JUWE OLUWAFEMI looks into the world of ‘Dance Hall’ steps in Nigeria and concludes that in spite of the cosmopolitan nature of today’s music, there seems to be so much noise and so little sense.
The short ride from Berger to Wuse had not been exactly eventful until Olajide Babagbenleke, a 68-year-old retired civil servant who was aboard the commuter bus with us, screamed at the driver, who was blaring from his speakers, the latest of popular music act, D’ Banj’s effort, titled, ‘Mr. Endowed’
“Cut out that nonesense!” Babagbenleke bellowed at the shocked driver who also lost control of the bus.
Shocked at this reaction, especially the way the stop-order was delivered, we (the other passengers) one after the other instantly took turns to have a good look at the man in question.
And without speaking to any one in particular, but in a rather rude and disgusting gesture, he made a loud hiss, which obviously annoyed the passengers but who all surprisingly burst into laughter!?
“Well, you can’t blame the old man…” a woman finally spoke out! “I’m sure the music must be disturbing his aged ears.”
Encouraged by the first woman’s guts, other passengers summoned the courage to enquire from Babagbenleke what his grouse was with the music or the musician.
But still sounding defiant and nodding his head in the negative vigorously, he finally opened up.
“Somebody should please tell this young man to turn down the volume of this noise!” he shouted again at the driver who was obviously lost in music as he continued to mime along the lyrics of the award winning song with D’banj.
“In our younger days, music was not noisy. It was about the coordination of the sound and lyric. We enjoyed the lyric and the harmony, not the noise”, Babagbenleke explained.
Babagbenleke without doubt is one of the many people lamenting the death of what they say used to be good days of the ‘good old music’.
Unfortunately for the old man, several of his fellow passengers are youth and of the hip hop and rap generation; they are thus lost over his outburst!
Most pitiable again for Babagbenleke is the fact that in the last decade, there has been a strong reversal of role and identity in the Nigerian music industry.
In today’s Nigeria, the most impactful musicians are the ones who rule the air waves, parties, and the tubes with their dance hall music. Talk about: Tu Face, D’Banj, MI, Ice Prince, Ikechukwu, Naeto C, Wiz Kid, Faze, Ruggedman, Mode Nine, Sauce kid, Sasha, 9ice, Bouqui, Mo’cheddah, Teeto, P-Square, Don-jazzy, Wande Coal, Black Face, Dr. Sid, D’ Prince, K-Switch, Timaya, to mention a few.
Never mind that they’ll rather mime than perform their songs, which Babagbenleke readily pointed out, and noted that it is a break-away from what was obtainable with older generations.
“At public functions, they mime… they do not have a real band in the sense of what it should be. They rely on computer generated tunes and sessions to sing. They are not artists, they may pretend to perform, but they are not necessarily composers, and even good dancers… their dance steps are not original and they are strange to our culture!” he declared.
Continuing, the retired civil servant and one you could readily refer to as the original “Old Skool Label” further observed that, the new generation of musicians are so bad with the vocation that they can’t even sing a correct musical note. “They talk and say things you can’t even understand or easily comprehend… things we call jargons in our old days…
“There’s so much repetition of their lyrics because they have nothing new and original to offer,” Babagbenleke further submitted.
Without doubt, Babagbenleke’s grouse like others have continued to raise, perhaps, the most pressing question in the Nigerian music community; where are the musicians of yesteryears, their music and their successors?
With Nigeria being referred to as “the heart of African music” obviously because of its role in the development of West African highlife music, which fuses native rhythms with techniques imported from the Congo for the development of several popular styles that were unique to Nigeria, such as Apala, Fuji, Juju, Highlife, among others, one cannot deny the country had carved for itself a unique identity.
Nigerian musicians for instance created their own brand of music style from the American hip hop and Jamaican reggae. So brilliantly done has these been that the country has achieved wide international acclaim not only in the fields of folk and popular music, but also Western art music written by composers such as Fela Sowande. That highlife once ruled the Nigerian music scene and was even exported to other countries because of the mature rhythmic pulsation it creates was not the main question, rather, such brilliant names the country also paraded then, the likes of – Osita Osadebe, Zeal Onyia, Victor Olaiya, Orlando Owoh, Fatai Rolling Dollar, Victor Uwaifo, Sir Warrior, Rex Lawson, Oliver De Coque among many others were a source of pride to the country and attracted more than enough followership from across the African continent alone.
Apala is a special genre of music which incidentally is fast going into oblivion. It is a fusion of vocal and percussive Muslim Yoruba music which made waves in the 1960s and 1970s. History has it that Apala emerged in the late 1930s as a means of rousing Islamic faithful to break their daily fast obligation during the Ramadan period. However, under the influence of popular Afro-Cuban percussion, Apala developed into a more polished style and attracted a larger audience. Haruna Ishola was a foremost Apala performer, and he later played an integral role in bringing Apala to a larger audience as a part of fuji music until his death. In the late ‘90s, his son tried to resuscitate the genre, hitting the airwaves with two sensational efforts, but ever since, little or nothing has been heard of it.
Bayo Otunla, a music lover and historian explains that Nigeria is the homeland of juju music, another music genre popular in Nigeria. It is regarded as the African equivalent of American folk-rock: tribal polyrhythm wed to electric guitars. “In the 1920s juju music was born (like the blues) as a music of the rural poor, but in 1958 Isaiah Kehinde Dairo began to transform it into an urban phenomenon, and in 1960, he introduced accordion into the ensemble. Ebenezer Obey now a (Christian evangelist) further modernised juju by drawing on highlife, and his lengthy jams (underpinning a spiritual longing) turned it into an exercise in trance, for example on Mo Tun Gbe De (1973)”.
