flash back: Lagos

The sociohistorical study of any musical genre would be incomplete without reference to the origins of the music. Realizing this I traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, the home of Afrobeat, during the months of October to December, 2007. Like my previous sojourning in Los Angeles and New York City, and my current San Francisco experience, the purpose of my Lagos trip was to explore the Afrobeat scene(s) in the city.

Lagos, the urban commercial and financial nerve center of Nigeria, and the larger West African region, is a sprawling metropolis of 11 to 15 billion inhabitants. Having a metropolitan area of only 300 square kilometers, the city of Lagos (capital of the greater Lagos State area) is nevertheless one of the largest and fastest growing cities in the world. Geographically, it is made up of a concentration of islands connected to a main land area through a network of rivers, creeks and lagoons all of which ultimately drain into the Atlantic Ocean at the southern border of the state.

The first (and second and third and fourth etc) time visitor to Lagos should brace him/herself for multisensory hyper-neurological experience like they have never or will ever experience any where else. The blaring horns and squelching grind of rush hour (which is sometimes every hour) traffic is complemented by highway hawkers, popularly called “on the run” aggressively advertising their wares—ranging snack items and sunglasses to irons and computer hardware—by thrusting them in your face (if you are in a car with air conditioning, keep your windows up, unless of course you are trying to buy something).

On a less major road, you might enjoy the singsong calls that the more domesticated hawkers make in an effort to attract the potential buyer’s attention. On most streets you will find a church from which highly charged Holy Ghost drenched music regularly streams through invasive loud speakers, forming a counterpoint with the five-daily megaphone channeled Muslim azan (call to prayer), always within an ears reach.

The open air markets dazzle with color, smells, brawls and the cacophony of musical (and sometimes not so musical) sounds pouring from a million distorted loudspeakers. Lagos might very well be the modernist composer’s dream of a cataclysmic aleatory project in real time. If you listen above the din, you might hear the voice of a lone warrior, hoarse from decades of shouting indictments, leading an army of chanters and musicians in sometimes humorous, often scalding critiques of the system:

I sing about one street for Lagos/I sing about a street in Lagos
Dem call am Ojuelegba/They call it Ojuelegba
I think I compare how Nigeria be/I compare it to Nigeria
One cross road in center of town
Larudu repeke
For Ojuelegba/At Ojuelegba
Moto dey come from east/Cars approach from the east
Moto dey come from west/Cars approach from the west
Moto dey come from north/Cars approach from the north
Moto dey come from south/Cars approach from the south
And policeman no dey for center/And there’s no traffic warden in the center of it all
Na confusion be that ooo!/That is confusion

This is the Lagos of which Fela Anikulapo Kuti sings, the Lagos of Afrobeat’s birth, and which continues to bear strong imprints on the genre whether it is played in New York, Paris, Japan or London.

The language of Afrobeat, pidgin English, is also the language of the market place. Pidgin English, formed from a mixture of words in Portuguese, English and a variety of indigenous languages, registers not only the city’s turbulent history of foreign and colonial interactions, but also its long established status as an immigrant city. In many regards, the confusion of which Fela sings in “Confusion Break Bones” directly mirrors this history of unbalanced interactions. The story of Lagos is that of a city that experienced astronomical population growth in a very short time due to its position as a regional commercial and industrial hub, but sadly failed to measure up in the area of infrastructure due to unsavory political distractions that have plagued the nation throughout its existence.

But chaotic as Lagos may be, it has its unusual charms, hard though they may be to discover. And for a born and bred Lagosian such as I, there is no place like Eko ile (Eko is the indigenous name of the city and the only name by which it was known before Portuguese sailors named it Lagos—literarily lakes, after a port city in Portugal). Sometimes unbalanced socio-cultural interactions yield interesting, even compelling bi-products. Examples abound; from the Brazilian architecture of Yaba and Lagos Island, the British colonial houses of Ikoyi and Ikeja GRA., to the city’s multi-derived urban fashion and cuisine.

Arguably, the most compelling product of multicultural Lagos is its music. The urban musics of Lagos, including highlife, juju, fuji, hiphop, and yes, Afrobeat, tell many stories. They tell the stories of Portuguese and West African sailors drinking and making merry on the Lagos Marina; of an emerging African elite aping, at the turn of the 20th century, the high profile ball room dances of British colonial officers which excluded the “natives;” of Christianity’s mellifluous entry into the hearts and minds of otherwise apathetic black Africans; of Islam’s collision with indigenous Yoruba traditions and the results of that connection; of the arduous sojourn of West Africans in Latin America for a while and the return home with neo-African cultural products. Lagos music tells of the attempts by Africans, Black Americans and Caribbean Blacks to forge a Diasporic black identity at an auspicious time in history; a time when globally, black people were either struggling for independence from colonial rule or the attainment of civil rights in the face of systemic racial hostility. The musics of urban Lagos tell of the people’s attempts at apprehending the disillusionment of postcolonial polities which betrayed the glorious and hard fought promise of self rule. Not merely in their lyrics, but in the overall aural and visual experience that they present, these musical styles tell of a people’s encounters with history, of resistance and negotiation, of acceptance and self determination.

