Any truth here

"THE TALENT, THE TEMPERAMENT, AND THE TEMPER TANTRUMS.

Once, I briefly managed a club called Crescendo Bar & Grill in Karen. One of the pleasures of the job was booking Congolese musicians for weekend entertainment.

Those people are outrageously talented. They are also outrageously petty.

I have witnessed a band descend into an internal crisis so serious that, in the middle of a song, one guitarist simply stopped playing.

Just like that. The music was still going, the audience was still dancing, but somewhere on that stage, diplomacy had collapsed.

Managing creative people in nightlife is no mean feat, especially when tips, ego, alcohol, and audience attention are all thrown into the mix.

A typical Congolese band is a small republic of competing interests, with vocalists, instrumentalists, dancers, and bandleaders,

Each carrying their own ambitions, and occasionally fights over payment shares, spotlight allocation, and questions of loyalty.

Accommodating such temperaments requires the patience of a saint, the diplomacy of a UN peacekeeper.

And the acting skills to pretend you neither saw the dirty looks nor heard the whispers.

Some of the Congolese musicians I booked were petty and backbiting, a vocalist would lobby me separately to perform at lower rates.

But when the band starts playing. The guitars begin to weave their magic. The bass settles into your bones. The drums summon the ancestors,

The animateur takes over, and the sebene erupts. Suddenly, the audience forgets the quarrels, and the backstage cold war.

That is the paradox of Congolese musicians: Managing them is hard, but listening to them perform is like residing in paradise."

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totally spot on

Yes, a friend of mine who was a manager for a big name artist once told me running a band in DRC is arguably the hardest leadership position outside of government and this is the reason why there are only a few very big name artists at the moment.

Bob White from Duke university wrote an excellent book on this subject. To better understand the dynamic he literally became a band member of Big Stars and Defao’s understudy for some months. He alluded that the band leaders needed to lead the bands like Mobutu, because authoritarian leadership was the only way to keep the personalities functioning together and that’s what the band members were already used to in daily life in DRC.

I highly recommend the book if you get a chance: