By Dennis Asiimwe
Michael Ross had been an upcoming musician for so long, everyone forgot he was an upcoming musician. He hadn’t dropped a single song of note for the entirety of his career.
Mostly, he was famed for an apparent ability to dance and for insisting he was an R & B artiste, a claim he had no technical reason for making.
The songs he had released prior to this varied from genuinely bad to catastrophic. His career was only comparable to the artiste formerly known as Sweet Kid, whom God, in His infinite mercy, delivered us from at the turn of the decade.
Ross was about to go down in the annals of Uganda’s musical history as a cautionary note, the sort of name parents bring up when frightening their children into studying hard for PLE exams (“You be there ignoring your studies! You will end up like Michael Ross!”) when the universe decided to cut him some slack and he dropped this track.
Yooyo worked because Ross finally decided he wasn’t an English R & B singer. Once he abandoned his forlorn attempts at that violent language, he was suddenly in his comfort zone. I have never figured out who composed Yooyo, but it is a gorgeously penned melody.
Stacked with a rousing bridge, a tuneful interlude, this is some of the best singing he has ever done. It is the best vocal performance he has on record, unlike those attempts at singing in English where he sounds like he is about to hurt himself.
Yooyo is a love song, and Michael Ross croons his way through a song that has actually aged well (I think it dropped about nine years ago). It’s too bad he didn’t realise he had figured out a formula which he should have stuck with.
After releasing Yooyo, Ross went back to doing what he did best: dropping forgettable music.
