It takes a lot of hard work to make things look easy. Effortlessness demands effort. Bien is certainly a hard worker, skipping counties, countries and continents to play the “Alusa Continua World Tour” in Eldoret, Meru, and Nairobi, and international shows in the US, UK, Finland, and Germany.
From his days of singing in the house to becoming a household name, Bien does not seem even the least bit tired.
If you haven’t heard a song from Bien Aime Alusa, then it is only fair to ask, How heavy is that rock you are living under? This is no small feat, having had his identity cauterised as part of the 2005-formed boy band, Sauti Sol, for the better part of his young adulthood.
Since 2021, with Sauti Sol focusing on solo projects, Bien has not had an off-day, releasing the EP “Bald Men Love Better” with Aaron Rimbui, and chart-topping echoes of ache in Inauma and My Baby and the smooth swagger of songs like Mbwe Mbwe, and Ma Cherie setting him up as one of East Africa’s most streamed artists. He also released his album Alusa Why Are You Topless? in November 2023 with a star-studded cast of Adekunle Gold, Fally Ipupa, Ayra Starr and Wretch32.
"There’s no skipping steps because you were famous. You begin where you must and earn your way upward."
His trajectory as a solo artist has unspooled at an envy-goading speed, shooting him from a star to a supernova, exploding as the sun around which Kenya’s contemporary music seems to orbit.
It is white noise by this time to fawn over his discography, with the virtuoso claiming a scalp under his name for a Grammy Award for his contribution to Burna Boy’s Twice as Tall (Best Global Music Album, 2021), perhaps a musician’s nirvana, which flings you from a good artist to a great one.
With a pockets-out guile to his life, Bien has wrung out any drop of talent from his gifts, and you can feel in the sinews how hard he is working to eclipse the show and dip into the business of showbiz. He is a co-founder of Sol Generation Records, a creative label that supports emerging African talent as well as holding a significant stake in Hustle Sasa, a platform for creatives to sell directly to their audience, Sol Kids, which produces children’s content, and The Manhattan Ke Bar & Grill, a 2022 nightclub in Nairobi.
Married to his long-time partner, and now manager, Chiki Kuruka, the level of fame that Bien has achieved is both liberating and obliterating, and as such, he appears to live his life at the extremities—he appears to live a life at once impossibly large and impossibly small.
“I had to have the humility to start again,” he says in a past interview. On his recent European tour, he performed in the same modest venues Sauti Sol once played as a young band. “There’s no skipping steps because you were famous. You begin where you must and earn your way upward.”
That he keeps putting in the work is in no doubt. The hard way too, no matter how easy he makes it look.
Education: Bien graduated from United States International University Africa (USIU-Africa) in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism and Media Studies.
— Eddy Ashioya