A week ago, the right Reverend Alishas weMaskiri uploaded the video of his 2004 classic joint, Madam Mombeshora to YouTube. You don’t remember the song having a video? My apologies: he uploaded A video. It is AI.
In those six days, the video currently sits at 13 000 views. While those aren’t tear-up-the-forest numbers by contemporary standards, they are definitely impressive for a) an artist who, despite their legacy being sealed in stone, has been nowhere near the heights of heyday for close to two decades now b) has never been known for his music videos and c) need I remind you, the song is already 22 years old. For further context, Skillaz’ last two official music videos (‘Huku’ and ‘Harare Drive”, released at the tail-end of 2024, currently each sit at around 110 000 views: I anticipate Madam Mombeshora overtaking them both by year-end.
(SN: as a test to see who pays attention; if I am wrong about this, hit me up, and I’ll buy you a Christmas drink ;) )
Put a pin in that.
Not too long ago, my colleague on here put out a hitpiece, sorry, thinkpiece on Winky D’s most recent visual effort, Fake Love. In a nutshell, this brave soul was underwhelmed by the AI effort, and even less whelmed by the fact that it had just won video of the year at the NAMAs.
While it didn’t rouse similar levels of vitriol within me, I too share the opinion that it was nowhere near the best video we had last year; and what was in fact being rewarded was novelty. And Winky tends to be inevitable.
The conversation , of course, ended up being far bigger than just the moment and, in some spaces, became a proxy for the larger ongoing “AI in the Arts” debate: which I am not sure it was ever meant to be, but here we are.
Since then, we’ve seen a slew of other AI videos accompanying attempts at mainstream music. Most are terrible. That’s not an anti-AI sentiment; just the reality of what happens when a new technology is made widely available for the low, you’re bound to get an early avalanche of opportunistic,half-assed, and unserious efforts pop up. Others are…okay, but at the rate that AI is improving, they’re going to be dated in a month or so (and not dated in any nostalgia-inducing way.) And some, like Fake Love, will live on yet. WInky tends to be inevitable.
The Madam Mombeshora video is, generously, in the second category. But, unlike others in that category, it is doing the bidding for an already-classic song. But what does such retroactive artistry do to the legacy of moments? Before we come back to what I mean here, I think it is important to situate Maskiri, and the song itself, within the larger trajectory of Zimbabwean Hip-Hop
Once Upon a Blue Movie
I may have said this before here, but it bears repeating here: I have zero patience for generational wars. Ama2k this, ancestors that—yawn. The arguments are typically downright lazy and, at best, devoid of any real nuance. What did you want; for people to be born a different time? I digress. I needed that to be clear before I do this next part.
For those who may not have been there; Maskiri-mania needs some contextualization: there is a reason why he, and he in particular, is consistently brought up in GOAT conversations at a rate that none of his peers tends to be.
Up until the turn of the century, there were only four public radio stations, all ZBC channels (Radio 1-4.) So no regional stations, no ZiFM etc. While Radios 2 and 4 focused on local, often rural-facing content, Radios 1-3 were synonymous with Western music: for every ten songs they played in an hour, only two had to be local. Due to a combination of factors beyond the scope of this paper; that changed in 2000 when stations were now mandated to play at 75% local content. Radio 3 (now Power Fm) had always been the riddims and raps station so, naturally, the nascent riddims and raps scene (aka ‘Urban Grooves’) found its home there. True to form, many incredible rappers emerged from that mishmash of genres and riffraff of talent: the likes of David Chifunyise, King Pinn, ExQ (yes!), Leonard Mapfumo, Walter 21, Project Fam- a whole scene.
But because they were entirely at the mercy of radioplay, thus censorship; and a particularly draconian version thereof at that (given that the government was going all in on a nationalistic propaganda campaign), the music that made it to air was very…sanitized. Cute love songs, fun party songs, the occasional silly narrative or non-political social commentary. In the absence of social media or private radio stations, how else were you gonna get heard? They played ball.
