The subtle ways our lives have changed for the better since the spread of mobile technology may be hard to miss, but there are also even more peculiar differences to how we interact with the lives of the rich and famous. The wall between celebrities and the audience has been virtually broken down, these days, conversations on separating the art from the artist have grown more prominent as a result of the naturedly human tendency of public figures to be problematic.
Last week, British-Nigerian rapper, Naira Marley surprised everyone with a caption with the words: “If U Know About Slavery You Go Know Say Yahoo No B Crime” on his Instagram. This picture quickly went viral spurring instant backlash, reprimanding his support for cybercrime. While his Instagram page is no court jury and anyone caught committing internet fraud will serve their time jail, once again, it also showed how polarised the country is about the dangers of internet fraud.
Music releases referencing the underground cybercrime culture have a long history in Afropop. In 2007, Olu Maintain released his hit single, “Yahooze”, a controversial single, he explained was a tribute to the Monday to Friday worker-bees. Before Naira Marley’s recent incursion became a headline, the biggest debate around the dangers of Yahoo-Yahoo started after Falz allegedly took shots at artists who celebrate known cyber-fraudsters. At the time, 9ice was pushing “Living Things”, a track where the veteran runs through a list of popular names allegedly suspected of cybercrime.
Although Naira Marley himself has denied being involved in cybercrime, he seems bent on holding on to his belief that ‘Yahoo’ isn’t a crime. For a lot of his supporters, the gritty reality on the streets is often given as an excuse to get rich by any means necessary and artists like SamKlef have even argued that the poor quality of government in the country should be blamed for the crimes. It’s a sentiment similar to Naira Marley’s argument that stealing is justified by slavery. But a life of crime can’t be rationalized and those who attempt to do so are only encouraging bandits. In line with those who believe the whole thing to be a publicity stunt to build hype for a new release, the singer released his reply to media critics in a snippet he shared on his Instagram. The snippet finds him comparing the backlash he has gotten to the oppression Fela, Mandela, and MKO Abiola faced while they were alive.
His conviction is even more troubling than flat earth believers and now fans are faced with the tough decision to keep listening to a cybercrime defender or remove his songs from their playlists. And that’s where the internet has come through for modern society. Consumers have the power to determine who they listen to and can have a direct effect on the banks of artists who hold opinions they don’t agree with.
Featured Image Credits: Instagram/nairamarley
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
Johnny Drille fans still haven’t gotten that debut project to earmark their territory in the Nigerian music space, but the singer has certainly kept up a steady stream of releases lately. After sharing “Forever” and a music video for “Shine”, “Finding Efe” is the Mavin artist’s third single for the year and it finds him returning to his tortured romantic sentiments, penning a touching song that mourns the loss of his lover.
A piano-led beat serves as a soothing drop for his heartfelt lyrics addressed to a lover who he can no longer reach. Just like his lyrics, “Even Though We’re Worlds Apart, I Wonder Dear Where You Are”, the music video for “Finding Efe” shows Johnny Drille’s inability to move on from the relationship as we watch him embark on a quest to find the song’s muse. Timmy Davies directs the video following Johnny Drille’s search across the country, armed with a photographer which he shows everyone he meets.
You can watch the music video for “Finding Efe” below.
Featured Image Credits: YouTube/MavinRecords
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
This year, Nigeria will celebrate 20 years of return to democracy. This is a landmark achievement for any African democracy, but when the 9th assembly is inaugurated on June 12th—Nigeria’s newly established Democracy Day—there will be fewer women who will sit in the green and red chambers to make critical decisions about inclusion, budgeting for gender issues and participation.
The exclusion of women has long been a crux of the Nigerian electoral process. These days it’s getting harder to tell if anything is actually changing. At the recently concluded general elections, only sixty-two of 2970 women who ran for various offices will be sworn into office to legislate for the nationwide population of 190 million people. This number represents only 3.8% of all the positions in the country, from the office of the President to the Vice, the Members of the National Assembly and the Members of various State Houses of Assembly. In 2015, it was 6.5%.
Younger women under-4o were even more marginalised by the last election. Despite the clamour for younger candidates and fresher political voices at the last election, there are only nine women of the 260 total number of elected candidates under-40, and only two of them are thirty-five years or younger.
Last week, YIAGA AFRICA, a youth non-profit focused on upholding human rights and democracy, brought together a cohort of 20 young female candidates who lost the 2019 elections for a reflection meeting on the challenges they faced and the way forward. The sit-down held at the Center for Legislative Engagement (CLE), where these courageous women, some of whom were understandably still shaken about their loses, discussed their experience during the general elections. The discourse turned out to become a safe space for the women to give context for their candidacy, and share their post-election feelings.
“There are about 10 states in Nigeria with no single female legislator, so how do you plan to legislate for women in the state,” Chioma Agwuegbo, founder of TechHer and Strategy Team Member of the Not Too Young To Run Movement, stated. “In Ondo state, there is only one female legislator amongst 26 in the state that will be sworn into office, which means her voice will most likely be drowned out.”
Alongside Agwuegbo, other leaders of the Not Too Young To Run Movement: Yetunde Bakare, Maryam Laushi, Bella Anne Ndubuisi and Cynthia Mbamalu, the Programs Manager of YIAGA AFRICA, presided over the townhall meeting. The speakers took great effort to ensure the women spoke very frankly about the experiences from their different constituencies, states, polling units and parties, beyond the observer reports and statements by political analysts.
