The Queen: Betrayal And All

Betrayal is certainly the order of the day on The Queen with Harriet behind bars and the Khoza’s under Shaka’s leadership controlled by Linda. Linda has shown her true colours since Shaka put a ring on her finger, she has become the brains of the business coming up with creative and  strategic ways of keeping the business afloat even though the family is under the watchful eye of detective Maake while battling Kea at the same time, we see her low key going for the throne and moving into Harriet’s master bedroom all while she is in prison

Meanwhile Kagiso is mastering the art of betrayal back in the Tembisa township promising marriage to Amo while buying enough trust from Jerry to free her family from their charges. Honestly we didn’t think Kagiso had it in him to use Amo and the love they have for each other to save his sinful family. After everything they both have been through it would only  make sense that they would want to break free from their family ties and start a new life together  and we do not pride ourselves in discrediting men but Kagiso is such a momma’s boy that he can’t see how flawed his family is and what a devil his mother I and in all of this we are most worried about Amo, she has surrendered herself to love and tested her relationship with her father all because she is in love with Kagiso who is currently fooling her. We do however believe that there is going to be a strange turn of events where Kagiso will realize how naïve he has been the whole time and that his mother and the rest of the family are all criminals, we do also understand why Kagiso might feel the pressure to jeopardize his relationship with Amo, it might be because he feels obliged to find a way to payback his family after they gave up almost everything to save his life when he was kidnapped in Somalia.

If there is one character that has managed to get to our throats real quick is Linda. We can’t believe that there was a time where we felt sorry for her, when Shaka fooled her into believing that he is still in love with her only to dump her the morning after as way to teach her a lesson for dumping him some years back for a better monied up soccer player. But as it always happens women always have the winning card and Shaka fallen in love all over again after he found out that they share a child. Now they have the perfect life living in a mansion, running the business, stabbing Harriet in the back and showing her kids the middle finger. We have a feeling Shaka and Linda’s lives can go from perfect to miserable in zero seconds the moment Harriet steps out of prison 

Idols SA Cuts Bevin

Season after season there's always that one contestant who seems to overstay their welcome, and this year it was Bevin. Universal fact; Bevin wasn't the best singer in the competion but definitely was the best performer, he knew how to put soul in his performances and this is what we think got him through each week. Though we think Idols wasn't the place for him we think there is a market in the industry for him.

As the competition is getting closer and closer  to the crunch the performances seem to get less and less memorable hence we are not going to review all of them but we have to discuss Terra Cox and Tebogo.

Terra Cox went from being the underdog of the competition to being the most likely to win and to being right at the bottom this week. We had a lot of faith in him ever since he took to the stage to belt out Michael Jackson's Will You Be There and impressed us even more when he did Love On The Brain by Rihanna for his showstopper performance. This week the Idols Appropriated songs that got messed up by Wooden Mic contenders in the audition phase. Terra decided to take on Adele's Hello and gave it a further dip, the performance just wasn't good at all and we think it might cost him the competition.

So far in running in the lead for the win since Terra dropped the ball is Tebogo. Before, Tebogo was just in the middle with no proper direction, he started slow to say the least. Tebogo started to run for the win in the showstopper week with his Treasure by Bruno Mars rendition which is one of the performances that stand out this season so far. This week on the 2nd round the Top 5 were tasked to deliver hits by their musical icons and Tebogo serenaded us with Jailer by the incredible Nigerian superstar Asa

In the middle we have Noma, Thami and Lucia. These 3 have been very unreliable off late. Thami has been getting a little arrogant, Noma has been running low and getting worse by each performance even a heartfelt song like Heaven by Beyonce this week couldn't put her at the top and Lucia has been lacking a little confidence and good song choice

If we had to pick the top 2 it would have to be Tebogo and Lucia and we think Terra is in danger

Generations The Legacy: Wandile Doesn't Want It Anymore

 

As we know it for some time now Wandile has been having problems with his gender and sexual orientation and he has gone through the most in the past few months. He Lost his father, found out he was excluded from the final will and his brothers moved abroad to move on with their lives all whilst leaving him to deal with his sexual confusions on his own.

 Wandile fell out of touch with who he was when a physical altercation broke out between him and Elam who was hitting on Wandile at the gym but Wandile wasn't having any of that (at that moment least). Elam ignited something within Wandile and introduced him to cross-dressing where Wandile found some sort of freedom but quickly shut it down at the disgust of his father. Since the passing of his father Wandile has been living in a backroom in Alex where he works at the Diale's shebeen and is the township Casanova but was just comitted to Getty when his ordeal occurred.

It was probably the most shocking thing we've seen on tv when Wandile took a knife and had a go at his man parts in attempts to get rid of them so he could be who he feels he really is. Wandile had made up his mind that he didn't want to be a man anymore and pleaded with doctors to finish off the job and remove his penis, a request which the doctors refused since they wrote him off as mentally unstable.

