CELEB BUZZ: What happened to the mighty King Kaka?

King Kaka is a phenomenal businessman. In fact, it's not misleading to say that it reflects the entrepreneurial skills of wealthy American rappers like Jay Z and Puffy.

He also has a flawless sense of fashion. I am surprised that the Italian costume brand Georgio Armani has not yet endorsed it. He is long awaited. He always dresses as he attended the wedding of a tycoon or a gala.

Unfortunately, when the conversation turns to music, the tone has to go from free to unsettling. Lately, his lyrical dexterity and instinct for catchy jams seem to have deserted him.

His last song "Sababu" confirms it to me. At a time when the best Kenyan artists are getting no less than 500,000 views on YouTube in a week or two, "Sababu" is only 60,000, but has been out for nearly a month.

For an artist of his stature, this is serious underperformance. Most of his outings over the past year also have low numbers.

When I came across "Sababu" for the first time, I was eager to listen. I mean that it was King Kaka, you know, the guy who did "Adisia", "Jam Nakam" and "Swahili Shakespeare". Do not forget the creatively nasty "Uko Sure".

After listening to "Sababu", I was not disappointed. I was just sad – the sadness of seeing someone you loved to change for the worse. If you were asked to name three good songs that the General Manager of the Kaka Empire has abandoned over the last three years, you would have a hard time remembering them.

It was not always like that. King Kaka had the habit of bringing warmth. His words had the habit of digging deeper into the emotional and cognitive ground of what initially seemed to be the ordinary activities of life. He was a genius who could bless us with a picky poetry. He was able to extract the extra on simple subjects. He could do 1 + 1 to be 3, sometimes even 4 or 5.

I remember the first time I met him. I was a freshman at the university. My friends and I went to the Wapi Festival, a monthly hip-hop concert at the Sarakasi Dome in Ngara, Nairobi.

King Kaka was still young in the game. He had just found success with songs such as "Dodoma" starring Harry Kimani and "Mtu Hivi Hivi". He always had the habit of wearing a durag these days and had the appearance of a hustler, not a mogul. His music was rich in hardened street wisdom.

Everyone was showing respect that day. There were more than 100 underground rappers on the site and they took turns beating their fists with him. They felt blessed to inhale the same oxygen as him. It was considered the future of Kenyan hip-hop. The legendary rapper Chiwawa, who was also present, even crowned King Kaka, his successor.

Kaka is not the first to be overtaken by the chaos surrounding the work. In hip-hop, there is a term that uses a lot. This term is "sell". Rappers are often accused of selling when they change their style or dilute their rhymes once they have become famous. If a rapper abandons his gross distribution for fashionable sounds, he is considered a sell-out seller.

It is said that the quality of a rapper's music is usually better when they are still trying to make a name for themselves. Once they become famous, they tend to relax. At that moment everything is fine for them. Their thinking becomes "People already love me now. I do not need to spend 12 hours writing a song. I can just write a song in one hour, save it and release it.

However, it's still a choice in the end. Not everyone gets chewed in chaos. There is a reason why the popularity of some rappers fades while others remain at the top. There is a reason why there are only two rappers in Kenya who are considered cream – Khaligraph and Octopizzo – and not nine or ten of them

Kaka's biggest mistake was to give up hip-hop for kapuka and love songs. In this way, he lost his base of fans. Most of his songs are now collaborations with singers. This is never a good shot for a rapper unless you are Ja Rule (Look where this one ended).

I think his other defeat is his habit of prioritizing quantity over quality. He comes out too many songs in a short period of time, songs where he's just going through his verses, instead of taking his time and putting out a good song in two months. No counselor maybe?

An artist needs real people around him, people who can report errors. King Kaka does not seem to have such people.

Looking back, it seems that the name change has also done him a disservice. He was a beast back when he called Rabbit. When he changed to King Kaka, all his powers disappeared.

In a music industry that has a penchant for glorifying newcomers while marking expiring dates on the old ones, he is lucky to still have a big name. can not blame his effort. He continues to try but for all sorts of reasons, the end results are broken songs that swim in bad rhythms that you can not imagine for extended studio hours.

King Kaka the conscientious observer was completely supplanted by King Kaka the skittish hiker. He definitely needs a resurrection. Two good hip-hop songs will bring him back to the controversy for "King Of Rap". But the resurrection will not happen by miracle. This will only happen if he wants it seriously.