“The whole concept of democracy is incomplete if there is no representation of the different segments or sectors of the society. And that includes ensuring that each time we talk of gender in politics, we are not looking at it as a male-dominated affair but a space, represented by both men and women, which is a true reflection of the society,” Lawyer and activist, Cynthia Mbamalu said. “You cannot talk about nation building itself without talking about the women; we make up part of the population. Statistics show we make up about 49% of Nigeria’s population. We need to sit back and reflect on how we experienced the elections. What challenges did we face and how can we address these challenges going forward?” She queued the female candidates to throw more light.
Once a person has been marginalised and discredited, silence becomes a likely option. YIAGA Africa told The NATIVE, they witnessed an initial reluctance from speakers who repeatedly asked the organisation, “the question is what is our protection after we tell our story, what is our protection after now?”
Rwanda just recently beat its record of 64% to 68% of women in politics because they saw the great change it made for their country. In Namibia, the classification of women in parliament is 48%. In South Africa, it is 42.4%; Senegal, 41.8%; and Ethiopia, 30.3%. In Nigeria, the number of women in parliament will drop from the 6.5% that it has been in the 8th Assembly, to 3.8% in the 9th Assembly, commencing in June.
It took the promise of identity protection and the option for anonymity off the record, for some of the women to start feeling comfortable about speaking up. TechHer founder, Chioma Agwuegbo broke the ice by telling the women to communicate their experiences in one idea. The choice of words that flew around the room, included an odd but predictable register of anguish and disappointment. “Tough, fraudulent, horrible, no respect for gender, an election replica, not credible, quite an experience, vote buying: highest bidder wins, money laundering, and, a market place.” The women echoed.
The participation of women is beyond a basic political issue; it is also the subject of community agreement. Nigeria has notably failed to learn from other countries on the African continent in this regard. Rwanda just recently beat its record of 64% to 68% of women in politics because they saw the great change it made for their country. In Namibia, the classification of women in parliament is 48%. In South Africa, it is 42.4%; Senegal, 41.8%; and Ethiopia, 30.3%. In Nigeria, the number of women in parliament will drop from the 6.5% that it has been in the 8th Assembly, to 3.8% in the 9th Assembly, commencing in June. “So technically it’s like we are hustling backwards. One step forward, 20 steps backwards,” Agwuegbo emphasized.
Some female candidates, however, ran their campaigns prepared for the worst; they offered solutions. “I built a community of men around myself. I went for midnight meetings with my husband.” “I started by telling them stories that never happened as a block to prevent strategy: Sir, everybody I have been asking for support has been sexually harassing me”
A series of recurrent issues were highlighted by most of the women. For example, on election day, some young candidates experienced betrayal from party agents who switched allegiances after they were bought over. In another constituency in the North Central, a female candidate’s campaign manager tried to use sex as a prerequisite to obtaining the money that had been specifically donated to fund her campaign. “He knew that the election had given me exposure, and he wanted to ruin my chances. The money he collected for me, [donated for my campaign] he has it in his pocket,” she stated. Another female candidate in the South West was sexually harassed by a state governor who condescendingly flattered her by telling her how lucky she is and promised to give her “the whole society” if she accepts to be one of his mistresses.
Like this, the conversations that took place among the women and speakers at the reflection meeting were wide-ranging and lasting in impact. One of the youngest female candidates at the reflection meeting who is in her mid-twenties was both a victim of her age and marital status. She was beaten up, for saying “no” to a sexual predator, who had promised support to her but threatened to continue assaulting her because she refused to have sex with him. In the South-South, a female candidate’s husband was kidnapped; her mother-in-law who had warned her not to go into politics, chastised and accused her, saying she “traded her son (the husband) for political conquest”.
We could sense the trauma still lingering from their experiences as the women’s voices caught in their throats, revealing emotions through shouts and cries. Some female candidates, however, ran their campaigns prepared for the worst; they offered solutions. “Have one or two men that will go with you for party meetings,” a candidate stated. This is an experience that their young male counterparts may not necessarily encounter, and it is absurd that this is even a solution, but maybe it is a starting point to protect our women. “I am from a conservative society. So I built a community of men around myself. I went for midnight meetings with my husband”, “I told them a story from my tradition about how men who sleep with other men’s women do not wake up the next day”, “We are not gender-biased but when it comes to elections, work with men”, “Don’t go to places alone”, “I started by telling them stories that never happened: Sir, everybody I have been asking for support has been sexually harassing me”, more female candidates explained.
Once a person has been marginalized and discredited, silence becomes a likely option.
It is true that the subjugation of women in Nigerian politics by old political warhorses and suffragists is commonplace in our communities. But what is common is not normal; it is high-priority that we aggressively refuse to see it as normal. We cannot continue to live in an era of complaints when actions would yield tangible results. Asides Civil Society Organisations and Non-Governmental Organisations, very few stakeholders in the world of politics have shown active concern about the intellectual or emotional well being of the political aspirants. This is why YIAGA AFRICA’s Ready To Run initiative is filming a documentary based on some of the revelations from this town hall meeting.
The complex array of women are stepping out to be known as the winning women—not victims but victors. They have drawn an action plan for election 2023, and they demand our attention and support. Out of their rather painful experience, they still bring bright light and coloured dreams, recognizing that: though the marginalization of women in the socio-political landscape of Nigeria is no new phenomenon, it is also a future we can mitigate.