This storyline comes after almost a year since the world got introduced to Caitlyn Jenner, and it has us wondering whether South Africans will be taken through the process of sex change and through the state of mind of the person who undergoes these changes and also how do we as society accept these people, what questions to ask and what is out of boundaries. The character is played by Zimbabwean actress Che Mende who commend on such an amazing job. Even we were naive when we heard that Wandile actually is a woman. She is so believable we did not suspect a thing and we sort of smell SAFTA for this one

Generations The Legacy: Puppet Sphe

 
Sometimes being a beautiful and a smart women isn't enough to impress family and this is what doctor Sphe has come to realize. Doctor Sphesihle Cele has become a puppet of Jack whom she refers to as her stepfather who together with her true family forced her to marry a man she hardly knew let alone love. Because she wanted to please her family and arranged marriages are an old African custom Sphe went ahead and married Mazwi Moroka who was infatuated with somebody else at the time of the wedding and wanted nothing to do with Sphe.

 Sphe respected her family's wishes and married a stranger but now the problem gets bigger. Though she's oblivious to her stepfather's intentions Sphe was actually sent to birth a Moroka heir so that Jack can always be involved with the Morokas but as it turns out the current heir is infertile and now Sphe is being cornered to sleep with Mazwi's brother Smanga and pass off the child as Mazwi's but Sphe is up in arms this time. Sphe is not the only one contesting this decision, Smanga is also against sleeping with his brother's wife but not for the moral reason but because he wants to punish the Morokas for casting him aside when he needed them the most, call it pay back perhaps. Smanga has also recently entered a relationship with Namhla who is Sphe's stepsister so we are excited to see how this plays out as this relationship could be jeopardized if Sphe and Smanga give in to the orders of their families and this could tarnish Smanga's public image of it got out as he was also romantically involved with his brother's deceased wife and is currently in a relationship with someone he was previously accused of sexually harassing.

Idols SA Cuts Nosihe

With only 4 ladies making it into the top 10 this year Nosihe becamethe second one to exit hot on the heals of Valentine. Nosihe performed Ingoma by Thandiswa Mazwai last week under the theme: Songs with Meaning. In her performance Nosihe gave the song all the ancestral elements the song needed and then some but the judges were just not feeling it and so did Mzansi and she was sent packing.

This week it was the Show Stopper theme and almost all the contestants missed the memo except for Terra Cox and Tebogo. This is the second week in a row Terra Cox enters our good books and the first for Tebogo.  To stick with the Show Stopper theme the show was opened by almost all of the artists in the Mabala Noise stable: Ricky Rick, Gigi Lamayne, a very worn out Nasty C and the man of the hour Du Boiz who killed their set.

Noma was the first of the top 7 contestants to perform with Beyoncé’s Sweet Dreams and once more she gave a stellar vocal performance but not much of a show stopper as she hardly moved on the stage. Following right after her was Bevin who surprised us by surviving another week and he took on Michael Jackson’s Rock With You and got high praises from the judges which got us wondering whether the judges were hearing things we weren’t through the TV. Randall has been weird the past 2 weeks and has been talking nothing but lies. Bevin’s performance was nothing too far from horrible; it just felt like a high school concert by the grade 8’s.

For Keegan’s performance the creativity got turned up a notch, the dancers were blazing and he had ladies on beds suspended from the ceiling and unfortunately he wasn’t quite as awesome. Following him was Lucia who brought kasi flair in bucket loads while performing Malaika’s Destiny, she seemed to struggle just a bit as she was constantly running  out of breath but still gave a standard performance.

The Show Stopper came to lifee when Terra Cox took to the stage with his take of Rihanna’s Love On The Brain. When we first caught on as to what song he’d be performing we kind of cringed and feared the worst but he actually took on the song well and put us in our place for doubting him. The theme died a little when Thami took on to the stage with Closer by Neyo. We just feel maybe this wasn’t the best song choice for him, Thami without a doubt has super vocals but there’s just something about the performance that never came together and perhaps he could have danced less and rather focused on the singing.

Tebogo brought the house down with his rendition of Bruno Mars’ Treasure a song we generally dislike but Tebogo’s performance changed everything. In our opinion Tebogo was the most comfortable contestant on the stage with the balance between his singing and his singing and therefor was our performance of the night. His performance embodied the term Show Stopper.

Overall it wasn’t a very good night; it didn’t even come close to what we saw last year. As far as we are concerned Noma, Lucia and Thami shouldn’t worry about the results whilst Keegan and Bevin should be pulling their hair out as their performances were the weakest.  Terra Cox and Tebogo are our faves for the week

Idols SA Cuts Valentine

Sunday night Proverb revealed the most shocking news in the history of the Idols show. After doing way too much justice on Alicia Keys’ It Doesn’t Mean Anything, Valentine didn’t garner enough votes to participate in the Top 8 performances and was sadly sent home. Her elimination is probably the most shocking thing on television as we saw her as the contestant that had it all, performing songs from Zonke to Tinashe to Beyoncé effortlessly. We were pretty certain that the dark cloud was rather looming over between Lucia and Tebogo as they both gave sub-par performances that week.

