In our society today, this synthesis finds its most urgent and compelling voice in the musical lives of Millennials and Generation Z, two digitally native generations for whom music is not merely a soundtrack to life but the very grammar through which life — political, personal and poetic — is spoken.
Our youth groups above, immersed in the relentless tides of the digital age, are increasingly discovering in music a language of resistance, solidarity and healing. It transcends entertainment, becoming instead a vehicle for mobilisation, a balm for intergenerational wounds and a spiritual medium that binds individuals to each other and to a wider collective struggle.
Music, like all potent art, does not passively reflect society; it actively participates in its making. It bridges generations, melds the sacred and the secular and translates private yearning into public anthems of defiance and desire.
At the vanguard of this musical insurgency stands Bien-Aime Baraza, widely known mononymously as Bien. A gifted vocalist, songwriter and music executive, Bien first rose to fame as a member of the award-winning band Sauti Sol and has since cultivated a distinct solo identity, blending Afropop, rhumba and experimental forms into a richly layered sound.
I write not only as a critic but also as someone with kinship ties to Bien through his parents. But beyond familial proximity, I, as a postmodernist Kenyan cultural critic, feel an ideological kinship with his work. His art speaks the idiom of those caught between tradition and transformation, those for whom music is not only an outlet but a form of insurgent knowledge.
In Bien’s oeuvre, particularly in songs like Inauma and Maandamano, we perceive the dual movement of dialectical art. These tracks oscillate between the personal and the political, the affective and the structural. Inauma, though ostensibly a ballad of heartbreak, reverberates with the metaphorical weight of betrayal. Romantic, yes, but also national and systemic.
This layering speaks to what psychoanalytic theory identifies as the return of the repressed. In a society where political rage, grief and erotic longing are often silenced, they resurface in art with a defiant urgency.
This music is not apolitical catharsis. It is the politics of feeling. It functions as both conscience and consciousness. The conscience of art lies in its moral compass, in its ability to articulate what is just and unjust, what is beautiful and profaned.
As the famous Russian critic Vasily Kandinsky argued, true art externalises inner truth. Bien’s transition from the collectivism of Sauti Sol to the introspective experimentalism of Alusa Why Are You Topless charts a trajectory of deepening artistic conscience. His voice has become a vessel for a generation rendered invisible by older political logics, yet pulsating with unspoken dreams and discontent.
Music among our Gen Z is also a site of consciousness, of self-reflection, critique and imagining otherwise. The eclectic fusion of genres — Afropop, Amapiano, Drill and Rhumba — is no accident. It reflects a polyphonic worldview that is at once rooted in African tradition and radically future-facing.
This hybridity is not confusion but resistance: a refusal to be reduced, labelled or co-opted. It is the digital generation’s form of cultural survival; of being many things, and none of them legible to colonial scripts.
Bien’s cross-border collaborations with artistes such as Ayra Starr, Scar
Mkadinali and Fally Ipupa speak to a cultural Weltanschauung akin to
Goethe’s Weltliteratur. He is unabashedly Kenyan, his sound
infused with the textured vitality of Nairobian streets, yet he is also a
global artiste.
In his music, the local is never parochial; it is the ground from which universality emerges. The pungent aromas of matatus and city dust coexist with the borderless dreams of African youth raised on YouTube and TikTok.
It is within these digital frontiers that Bien’s music, and that of his contemporaries, takes on its mobilising force. Maandamano is not merely expressive; it is performative. It uplifts, organises and galvanises. These songs ricochet across WhatsApp forums, flare up as TikTok trends and reverberate in streets lined with tear gas and protest placards.
You may want to comprehend the new youth music using three levels of dissent: articulated (explicit protest), latent (symbolic resistance) and displaced (subversive metaphors). The artiste and activist merge; art becomes action. Artivism.
What is particularly striking is the spiritual register of this mobilisation. With the credibility of religious institutions compromised by complicity in power, music becomes a new altar for the soul. It offers spaces of contemplation once occupied by church pews, only now the congregation gathers through earphones and hashtags.