ImageCredit:OvinuchiEjiohuoforYIAGAAFRICA
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On the ordeals of women who ran in the 2019 elections, Fisayo Okare writes from the Communications and Media department of YIAGA AFRICA, Abuja. Tweet at her @fisvyo
After debuting in 2019 with the release of “Happy”, Koker is following up with a new song titled, “Too Late”. The ‘Kokeboy’ retains his pleasant mood for the sultry new single produced by Rhymebamz to a lightweight synth led groove. His penchant for fusing Yoruba and English lyrics for a melodious performance gives the song it’s a gratifying feeling like a freestyle performed at the bar to impress a love interest.
The music video The Great Murshed directs follows Koker and a love interest around the streets of what appears to be France with clips from the Love Locks in Paris featuring in the video. Though the plot isn’t as much a focus as the colourful city is, Koker seems to be trying to apologize to his love interest for something he did wrong.
You can watch the music video for “Too Late” below.
Featured Image Credits: YouTube/KokeboyVEVO
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
Generic and derivative as her name might seem, Teni the Entertainer has earned her ambitious name with her expansive range of talent displays to keep her fans engaged. From sharing funny videos on social media to releasing club songs and even motivational songs, she is a delightful performer and her latest single, “Sugar Mummy” sees her explore her street sensibilities for a new club driven number.
Rexxie and Jaysynths Beatz team up to produce the Afro-house fueled instrumentals for “Sugar Mummy” set to a catchy baseline. Teni has never been one to shy away from sensual expressions and her indigenous Yoruba dialect, and here, she combines both.
You can stream Teni the Entertainer’s “Sugar Mummy” below.
While Nigeria before colonialism and Independence had its own patriarchal structures, the introduction of Victorian-era values to the ‘colonies’ brought with it a paternalistic view of women that demanded they be seen and not heard. Prior to the arrival of the colonial government, existing social structures gave men and women their own social societies, each with considerable power over the communal government. Music was an integral part of these societies and when women were silenced through violent force like the Aba and Ikot-Abasi riots or through policies like arbitrary taxation, their societies were weakened.
By the time Nigeria gained Independence, only a handful of women held positions of power or influence in any field. But this didn’t mean that they were completely invisible. Women made the core of many of the bands and groups of pre-Independence Nigeria; they played instruments, managed group finances and handled image and costuming. The efforts of many of these women are lost to us mostly because it was expensive to record and document music in the 40’s – 80’s, and the labels and individuals, local and foreign, with the finances to record these women and document their careers were simply not interested.
But not all women from this era have been erased and a handful continue to perform music to this day.
The most prominent of the women from this era is multi-genre singer and instrumentalist, Mona Finnih. Credited with being the first Nigerian woman to lead a popular musical band, Mona Finnih began making music in the early 90’s but didn’t really come into her own until 1969 where she began The Sunflowers. Her band stood out for two reasons; first Mona recruited professional instrumentalists who already had an understanding of the sound she wanted to create. There was no experimenting, no teenagers just figuring their way around an instrument or trying out vocal work. Second, Mona was originally managed by Sunny Okogwu, brother to Maryam Babangida (nee Okogwu), the wife of former president Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida.
With Okogwu’s access and her proximity to such an important figure at the end of the Civil War, The Sunflowers had the talent and proximity to have grown a cult following. As with many groups from the era, they chose to create music and tour, rather than focus on burning vinyls. That would prove to be a misstep as an accident during their tour of Northern Nigeria would lead to the loss of The Sunflowers expensive equipment.
Concerned by the accident Finnih would be shipped abroad to study and would return a decade later, as a jazz singer. Finnih is still active today, though her focus is almost entirely on gospel.
The LIjadu Sisters however have had no such change of heart. In an interview given in 2014, both sisters talk about still making music that reflects their feminist values, their love for afro-fusion and their place in an industry that seems to suffer from retrograde Amnesia. Building on the foundation created by Mona Finnih and the commercial success of singer Nelly Uchendu, The Lijadu sisters breakout hit Danger, released in 1976 would catapult them into international stardom and lead to tours around the United Kingdom. It would also make the first female exports out of Nigeria with no male retinue or male bandmates. The self-awareness and sass of the Lijadu sisters continue to inspire young Nigerian women across all creative disciplines as their music continues to fascinate four decades after it was made.
But not all the women from that era were fascinating in conventional ways. Take for instance Area Scatter, an itinerant musician from Imo state who became so famous, her name has long since become a part of Nigerian colloquial English. With one album to her name and adoring fans that included Igbo royalty, her success becomes even more of an anomaly because she was openly trans and accepted for her duality, long before Nigerian feminists on and off Twitter would publicly advocate for the inclusion of all kinds of women into the discourse around acceptance and opportunity. It is a shame we know very little of Area Scatter herself, other than her music and a short documentary that perpetuates itself, challenging many of the myths around women and sexual minorities in music in the 60’s and 70’s.
Women from this era are erased in other ways; the female musicians and performers of the Fela Afrika 70 and Egypt 80 bands were as much a part of his mystique as they were instrumental to his success. Their contribution to the man who is arguably the country’s most famous musician is often reduced to bit roles in his politically charged mass marriage. Their contributions to his composition and music, both as performers and muses are erased, and they merely become footnotes in his success. Plays like the Kalakuta Queens created by Bolanle Austen Peters is trying to correct this, but it is only a small drop in what is an ocean of erasure.
Not much has changed in the industry, female musicians are still pitted against each other and tokenist representation forces many talented women to either align themselves with male musicians or drop out altogether for fear of sexual harassment. There is much to discuss and much to change.