Now here was Maskiri.
Maskiri was very much of the That Squad/Chamhembe stable family. You say Roki, ExQ, Leonard Mapfumo, and….I bet the next name on that list would be Maskiri. Maybe Stunner, but that was at the tail-end of the Chamhembe movement. Maybe MAfriq or Tererai or Extra Large. But Maskiri feels right. On the other hand, Maskiri was not like many of his peers here. For starters, unlike him, everyone listed here (with the exception of Xtra Large, I believe) had come through the Galaxy Records-That Squad-Chamhembe pipeline. In fact, coming out of Chi-town based Phathood Entertainment, rumor has it that he had tried to initiate an inter-stable beef with Galaxy, but fortunately that was shelved. Eventually, he ends up at Chamhembe. But even then, he’s conspicuously missing from the Chamhembe compilations. Maskiri moves different.
I first heard Maskiri on his 2002 album Muviri Wese. Tambudzai blew my mind and, by the time I had heard 'Muviri Wese' and 'Zverudo Zvaramba', I was sold. If David Chifunyise had been my archetypal, Suburban, clean-cut Shonglish rap guy, and King Pinn had tackled my “Zim rappers can be as good as American” sensibilities, then Maskiri was that Shona, irreverent ghetto flow; and I loved it.
The album was, for the most part, barely controversial: at least by today’s standards. A bit salacious here and there (ExQ’s “tongoti ndiri boss, ini ndiri secretary" comes to mind!) One song, however, proved immediately problematic. It was the one gospel effort on the project, “Dhara Rangu.” What got it banned? Well, Christian sensibilities were offended by hearing their deity referred to by the oft-irreverent title of “Mudhara”- and they came out swinging: banned from radio. (At the risk of digressing again; I wonder what that purist bunch has had to say about the direction(s) that gospel music has taken in the past two decades since!)
Then, in 2004, Maskiri’s second studio album, Blue Movie, dropped. Its story stands alone in Zimbabwean music lore. While, by the very nature of censorship (i.e erasure), it can be hard to ascertain what works have been banned before: but while songs have been banned for vulgarity before, and other works blacklisted over political reasons, Blue Movie was banned as an album “because of what ZBC radio bosses considered offensive content.”
The album was, indeed, boundary-pushing for its time. What was this “offensive content"? The 11-track album included “Mabasa eRima” where he attempts to corrupt a preacher’s daughter, “Cousin” in which he pines after his, well, cousin; “Utsinye” where he walks in on his wife cheating and goes on to describe in some detail about what he does to the amorous pair, “True Story” a crazy romp, clearly inspired by the Nollywood movies that were all the rage, about being whisked away into some great beyond, and “Madam Mombeshora” in which Skillas has a huge crush on his school teacher. (Add Mai Mukudzei, Ivy Kombo-Kasi etc: Maskiri really just wants women who are ‘forbidden fruit’ huh? I’ve gotta stop digressing. While much of the delivery may seem near-tame by today’s standards, and while I have mixed views about censorship on the public airwaves, one can see what the draconian conservative institutions reacted to when they banned the album.
By so doing, though, the censors unwittingly catapulted the album into further infamy. As part of a phenomenon now dubbed the Streissand effect, the suppression actually led to everybody wanting to hear it. It was in all the kombis. Lines formed at internet cafes as people ‘burnt’ the CD. Anecdotally, I was a ghetto kid who, by some stroke of fortune, found himself at one of the classic ‘Former A’ schools for high school in (gasp!) 2000, thus upper six in 2005; I came into the space with the birth of Urban Grooves and, for all intents and purposes, I left with the Chamhembe wave: Blue Movie included. I specified the school to say this: when I came in, there was virtually nobody talking about Urban Grooves or Zim music in general; are you kidding me? I held tight to my Alexio, Chifunyise and Maskiri tapes with nary a soul to listen with. In Upper Six, I lent out and dubbed several copies of Blue Movie: that’s how keen even north of Samora was to hear what this madman had to say. While the numbers are hard to ascertain because of its largely underground existence, many estimate it may be the most popular album of the Urban Grooves era, outside of the Chamhembe compilations (and maybe not even that.) My older brother insists it is the best album of the era. I don’t necessarily agree: that honor belongs to Trinity’s Ini, Iye, Naye. (For my money, I don’t even think Blue Movie is Maskiri’s best album: The rapping on Muviri Wese is the best rapping of Maskiri’s entire career.) But the banning controversy helped mythologize the project and, with it, one of its more popular songs, Madam Mombeshora.
