Rivalry costs Willy Paul, Bahati Groove Awards nominations

Famous gospel music rivals Bahati and Willy Paul have not been nominated in any category for this year’s Groove Awards. The list of nominees was released on Wednesday.

Their exclusion from the competition cannot be considered a surprise as the two have been heavily criticised for their rivalry. Rivalry in music is mostly among hip-hop artists and a local example of the same can be seen in rappers Khaligraph Jones and Octopizzo’s heated beef. Singing gospel demands that the artist lives a life that is in line with Christianity. This is so that their audience can connect with the music and conform to what they learnt from the music.

The root purpose of singing gospel is praising God and rivaling over that is not even close to doing so.

Last year, Bahati rejected nominations for the annual Groove Awards, saying he was not interested anymore having amassed four awards in previous editions. Well, Groove organisers took him seriously and saw best not to include the gospel hit maker in this year’s edition as well.

Willy Paul, on the other hand, took it quite personally when he was not included in 2017’S Groove awards. He went on to release a diss song titled ‘Digiri’ attacking the Groove fraternity. It was evident in the song the ‘Sitolia’ singer was bitter about his exclusion from the annual awards. In the song, he declared that Groove awards exclusion did not have any effect in his music.

Leading the nominations this year is artist Jabidii, who has released several hits over the past year. Jabidii, also known as the Dance Inspector, has been part of several hit songs the most dominant ones being ‘Chinku’, ‘Kanyaga lami’, where he featured Timeless Noel and ‘Vimbada’ featuring Moji Shortibaba. He first came to the scene with famous hit ‘Odi Dance’ in which he worked with Timeless Noel.

The Dance Inspector is more or less assured of at least one award as he has appeared in 11 nominations. The artist has broken the record of most nominations in a single Groove awards ceremony. A record he set himself last year.

The Groove Awards has grown over the years and this year’s edition has proven that even more. The organisers have introduced new categories in this year’s edition. Online/Digital Personality of the Year, Young Groover of the Year and the Diaspora Artists of the Year have all been brought in. There has also been a split of the Breakthrough Artists Category to accommodate both the Male and Female artists separately.

Online voting on www.grooveawards.co.ke will begin at 10 pm tonight 8th May 2019. SMS voting will be introduced on Wednesday 15th May 2019 to compliment online voting and will run concurrently until midnight 31st May 2019.

This year’s winners will be announced on 1st June 2019 at the Gala Awards ceremony, to be held in Nairobi.