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Emmanuel Tetteh Mensah plays his first gigs with his band, The Tempos in Great Britain. Originally formed by British soldiers stationed in Accra, Mensah reformed the band with an All-African instrumentalist team and began to make music.
High-life had evolved as a Ghanaian response to the forced introduction of Western classical music to Ghanaian colonial school curriculums and the suppression of traditional Ghanaian music. As West African colonialists routinely carried favoured subordinates across West Africa and back to Europe, early cross-pollinations of musical interests and influences were starting to occur.
1954
Bobby Benson, formerly making traditional jive, rumba and Jazz as part of the Bobby Benson Jam Session, is introduced to Highlife by E.T Mensah as they tour similar circles in the United Kingdom. This introduction forces him to change his sounds and sparks his interest to return to Nigeria and replicate the success of jam session back home.
The Lagos Bobby Benson Jam Sessions were characterized by a clearly defined brass section, which was heavily influenced by rock ‘n’ roll and the jazz music from America at the time. The concerts would eventually become a proving ground for some of the country’s most renowned trumpeters, launching the careers of Rex Lawson, Victor Olaiya, Roy Chicago, Zeal Onyia, Chief Bill Friday and Freddie Okonta.
1956
Three years after Sir. Victor Olaiya leaves the Bobby Benson Jam Session to form Victor Olaiya and the Cool Cats, he is invited to perform for Queen Elizabeth II at the State Ball organized in her honour in that year. She was in the country to acknowledge its agitations for Independence and State Balls were the highest level of acknowledgement of talent a musician could be offered at the time.
The honour elevates Olaiya’s status as a respected musician and would become the first of several high profile performance opportunities for Olaiya and his band during and after the Independence process.
1957
E.T Mensah performs with Louis Armstrong, during the celebrations to celebrate and commemorate Ghana’s Independence. As the first West African country to gain independence, Ghana was the first ‘Mecca’ for African Americans looking to discover the ‘motherland’ and reconnect to their African roots. Mensah’s performance with Armstrong would solidify High-life’s position as a contemporary genre in its own right, able to attract the attention of the world’s most renowned trumpeter at the time.
By this time, Mensah’s The Tempos had become so popular, the band routinely toured across English West Africa and Great Britain, with most of its explorations happening in Lagos. His music also created keen interest in Ghana’s Independence and would spur Nigerian agitations for Independence.
1958
After a year of performing the hit in the Bobby Benson Jam Session, Bobby Benson and his combo would officially release Taxi Driver on Vinyl in 1958. The two side combo (along with Gentleman Bobby) would become an instant success, helping pivot the musician from a scene favourite to a bonafide recording artist. The success of the vinyl would create a movement around Benson’s Jam Session in Lagos and popularize Benson’s brass-heavy arrangements; arrangements that would inspire a young Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, then about to leave for medical school in the UK.
1960 – 1961
The Western Nigerian Broadcasting Service (WNBS) was created as a replacement for the BBC, which was going to leave Nigeria to make way for a national broadcasting service. Run in partnership with the Overseas Rediffusion and the Western Nigerian government, the WBNS was formed in response to the growing demand for indigenous music and would begin to broadcast juju and highlife music to its radio audiences, allocating two radio slots per week to highlife in a show slot called ‘Time for Highlife’.
WBNS also signed exclusive performance contracts with artists like Rex Lawson and I.K Dairo to gain first access to their original music. The relationship was mutually beneficial as at the time, Nigeria only had a skeletal road network and travel with equipment was expensive and time-consuming, radio was a quicker way to reach audiences and earn revenue from deals with the WNBS while avoiding risky travel.
1965
After moving to Lagos from Benin City, Sir Victor Uwaifo forms the Melody Maestros band, which is influenced heavily by Latin dance music and highlife. The band releases “Joromi”, “Guitar Boy” and “Mami Wata”. All three go on to become critical and commercial successes in 1966, paving the way for Uwaifo to tour Nigeria during the Civil and perfect what would eventually be called Akwete music, a variation of highlife that references traditional bini music, latin twist and highlife.
Uwaifo’s Magical Maestros benefited heavily from the Civil War and its outsize effect on the growth of traditional highlife in Nigeria, and a good number of the artists who rose to prominence in 1966 were able to do so because of the absence of artists from South-East Nigeria already famous during that era. Uwaifo was also a renowned poet, academic and inventor and was credited with inventing the revolving Guitar belt hook, an 18 string Guitar and inspiring renowned rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix.
1967
Sir. Victor Olaiya is conscripted into the Nigerian Army at the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War and offered the honorary rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In return Olaiya’s band performs for troops in barracks across the country and in the front lines of the Civil War, mirroring similar tactics on the Biafran side of the war. Olaiya’s tenure in the army allows his music reach parts of the country that would have otherwise been financially forbidding.
Olaiya’s position as one of the most successful high life musicians in Nigeria in spite of his Yoruba upbringing is especially relevant to this move, as it positions the genre as Nigerian rather than Igbo.
1970
After a decade in professional residency at the Dolphin Cafe Hotel in Onitsha, and nearly 100 songs in his discography, Cardinal Rex Lawson and the ‘Mayor’s Dance Band of Nigeria record Oturukorote, the musician’s final album as a performing artist. Lawson had already gained significant fame as a result of his partnership with the Western Nigerian Broadcasting Service and was the equivalent to contemporary pop star Wizkid in regards to his national acceptance and the universality of his music.
