| dc.description.abstract | Music is a site for performing a number of socio - cultural activities - imaginative, configurative and constructive. It is more so when an artist engages in an enterprise of allowinginGividualand communal consciousnesses to interpermeate, presenting himself as a double--·faceted and multi- voiced agent. This study has examined this constellation in a critical appraisal of kipchamba Arap Topotuk, a legendary singer who, through music, appears to have wielded immense power on the loci of the socio - cultural configuration of his ~ through his music. In this work, I have centred my inquiry on the nature, the function, and the strategies of individual and communal consciousnesses inherent in his selected songs.
From the observations obtained from the two scenarios, I have reflected on the intersection of the two consciousnesses and evaluated the apparent harmony and tension of the individual consciousness appropriated to a communal sphere, on the one hand, and the communal consciousness appropriated to an individual sphere, on the other hand. This is where I have deconstructed his discourses for ironies and contingencies. I have concluded by arguing that Kipchamba has acquired his iconic status through a combination of dialectic and rhetoric, that is, constant sensibility, use and address of subtleties, which are fundamentally valued by his people at a time when no other person seemed to do so. | en_US |