The AI Return of Madam Mombeshora
Since then, Maskiri has gone on to have a decent, if hot-and-cold career. From jumping out of third storey buildings and showing up to “Umdala Wethu” Gala in a wheelchair to his weird beef with Nasty Trix: the man has lived. He continued to work prolifically and, in a detail I had forgotten until researching for this piece, actually won artist of the year at the 3rd annual Hip Hop Awards in 2012. While this acknowledgment was well-earned, it represented a run nearing an end, as opposed to one just beginning or in the middle. Fascinatingly, that year was also the year that he made his first music video: the chart-topping Wenera which went on to be video of the year on ZTV.
I draw attention to that last point to emphasize that Maskiri does not appear to have ever really cared that much for music videos. More than a decade into the game, much of that at its apex and, while his closest peers in the game all had decade-defining videos in the 2000s (Seiko, Ndichakuteera. Chidzoka etc), he sat back. Since 2012, he has dropped a few more, including “NaMwari”, “Amai Kani” and a couple that were mentioned earlier.
And now, “Madam Mombeshora” is here in visual form. 2026 Generative AI visual form.
What do you make of the new video? Furthermore, what do you make of its utility? Thinking beyond just Maskiri and this effort, there are many artists, here and departed, for whom decent visuals, if visuals at all, would have been inaccessible in their heyday. And being that people get older and spaces change, how feasible would a true-to-story real “Madam Mombeshora” video be today if he had wanted to do it? A few years ago, I came across veteran Sungura artist Paul Mukwamba’s contemporary video for his 1980s hit song “Vapenga Nayo (Bonus.)” Full points for effort, but it looks like…someone tried to make a video today with the sensibilities of 1984.There is also a significant narrative difference between a young-ish man at a bar witnessing his peers being whimsical with their spending and commenting on it and somebody 40 years older hanging out the bar with young people making those same observations. So if retroactively making videos for popular songs may be expensive at best, if not just ineffective, is generative AI the way we bridge that gap? All those classics we’ve been told about but never saw?
We have already started to see the use of Generative AI being retroactively used in popular music. In the US, Beanie Sigel has used AI to regenerate the sound of his original voice, after it was damaged in a 2014 shooting. The DOC, another rapper who lost his voice back in 1989, has said ““I’ve thought about using AI to rap again. If the technology can give me back that tool, it’s something I have to consider. It’s not about faking it. It’s about having the instrument back to play the music I still have in my head.”” The conversation is alive.
Or does it fundamentally change narratives? Because watching the “Madam Mombeshora” video; that is NOT the Madam Mombeshora story we pictured. The exclusive private school aesthetic. The seeming European backdrop. How Maskiri looks older than Madam. Yes, these are visuals that now accompany the song; but are they THE visuals for this song? What does that do to the way we capture moments in time?
I am not sure I have the answers here; I hope we can keep the conversation, and keep watch. There is a camp out there that rubbishes everything generative AI. There is a camp out there that thirstily eats everything being offered by generative AI under the guise of “well, it’s here now so…” Both are too dogmatic—at least in the long term. What is important is that we continue to think about what it all means; continuously sharpening our nuanced understanding as this tool continues to evolve.