Six months later, Rex Lawson would die at the age of 33 from injuries sustained during a road accident on his way to Warri.
1976
Prince Nico Mbarga and the Rocafil Jazz Orchestra records and releases “Sweet Mother” the third official single of their residency at the Plaza Hotel in Onitsha. Mbarga’s single goes on to become the most successful Nigerian single ever released on home soil, selling 13 million copies, even though it was sung in Sierra Leonean Krio and favoured a Congolese guitar style.
1976
Nelly Uchendu releases ‘Love Nwantiti’, off her same titled debut LP which takes on the traditional Igbo folk love songs and revolutionizes it with contemporary highlife sounds. At the tail end of the 1975 coup and Fela’s skirmishes with the Nigerian government, a new wave ethnically driven of nationalism had created nostalgia for pre-colonial regional music and culture.
Nelly’s entry into the music scene is prominent because she is the first Igbo woman to attain the level of mainstream musical success as a solo performing artist. Love Nwantiti is quickly absorbed into the colloquial vernacular at that time and becomes a touchstone for young love.
1976
Ten years after reforming his band Celestine Ukwu and His Philosopher National, Celestine Ukwu releases his comeback project Igede Fantasia powered by the sleeper hit Money Palaver, which becomes a critical and commercial success, reintroducing Ukwu to a new generation of Nigerian music lovers and solidifying his legacy as one of Nigeria’s founding highlife practitioners.
Ukwu’s first band The Music Royals formed in 1966 was disbanded at the start of the Civil War when musicians of Eastern descent were forced to either renounce Biafra or return to the region. He is unable to capitalize on this new wave of success as he loses his life from injuries sustained in a car accident the following year. Ukwu’s legacy persists thanks to King Sunny Ade, whose brand of Juju and later Fuji is heavily inspired by Ukwu’s more louche take on highlife.
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Haruna Ishola re-releases his 1958 album ‘The Orimolusi of Ijebu Igbo’, an album released to commemorate the sudden death of the Oba. The original album failed to make commercial success, but the reissue, riding on a wave of ethnic patriotism would become a commercial success and marked the ascent of Ishola as the most famous Apala musician of the era.
The album is distinguished for Ishola’s insistence on conservatism and refusal to join the trend of incorporating Western instruments and influences into the music. Ishola’s album would mark the beginning of the split between traditional Apala music and the more contemporary juju music.
1957
Fatai Rolling Dollar assembles the ‘Fatai Rolling Dollar and the African Rhythm Band’, officially signalling the start of the juju movement. Rolling Dollar was already a regular fixture in the industry at this point and had dabbled in high-life before pivoting to focus his craft purely on juju music.
Around this time, I.K Dairo also forms the Morning Star Orchestra, after nearly a decade of bouncing between bands and working under the legendary juju artist, Daniel Ojoge. Riding on the wave of Independence driven patriotic pride and the substantiation of classical music for more vibrant Nigerian genres, both artists would pioneer the transition of juju from a niche performance art tied to local clubs and bars in Lagos and Ibadan to a mainstream music genre embraced by Yoruba communities across the country
1960
As the country gears towards Independence, celebrations in the Western Region look for musicians who bridge the gap between contemporary sounds and a deep Yoruba heritage to perform at their events. Acts like I.K Dairo, Fatai Rolling Dollar and a young Ebenezer Obey all are introduced to the Yoruba elite and political class as they are invited to perform at celebratory concerts and events commemorating Nigeria’s new status as a sovereign nation. Many of the relationship forged during these events would sustain many of the popular juju artists at this time in the coming decade and through the war.
1963
I.K Dairo releases Ka Soro, his second critical hit following the success of “Salome”, his first song since Morning Star was formed and renamed The Blue Spots. The song is political in a way that deviates from traditional juju music and asks for tolerance among the ethnic groups. Some suggest Ka Soro predicted the civil war that would begin in 1966 and continue till 1970.
The year is distinct because Dairo is conferred the Member of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth, in recognition of his contributions to the growth of music in Nigeria. His introductions of instruments like the accordion and Harmonica to traditional juju had elevated him as a pioneer among his peers and caught the attention of the British government. Dairo was the first Nigerian musician to be honoured in this way.
1964
Ebenezer Obey starts The International Brothers, official marking his secession from the Bobby Bension Jam Session. He also releases “Ewa Wo Ohun Ojiri”, his official single as the leader of his new band. Obey’s exit from Bobby Benson’s troupe marks the start of the Jam Sessions eventual decline.
Obey would eventually pivot into gospel music later in his career and with him, bring a new sub-genre of juju music dedicated to incorporating traditional Yoruba praise music with Christian iconography.
1965
Moses Olaiya, otherwise known as ‘Baba Sala’ would disband the Federal Rhythm Dandies after just a year of touring and performing together as a group to pursue a formal contract with the Western Nigerian Television (WNTV) to create a variety and comedy show with his comedy troupe, the Alawada Troupe.
Moses Olaiya’s band is best known for giving future Juju legend King Sunny Ade his musical start. Ade tutored directly under Olaiya who was a gifted multi-instrumentalist and a main figure in the Nigerian fuji and highlife scene prior to 1965, serving as the Federal Rhythm Dandies’ lead guitarist. Ade would use the momentum from his time with the band to start his own solo career.
1967
Ishola comes to this agreement after a four-year dispute with businessman, Nurudeen Alowonole, with whom Ishola had started his first record label. Accusations of fraud and stolen copyrights had led to a strongly contested court battle and the first landmark ruling about intellectual property and copyrights for musicians in the genre.