According to him, “On the surface, the intricate dance suites of Nigerian juju vocalist and guitarist “King” Sunny Ade simply wed African percussion, call-and-response singing and western-style arrangements of guitars and synthesisers. “But, often, the roles of guitarists and percussionists were swapped, as the latter drove the melody and the former drove the rhythm. The production emphasised the techniques of Jamaican dub, and sonic details often harked back to other ethnic traditions, such as the twang of country music. Sunny Ade’s stylistic mixture reached maturity on Juju Music (1982).
“Juju was to later fuse with other styles (both African and western) in the work of Dele Abiodun, who came of age with Beginning Of A New Era (1981), and Segun Adewale’s Superstars International, that reached their best synthesis on Endurance (1982).
These were times when we enjoyed quality music, but now, things have changed considerably,” Otunla noted.
Whatever the divide and leaning taken, a new generation hip hop act however, reminded that majority of yesteryears musicians are of blessed memory. “The musicians you’re talking about belong to the ‘old skool’. The health of a few that are still living is failing them, while their supposed successors have taken interest in other things other than music. For instance, Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, the Fuji exponent died last year in a London hospital and Ayinla Kollington, Salawa Abeni and others are nowhere to be found… We can’t allow for a vacuum in the music industry, because even nature abhors vacuum”.
In an article titled: “A Nation’s Identity Crisis,” published in The Guardian, recently, Reuben Abati, the immediate former chairman of the newspaper’s editorial board, and now Special Adviser to President Jonathan on Media, observed that the country is suffering from an identity crisis imposed on it in part by an emergent generation of creative youths who are revising old norms and patterns especially in the Nigerian music.
Abati who labeled them as businessmen and women, noted that they were more interested in the commerce and self-advertisement, name recognition, brand extension and memory recall which went along with the vocation!
“They want a name that sells, not some culturally conditioned name that is tied down to culture and geography. But the strange thing is that they are so successful. Nollywood has projected Nigeria, and the next big revelations are in hip hop”.
Abati argued that the current hip hop style of Nigerian music has no doubt brought the country international recognition, yet their lyrics are meaningless.
“Nigeria’s hip hop is bringing the country so much international recognition. All those strange names are household names across the African continent, so real is this that the phrase “collabo” is now part of the vocabulary of the new art. It speaks to an extension of frontiers. In Nigeria, it is now possible to hold a party without playing a single foreign musical track. The great grand-children of Nigerian music are belching out purely danceable sounds which excite the young at heart. But the output belongs majorly to the age of meaningless and prurience. The lyrics say it all”, he expressed.
“Music is about sense, sound, shape and skills. But there is an on-going deficit in all other aspects except sound. So much sound is being produced in Nigeria, but there is very little sense, shape and skills. They call it hip-hop. They try to imitate Western hip pop stars. They even dress like them. The boys don’t wear trousers on their waists: the new thing is called ‘sagging’, somewhere below the waist it looks as if the trouser is about to fall off. The women are struggling to expose strategic flesh as Janet Jackson once did,” he further observed.
According to him, unlike the music of yesteryears, most of the music being produced now will not be listenable in another five years and this perhaps is the certain fate of commercial art that is driven by branding, show and cash. “But we should be grateful all the same for the music, coming out of Nigeria also at this time in the soul, gospel, hip, hop genre: the music that is of Femi Anikulapo-Kuti, Lagbaja, Asa (there is fire on the mountain/and no one seems to be on the run/ there is fire on the mountain now…”), Ara, Sam Okposo, Dare Art Alade, Sunny Nneji, Infinity (now a broken up team), African China, Alariwo of Afrika…. We suffer nonetheless in music as in the national nomenclature, an identity crisis. A country’s character is indexed into its arts and culture, eternal purveyors of tones and modes. Nigerian youths now sing of broken heads, raw sex, uselessness and raw aspiration, emotionalism. A sign of the times? Yes, I guess”, he added.
“Music is now business and those who run it want quick money not old tracks that are in less demand,” noted Yemisi Osewa, a mother of three and registered nurse at NHS who lives in Kettering, Northamptonshire, United Kingdom. She added that the less impact of these old-good-days music in today’s music stores and dancing halls is because of the much desire to copy foreign lifestyle by this generation. “Everybody wants what is in vogue. “And what is in vogue is meaningless and uncoordinated tunes that leaves the society with less value to uphold”.
While the appeal and lure of highlife seem to have since faded, the likes of afro-juju, juju and fuji are also fast slipping into oblivion, unless something is urgently done to resuscitate these genres of music. Some artistes like Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey every now and then though, still release new albums to revalidate the genre, sharpen their craft and woo younger fans. But the result has not been good enough as music promoters go for what they think modern fans want – contemporary music.
But Bayo Coker, a communication expert and former General Manager of WordSmith Press in Lagos, who is a rap lover and fan of P-Square, says the problem of yesteryears music is the packaging. “It is like fashion where top designers go to the archives, pick one out-dated fashion and restyle it into stuff that wows everyone. Like in music. Promoters should think this way and encourage younger music acts to commit to this rebirth that may even initiate an entirely new genre of music along the line.”