By Dennis Asiimwe
Fik Fameica’s career is floundering so badly, he now appears in our Down Memory Lane section.
At the time, his mad hatter approach to dancehall and music in general was considered by everyone as refreshing. It actually was – just have a listen to stuff like Kutama. He sounded like nobody else.
He then picked up the moniker of ‘Fresh Bwoy’ and then got carried away with it, turning it into a contradiction of sorts, because he increasingly sounded less than fresh when he used it.
But give credit where it was due, the frantic energy of his earlier material was otherworldly.
Listening to Kutama makes me wonder how the track’s producer put the whole thing together without overdosing on cocaine.
Back then, his urgent need to rhyme hadn’t yet gotten tedious – he was even considered witty.
And then that was some music bed that he was dropping his lines against, eh?
It was brilliant production work, the sort that keeps up with the frantic delivery of a rapper who was at his peak and had not yet had his confidence destroyed by a concert where the turn-out was mostly a few bouncers, and some trees.
See, Fik Fameica built his career in intense creativity. It was what his first bits of music was based on, songs like Kutama and Tonsukuma.
It was simply not sustainable, this sort of high octane musicality jam-packed into three or four minutes.
The burn-out was almost inevitable, especially since he had no formula for material with a little more laid-back approach.
It was good while it lasted. But inevitably, the rhymes started to feel force-fed, and the delivery got just a little more annoying.
And before we knew it, he had morphed that artiste we all really quietly hoped we could find in a dark alley and give a quiet beating, every time he said ‘Fresh Bwoy’.