At this time, Kasumu Adio, who would later be referred as Haruna Ishola’s closest rival for the title of King of Apala would release his first two albums ‘Iba Iya Mi’ and ‘Ina Nfe Romi Fin’, under British label Decca Records. Adio’s informal rivalry with Ishola would continue for most of their lives.
By this time, Mensah’s The Tempos had become so popular, the band routinely toured across English West Africa and Great Britain, with most of its explorations happening in Lagos. His music also created keen interest in Ghana’s Independence and would spur Nigerian agitations for Independence.
1968
Ayinde Bakare releases ‘Live the Highlife’ as an LP issue. The album ‘Live the HighLife’ is a compendium of music the artist worked on and recorded during his critically acclaimed tour of Great Britain in 1957 with his band The Meranda Orchestra. Known across Yorubaland as Mr. Juju, Bakare had understudied under the fuji great Tunde King, and had left to form his own band in the early 1950’s. Bakare was also the first Juju musician to use an amplified guitar during his performances, and as such the first to truly deviate from traditional Yoruba music.
The reissue of Live The Highlife, was often misconstrued as a highlife album rather than a Juju album because of the success of the much younger genre.
1969
Apala and Juju music re-converge with a financial merger between Haruna Ishola and I.K Dairo. Both at the creative and commercial peaks of their respective careers in Apala and Juju music, the duo join forces to launch STAR Records, the first African record label owned in its entirety by the indigenous artists on its bill. This merger is relevant for many reasons; it happens as the Civil War is ending and the intense hold Highlife and Afro-funk has had on Lagos’s social circuit and is an attempt by the remaining Yoruba influenced musical genres to fight the growing interest in Soul music.
Kasumu Adio would release Late Adesewa Ogunde, his tribute album to the Herbert Adesewa Ogunde, a pioneer of theatre in Nigeria, renowned for his troupe and his elaborate storytelling. Albums of this nature proved successful because they leveraged on the already outsize legend of other prominent Yoruba figures to elicit emotional responses from the audience.
1971
Haruna Ishola releases ‘Oroki Social Club’, his first album under the management of Star Records. The album, in the tradition of Apala music honours the patrons of the Oroki Social Club in Osogbo, Ishola’s most loyal patrons. The album is an instant commercial success, selling 5 million copies and paving the way for Ishola to tour Europe and introduce an international audience to Apala.
1973
After nearly a decade working as a visual artist at the Osogbo Art School, Twins Seven-Seven moves to Lagos looking for a new challenge. As a student of the Osogbo school, Twins Seven-Seven had drawn inspiration from the works of Amos Tutuola and Daniel Fagunwa for his visual work. His background as a dancer for a travelling medicine troupe introduced him to performance art and rhythm. Both influences would be awakened by Ofo and the Black Company, an Afro funk band active in 1969 whose work was heavily influenced by their preoccupation with the mysterious ‘Ofo’ cult of Igbo land.
Emboldened by the success of this band and Nigerians returning to their ancestral religions in the wake of the Civil War, Twins Seven-Seven started a band called The Black Ghost International and released his debut album called ‘In African Music Explosion Vol.1’. The album was a critical success, carving out a new strain of Juju music and returning it to the mainstream conversation about Nigerian music.
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The Nigerian Broadcasting Service is established from the British Owned Radio Diffusion Service, creating radio stations in Kaduna, Ibadan, Lagos, Enugu and Kano. The creation of radio stations would take the monopoly of radio broadcasting from British propagandists and introduce radio for entertainment purposes to Nigerian audiences.
This shift creates a demand for entertainment between news broadcasts and introduces teenage audiences of the era to the music popular in Great Britain and the Americas. American Jazz and Rock and Roll were crossing the pond at this time, driven by Hollywood and musicians like Chuck Berry. As Nigerian broadcasting looked to Britain and Britain looked to America, the trickle effect created the first generation of Nigerian rock and roll converts.
1965
After two years of performing as an informal troupe, the Hykkers earn a gig performing weekly on the television programme Saturday Square, targeted at a youth audience fed on a diet of American Rock ‘n’ Roll and British Funk, the Hykkers sound fed the new aspirations for a western lifestyle and positioned them as teen pop idols.
It takes two years and a pivot to traditional media for the Hykkers and by extension Afro-funk to get a foot indoor because of the overwhelming influence of Highlife music at the time.
1966
Hykkers meet Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and the Koola Lobitos band, who are the default band for Jamaican pop star Jimmie Small as he tours the country. This is the Hykkers first major gig apart from television and the contact with Fela introduces a brass section to the band’s sound, changing its composition and making Afro-Funk more accessible to Nigerian audiences.
1967
Fractions gain prominence after opening for American rock and roll singer Chubby Checker. Checker was at the height of his fame in 67, and just coming off a tour across Europe. It had become customary for African American singers to make pilgrimages to the ‘motherland’ and perform sets in its burgeoning nightlife scene. Checker provided the Fractions with the momentum needed to introduce their gritter Motown influenced sound to Lagos’s audiences and spark a revolution.
Their fame in Lagos was short-lived, by the middle of their breakthrough year, a civil war would end their Lagos domination and see them repatriated to the East.
1967
The Nigerian Civil War brings to a head a year of political strife and forced allegiances. General Ojukwu makes a call for all Nigerians of Eastern descent to return to their home region and support the cause of Biafra. In response, the Nigerian government forces Nigerians of Eastern origin to leave the major cities, Lagos included.
