Writes Frank Ntambi;
Hearing a GNL Zamba song can be like remembering a dream you’d forgotten you remembered, each song a new, strangely familiar feeling. The thread that’s woven through every GNL song connects us to a past GNL or a future GNL, a GNL whom we can’t know but can envision, one who’s guarded but open, simultaneously beaming or moodily eyeing the camera while pulling his lapels over his cheeks.
Unlike most of other Ugandan rappers, GNL is never unrefined—but instinctive. Of the songs we’ve heard, there’s the commercially giddy GNL (“Kikankane”), the trendy GNL (“Kkoi kkoi”), nostalgic GNL (“Ani Yali Amanyi”), and the GNL who packs his bars, smashed together with the comedown GNL (“Olabye Ekyana” and “Kayimba Ka Maama”)
And now there‘s a retrospective “Dear Hiphop,” where he narrates a simple Hip Hop story arousing our ears how he came, saw and conquered.
On this jam Dear Hiphop, Zamba expresses his so much love to Hiphop and actually takes us both through his musical journey and the short story of the rise and rise of Hip Hop as a genre in Uganda from the OGs(Kwesto, Ibraw, Sylvester and Abramz, Babaluku, Lyrical G, Navio, Lumix among rap Goddesses like Lady Slyke, Yala and Milka and how he picked the torch from all of them together with the late Mulekwa to keep it going and alive and surely this is a song everyone would wish to listen to.
Just like most of his songs, even on this one GNL built bars that 99% of rappers can’t even see over. He has this ability to connect lines of lyric together in places and in ways that are mind blowing if you really break his songs down track by track and bar by bar.