Afrobeat, the musical genre that I was in Lagos to research, is widely known to have chronicled some of the darkest and most tenuous moments of the Nigeria’s (and Africa’s) history, and to have done so with a particularly Lagosian inflection. Ironically today, this very Lagosian music thrives more in metropolitan cities oceans away than it does in the city of its origin.

Prior to my arrival in Lagos, I had spent several months exploring the Afrobeat scenes in Los Angeles and New York City and to my amazement there was a lot going on. In New York City where at least 5 or 6 major Afrobeat bands are resident, there was hardly a week when I didn’t find two or three Afrobeat shows slated to be held in the clubs of Brooklyn and Manhattan. In Lagos, the main venue to hear Afrobeat is the New Afrika Shrine in Ikeja, where Femi Kuti carries on his father’s legacy on a weekly basis. Seun Kuti, Femi’s younger sibling also carries the torch through his leadership of Egypt 80, Fela’s last band before he died, and can also be seen performing at the Shrine occasionally. Besides Femi and Seun whom I intervied, there are only an obscure handful of other musicians: Dede Mabioku, Daddy Fresh, Duro Ikujenyo etc., struggling to carry on the Afrobeat legacy. It is indeed a curious thing how the Afrobeat scene in Lagos is no where near as vibrant as that of New York City and other major American and European cities. This is a question that I continue to ponder even at the present stage of my research.

Some of the most eye opening encounters I had in Lagos were not with Afrobeat musicians per se, but with veterans of the Nigerian music and culture industry, including Chief Rasheed Gbadamosi, Steve Rhodes, Benson Idonijie, Femi Esho, Tunde Kuboye and Kunle Tejuoso. Most of them mourned the decline of live music whilst reminiscing about a golden era, now bygone, when highlife musicians like Bobby Benson, Victor Olaiya, Roy Chicago and Fela packed popular venues like the Bobby Benson Hotel (formerly Caban Bamboo), Kakadoo etc. When I asked about the muted state of Afrobeat in the country, I was informed of a more endemic problem, the dearth of live music in general, resulting from a range of factors: political, economic, educational and social. It became clear to me that if Afrobeat was on the decline in Lagos, it is because Afrobeat is a musical form which essentially thrives in live settings, and live music has generally witnessed a rash decline.

Additionally, some blame the decline of live music in Lagos to the rise of hip-hop music. To such critics, hip-hop merely requires the scrunching together of machine programmed beats, the ability to talk rhythmically and the looping of simple refrains. They argue that not much expertise or creativity goes into the production of hip-hop and certainly the ability to play musical instruments live is not required.

In the face of formidable obstacles, efforts are nevertheless being made to reintroduce the quintessential popular music styles of Lagos, even if it is through the reissuing of old records on CD, or the revival of all but forgotten musical legends.

Femi Esho, one of the music industry veterans that I met, runs Evergreen Music, a company that seeks to preserve the Nigerian popular music legacy through the reissuing of vintage material otherwise forgotten. Esho’s most ambitious project yet has been the 40 CD compilation containing 157 songs by Fela, a chronological document of the musicians 3½ decade career.

Kunle Tejuoso, like Esho, also owns a record label: Jazzhole records. Through Jazzhole, Tejuoso is doing much to rediscover and repackage Nigeria’s musical old wine whilst giving much needed exposure to the new. One of his most recent efforts was the staging of a successful come back for the still virile 80 plus year old highlife guitarist and singer, Fatai Rolling Dollar with a new hit CD “Won Kere si Number.” “Won kere…” was produced by Duro Ikujenyo, one time keyboardist of Fela’s, whom I also had the pleasure of interacting with on numerous occasions.

Duro leads his own Afrobeat ensemble: Age of Aquarius and can be heard on Friday nights at Bogobiri, a hotel, art gallery and cultural hub in Ikoyi.

One event that must not go unmentioned is the Great Highlife Party organized by Benson Idonijie and Jahman Anikulapo (editor of Guardian Newspaper) held monthly at the Asian run O’Jez Nightclub located in the National Stadium complex, Surulere, Lagos. The aim of the party is to preserve highlife music, and every month, luminaries in the music and culture industry are celebrated through live highlife music by great performers such as J.O. Araba and Fatai Rolling Dollar and Maliki Showboy. The resident band for the Great Highlife Party is Femi Esho’s Evergreen Musical Band.

Towards the end of my stay in Lagos, I met the editor/publisher of MUSE magazine and she asked me to write an article for the magazine. I ended up writing a piece which somewhat summarizes the state of popular music in Nigeria, and muses on what direction Nigerian popular music will go in the future. Unfortunately I could not supply enough pictures to supplement the article since my digital camera had developed problems earlier on and I had ended up with only a few good shots of live performances. It only seems appropriate, given the issues I have discussed so far, to follow this entry with that article, and so I will be posting the article right after this entry for your musing.

Enjoy!

Oye