Musicians like Jake Sollo, Rex Lawson and groups like The Hykkers and The Fractions all move to the east and take up residencies in renowned hotels like the Dolphin Cafe Hotel and the Plaza Hotel in Onitsha, performing to smaller and smaller crowds all through the war.
1967
Tony Benson starts ‘Soul Night’ and introduces his new group The Combos to Lagos’s nightlife. It is a full circle event for the younger Benson who was a former performer at the Bobby Benson and his jam session orchestra organized his father and a former bandmate of the Hykkers which he joined in 1963, drawn to their more flexible approach to music.
Tony Benson is not allowed to join his bandmates in the Hykkers and repatriate back to Eastern Nigeria. Afraid for his son’s future and influential enough to have the Nigerian government’s ear, the older Benson is able to sway government power to exempt his son from the forced repatriations that follow General Ojukwu’s calls for secession.
1967
The Postmen, one of the few Afrofunk bands based out of Eastern Nigeria becomes the first group to record an EP, marking the formal introduction of the genre into mainstream music. The EP is made in collaboration with renowned Hollywood director Bruce Beresford, then working with the Nigerian Film Commission in Enugu.
The war would make it impossible for any musicians during that era to record any EP’s and much of the music made during the period would be lost to posterity.
1968
Fractions regroup after being repatriated back to Eastern Nigeria and losing guitarists Cliff Agwaze and Sunny Okosun (yes that Sunny Okosun). They are replaced by Jerry ‘Ify Jerry’ Jiagbogu and Nkem ‘Jake Sollo’ In response to Sir. Victor Olaiya being conscripted into the Nigerian army and given an honorary rank in exchange for his services as the army’s official musician; General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu makes the Fractions the Biafran Armed Forces Entertainment Group.
The position allows the band tour all of the Eastern regions of Biafra largely unhindered during the war, boosting morale among the troops and performing for top Biafran dignitaries. That kind of access would make the Fractions the most famous group in the region by the end of 1968.
1968
Segun Bucknor begins his career as the frontman of the new group, The Soul Assembly. Inspired by the emotional soul of Ray Charles and eager to fill the chasm left by the highlife and Afro-funk musicians chased out of Lagos by the Civil War, and backed by a recording contract from the British record label Polydor, Bucknor arrives Lagos and introduces his new brand of music.
Bucknor’s music fails to reach critical mass because of its derivative sound and the growing influence of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti who at the time is beginning to pioneer his own brand of music called Afro-beat, which fuses contemporary sounds with highlife. Bucknor and Kuti develop a rivalry that persists all through the 60’s and is superseded today only by the feud between Wizkid and Davido.
1969
Ginger Folorunsho Johnson shares a stage with the Rolling Stones in a British variety television event. Rivalled only by the Beatles in 1969, the Rolling Stones were musical royalty, able to demand the best time slots and sell millions of records, Folorunsho was best known for his attempts to document the underground Afro-rock scene dominated by African immigrants in London.
Johnson would leave for Lagos later that year and spend half a decade trying to decode the Lagos music scene, working on a film and releasing significant music in that time.
1969
The Fractions are finally disbanded and forcefully conscripted into active service in the Biafran war. At the tail end of the war and severely lacking active duty soldiers, the Biafran government began to arrest and conscript individuals they had formerly designated as high value into its infantry.
Tony Amadi, former Fractions bandmate would escape and with the help of Roy Chicago, find his way back to Lagos just before the end of the war.
1970
The Funkees play their last first official gig in the town of Nkwerre, even as the Nigerian Army closes around the town. The concert which lasts all night amidst sounds of shelling and deaths is a final act of defiance against the brutish power of the Nigerian Army and a final celebration of the ideals of the Biafra sovereign state.
One of the few Afro-funk bands that were formed in Eastern Nigeria during the war, the Funkees never had a classic line up of artists, with education, war and personal interest ensuring instrumentalists and vocalists were always joining and leaving the group. A few days after the war officially ends and the band mates of the Hykkers are taken into custody before being released to return to Lagos.
1970
Ofo and the Black Company debut at the Afrika Shrine. This was the first Nigerian band to shirk the uniformity of traditional music bands at the time, basing the performances on the mysticism of the ‘Ofo’ cult from Eastern Nigeria, rather than choreography and performative cuteness as was customary at the time. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was also experiencing a spiritual awakening at the time and had opened the Shrine to performers from across the country to come experiment.
Their music would form the basis for Nigerian performance artists like Twin Seven Seven, Quddus Onikeku and Bantu to incorporate contemporary performances into their sound.
1970
American drummer and guitarist, Ginger Baker, formerly of the group Cream would undergo a cross-continental trek to reach Nigeria. His fascination with Nigeria would lead to an informal residency characterised by performance rehearsals and session with the emerging Afro-rock musicians of the era like Jake Sollo, Ify Jerry.
Baker’s jam sessions helped introduce and connect many of the afro-rock artists would go on to create bands together or start bitter rivalries.
1970
The Fractions disintegrate, from pressure from the Nigerian Army, ending the biggest feud of the Afro-funk era. Ify Jerry and Jake Sollo leave the Fractions to join the Hykkers who had risen victorious from the years of the war and were keen to return to Lagos and restart their careers.
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti then with his newly renamed Afrika 70 band would provide instruments and leverage for the group to make their comeback, complete with new performance material.
