Strangely, this was something that I had been warned about.
A couple of years back, I'd attended a seminar on making money in the Creative Industry.
Eric Wainaina had just given an inspirational talk on the business side of the Music Business, and was taking question. Murfy's fLaW had just had our first mention in the a local paper. The writer managed to spell the band name wrong, get the wrong number of band mates, and blessed the mentioned ones with a whole string of made-up names and features.
"So," I asked Eric, "How can you ensure the press get the details right?"
Eric said, "You can't".
Fast-forward to the present. 1.5 albums, dozens of gigs, a few blurbs and a multitude of scandals later, and I wonder why I still felt let down when I read this article.
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/mag/InsidePage.php?id=2000036217&cid=616&
Pretty innocent, you might think.
YOU'RE WRONG!
All along, we were led to believe that this would be an article about the "band". They gave questionnaires for all of us to fill, took lots of band photographs, and individual photos as well.
Then, the article comes out, and they've gone ahead and edited 9ine out of it.
I get that people think it's really amazing that there are so many girls in the band. Power to women and what not. And yeah, Murfy's fLaW is made up of pretty amazing people who've overcome pretty amazing things and formed a band. And sure, 5 of them are girls, but 1 is a guy and it's this grouping that makes us as awesome as we are.
So yes, I get upset when they'd rather just blindly ignore the one guy in the band, just coz he's "ruining" a perfectly nice "girl band" picture.
Get over it people. We are not a girl band. We are a band with girls and a guy. If you want to take pictures of pretty girls, you've got Spice girls and The Moipei Sisters. (Pause. No disrespect to them). Does the world need another all-girl grouping so desperately that you'd kick the boy out?
I guess what bothers me is that they were so sneaky about it. Why go ahead and involve 9ine in the entire interviewing process if they were going to edit him out? There wasn't even a token "whole band" photograph, just to appease my troubled heart. (Let alone the trouble hearts of all the lovely female flawbots out there who only watch the band coz they like 9ine). The whole thing ended up leaving a pretty foul taste in my mouth.
They say there's no thing such as bad press. Yay for free publicity etc. But man, sometimes it feels like crap.
(DISCLAIMER: Written by a highly-emotional band mate. Views of the writer do not necessarily reflect the views of Murfy's fLaW).
