervent artiste Nova Bleq — in Mukudzei Mlambo’s words, ‘the braided bandit’ — is that she is never afraid to speak out her innermost convictions on problematic issues afflicting our societies in the contemporary. Her courage for honesty inspires.
She bares her soul for all to see: the true manifestation of artistic prowess, not for self-serving purposes but for the respite of humankind as a collective. She embodies the notion that artistes are the leaders of humanity.
With her trusted collaborator DONTWORRY, Nova Bleq delivers beautifully magnificent art that not only inspires you with truthful and life-changing messages, but also blesses you with a larger-than-life swirl of melodiously meticulous instrumentation.
Her latest offering Captives Online comes after some careful contemplation. And this is the major thrust of this track: the deep thought process informed by a bird’s eye view of the internet and social media use in the 21st century. Especially as it affects youthful populations here in the Global South.
Captives Online, featuring DONTWORRY (thank goodness for his laid-back but hard-hitting lyrical missiles) is a message of determined rebellion, and at the same time it spreads wide and open the chance of genuine love. The latter being the sole foundation upon which the decadence of easy-to-control social media users can find redemption, as they are stuck in the abyss of superficial and lethal life standards.
It is the radical openness and gesturing towards a yearning of altruistic love that we love about this song.
Can the worth of a human being (note that the word worth is a warped metric of measuring life’s standards) be quantified by the number of likes and followers on social media?
Is mimicry of ephemeral and materialist of social media trends a sustainable way of existence for the youth?
Can our young girls and women live a life of chasing social media pressures; with our young boys and men constantly told that the only marker of love and success is solely hinged on the size of their wallets?
These are the questions that Nova Bleq and Dontworry bring to our attention in highlighting the gravity of the title Captives Online — the simple truth is that the majority of urban youthful populations are now captives online. And this should be viewed in the global context of predatory and exploitative global capitalism. Big tech is only concerned with milking your attention on social media platforms for profits and profits only, barraged with fakeness through endless adverts and pernicious influence from social media influencers.
Captives Online is radical truth. Because surely life cannot be all about clicks and likes. That becomes a depressing existence. An endless void of deadly existential crises. Sadness. Mental health distress. A disconnect from the concrete material realities of life because of social media. There’s that spiritual poverty because people have increasingly become captives online all for a small elite of the billionaire class to reap obscene profits.
Nova Bleq pushes the main message of Captives Online (that social media is now more harmful to the youths instead of building robust communities premised on solidarity) in a simple and understandable manner — of course a rigorous academic review of this song will centre on Surveillance Capitalism, but even if someone were to ask us what surveillance capitalism is, we will simply refer them to Captives Online by Nova Bleq and Dontworry.
In describing the essence of the song, Nova Bleq writes:
Captives Online is an exploration of virtual bondage that a lot of people experience nowadays due to the insane, unfathomable, strenuous standards of social media. There is no end to the madness and it is difficult to escape since a lot of communication, transactions, work, and leisure are all conducted online. Those who are popular on any given platform set the trends of what is unfortunately adopted as cool or worthy of reverence.
As such, the rest of the gullible masses copy these set trends in an attempt to be socially acceptable or garner popularity for themselves as well. So, I wanted to expose how vicious the cycle can get because the trends are never ending and they are getting more and more preposterous.
That is such a powerful precis of the song. Apt and straight to the point. What we love most about the song is the impeccable quality of the production process. The song is permeated with a conscious vibration of a mellow Reggae timbre: a chilled but frenetic sonic energy that elicits a meditative and searching soul in each and every attentive and patient listener. It just esoteric enough to deliver the message to the people. And all those melodic vocals railing at the monstrosity of a ruthless and heartless capitalist system.
In the following images (extracted from Nova Bleq’s Twitter account), detailed breakdowns of the song are proffered by the originator of the Nova Review (Nova herself, of course). We considered it just and prudent to share the artist’s direct perspective.
The surge in Nova’s artistic growth is truly phenomenal and portends hope and change to the entire industry. And of course we’ll do whatever to defend those Patois-influenced flows; and DONTWORRY surely removes all the worry in you upon listening to his works.
(We are a bit disappointed that some of these social media platforms are trying to censor this song.)
You can watch Captives Online lyric video by Nova Bleq ft. DONTWORRY via the link below and share with us your thoughts:
Nova Bleq - Captives Online (lyric video) ft DONTWORRY.
You can stream/download Captives Online via the linktree link below:
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