This week the Idols performed to the theme: Songs With Meaning and Thami attacked first with a super splendiferous rendition of Stevie Wonder’s Sign, Sealed and Delivered to which he received all round positive comments from the judges and we also agree with them. As expected Bevin fell short on his take on Mariah Carey’s I’ll Be There, obviously that was too big a song for him and there were so many unhit notes that we  just wish…. We just wish. Regardless it was still a proper performance but we don’t think it was enough to secure him a spot in the top 7. On the other hand we believe Keegan has added a different calibre to his fans after he chopped up Ntando’s Nguwe which we didn’t expect him to slander. First the song is a good throwback for those who have roamed the earth long enough and secondly, the fact he showed off the diversity within in this country and the importance of being multi-lingual in order to communicate with the masses and lastly he has just appealed to a new market which will definitely work for him in the votes.

Lucia reminded us what it is to be African with her take of Lesego’s Afrika and it was just a good enough performance. The best performance of the night and probably of the season came in the form of Terra Cox with his awesome performance when he sang the late legendary Michael Jackson’s Will You Be There. It was just beautiful and had us feeling all some typa’ way, he left Unathi with tears down her face and no words out of her mouth and Randall Abrahams just said “No Comment”. We believe that the performance wouldn’t have been as good if it weren’t for the Clash Of The Choirs 2016 winners, they did an amazing job backing him up. The performance reminded us of Shekinah in season 8 when she performed Macy Grey’s Try backed by the Drakensburg Boys Choir it was just amazing. Noma followed suite with her rendition of Mariah Carey’s Without You and we have nothing to say about Noma. Now that Valentine is gone we believe that if a female is going to win this, it has got to be her.

 Generally everybody was good and it was just a matter of standing out and Tebogo gave a good performance but did not stand out and was not as memorable as the others, he performed R. Kelly’s World’s Greatest which generally is a good song on its own. Last to perform was Nosihe and we have to give it her for the way she handled the performance right after she was told she was the last contestant to enter the top 7. She sang Thandizwa Mazwai’s Ingoma and gave it amazing ancestral elements, which to be honest we didn’t expect from her.

If you were to ask us we would tell you Bevin, Tebogo and Nosihe should be worried. Lucia, Keegan and Thami have nothing to worry about and our faves this we have got to be Terra Cox and Noma

Idols SA Cuts Sanele

The top 9 performed last night and we were quite anxious the whole time as we waited to see who would exit the show and the first casualty was Sanele who did not impress in the top 10 when he fumbled Boys II Men’s  I’ll Make Love To You and fell short of votes.

This week the theme was Judges’ Playlist and we can say the judges gave the contestants fair choices. To begin was Terra Cox taking on Chris Brown’s new Flame which was chosen for him by Randall, it was a good option and Terra stripped down the tune to a soft mellow sound which was fitting for a Sunday, we would say the performance was enough for Terra to perform in the top 8 but with the 200 votes between me and my partner he won’t get any.

Next to perform was Noma who took on the very edgy Russian Roulette by Rihanna selected for her by Somizi and obviously as Noma would, killed the vocals but there was something that lacked. The problem we picked up with Noma is that she fully commits vocally and nothing happens performance wise, next time we want see her pop out. Tebogo kept it local with a song chosen for him by Unathi and did the unexpected with Black Coffee’s Super man and was a soothing performance, just not memorable enough for us. Nosihe decided to be a little creative with another choice by Unathi as she performed John Legend’s All Of Me in a way we have never heard it before. The performance was good but it was just a little weird in the beginning, it felt like she was running out of breath and sounded like the band was rushing her, but as the performance went on it became more bearable.

Bevin was one of our favourites last night, we will admit that we also don’t believe he is the best singer in the competition but he is an awesome performer he should give Noma some tips. Bevin sang Love Yourself by Justin Bieber chose for him by Gareth and it was a great choice and we would like to believe that it landed him in the top 8 quite comfortably. Out worry Bevin is that he is getting a little predictable and we would also like to see him perform Shawn Mendes’ Treat You Better and going forward he should pick artists that are out of the teen range and try to make them appeal to the teens which we assume are his biggest supporters. Eish Lucia, we are very uncertain about her as she is one of our initial favourite and now she seems to be losing the plot. Lucia sang Toni Braxton’s Breathe Again chosen for her by Randall and it didn’t go down well with us and we fear she might be at risk next week. Then the Keegan took to stage with a sexy number Kiss It Better by Rihanna and brought the house down even Gareth suggested that he makes a show for women only, so yeah we are not going to say much about that performance and the just hope he’s here the following again. Our forever favourite who earned all of our 200 votes was Valentine who serenaded us in the Alicia keys hit Doesn’t mean Anything suggested for her by Gareth. Thami was the last to perform as he redeemed himself with a local number called Sobabili by Robbie Malinga and the whole house fell in love with him all over again as he also apologized for forgetting his lyrics the previous week.

Our favourites for the night were definitely Valentine and Bevin and we just didn’t feel Lucia and Tebogo’s performances and we are worried about Lucia and next time she should try a vernac song.