After-War (1973)
Ofege releases Try and Love, their debut album. Heavily influenced by American blues and R&B and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the young group’s music becomes one of the first albums to gain mainstream acceptance primarily through radio airplay. Defined by its insistence on centring the issues of young Nigerians and distinguished by the relative youth of its bandmates, Ofege would start a revolution of young Nigerians either starting or joining bands to try their hands at earning fame and fortune via music.
1973
Blo, the Nigerian Afro-rock band formed by former band members of the group Salt, Laolu Akins and Mike Odumosu release their debut collaborative project ‘Chapter One’. Riding on the success of the album’s debut singles and the new interest in Nigeria by Western niche musical audiences, the album Chapter One would become an international success and separate Afro-rock from Afrofunk.
It would also give the band the leverage they needed to tour and perform in Warri, Lagos and Enugu.
1973
After being rough-handled by Nigerian soldiers during the war and forced to stay in Easter Nigeria as a symbol of the relative peace and unity the end of the War was supposed to bring, the Funkees leave Nigeria for England. But not before they convince, Jake Sollo, formerly of the Fractions and then the Hykkers to come play lead for their band.
A four-month travel gig would eventually extend into a four-year sojourn in England recording music and immersing themselves in the British Funk scene.
1977
After three years of false starts, the Nigerian government finally hosts the Festac 77 global arts event. More than 15000 artists and creators from 55 countries attend the event and while the general atmosphere is progressive, a feud between the Nigerian government and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti leads to a ‘Counter Festac’ at the New Afrika Shrine, where dignitaries and performers sneak off to perform or hang out at the Shrine.
The Funkees return from their four-year sojourn in the UK to perform at Festac ‘77, and they also perform at the ‘Counter Festac’ signalling their shortlived return to music in the country.
1978
Williams Onyeabor releases Crashes In Love, his debut album rumoured to be the soundtrack for an independent film he made of the same name. Crashes in love would introduce Onyeabor’s futuristic sound to the global house music scene, decades before the scene would gain mass appeal and crown Onyeabor as a cult-figure within the progressive dance and house music scenes.
Onyeabor would disappear from the scene after a few years and a handful of projects, signalling the official end of the Afro-funk movement.
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As an artist and public personality, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti has come to dominate the conversation around Nigerian music. His music, personal skirmishes with government and other artists and his activism form a dense web of truth and propaganda that has continues to grow two decades after his death, centring firmly in conversations about the present and the future of music.
As the son of the ‘Lion of Lisabi’ Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Fela seemed destined to walk the knife’s edge of patriotism and rebellion. Funmilayo was the country’s first suffragette, advocating for women to get the right to vote in the pre-independence government and challenging harmful pre-independence laws. Her advocacy would provide early exposure for Fela and his brothers Olikoye and Beko to the injustices that would inform his music in the coming decades.
1958
But for most of his youth and adolescence, Fela lived in relative privilege. He was largely insulated by his father, Israel Kuti from the increasingly powerful confrontations Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was having with the British colonial government and the complicit local monarchs who enforced the British’s oppressive demands. Her fight against arbitrary taxation in Egbaland, her fight for Independence from the British and her ties with China and the Communist Eastern Bloc created a vortex of social commentary around the Ransome-Kuti family. These confrontations would peak in 1955, the year Fela’s father died from cancer-related complications with the Nigerian government refusing to renew Funmilayo’s passport and the American government denying her a visa to visit the country because she was considered a communist ally. As with many families of privilege, Fela was sent to the United Kingdom to study medicine partly because of their superior education (the first University teaching hospitals wouldn’t be established in Nigeria until the 60’s) and partly because of the rising tensions around Funmilayo.
It is at this point that Fela’s interest in music begins to manifest. Israel Ransome-Kuti, Fela’s father had served for most of his life as a pastor in his local congregation and was renowned for his talent as a pianist. Fela was exposed to classical music and grew a taste for creating music of his own. With his father dead and his mother embroiled in politics; there was little to stop Fela from switching his major from medicine to music at the Trinity College of Music.
That decade saw African American musicians rise into prominence and new genres like jazz, blues and the early iterations of rock and roll gain mass acceptance. After several decades of music from black creators being stifled or branded as intellectually inferior to classical music, the new wave was liberating to creators in more ways than anyone could have predicted. The focus of the music was political and vulgar, the visual images progressive. Moving to the UK exposed Fela to these new sounds and the independence that came with creating and performing original music. In comparison, the strict diet of classical compositions at Trinity felt creatively stifling to Fela, and the college’s insistence on teaching the works of European composers held little interest for the man who at that time was already an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. The only recourse for him was to begin to make music of his own.
1961
At 24, Fela would start the Koola Lobitos, his first musical band. Heavily referencing British Jazz and American pop music of the 50’s, and focused on live music, Fela’s band became a fan favorite in the British music scene, with Fela gaining special attention for his skills as a trumpeter. Fela would work with Koola Lobitos for a year, refining then becoming disillusioned with the music he was making in the United Kingdom. Back in Nigeria, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti had successfully mid-wifed suffrage rights for women alongside the demands for Independence and was the leader of the Egba Women’s Union, which in 1961 was 20,000 women strong. The promise of a new Nigeria seemed too strong to ignore, and Fela and Beko Ransome-Kuti both returned to the country to pursue professional careers in their fields.
At the time of Fela’s return, Independence had brought with it, an outpouring of Ghanaian immigrants. Ghana had gained Independence 3 years before Nigeria, and its position as the first West African nation to gain Independence meant famous Americans visited the nation and brought with them an urgency for local musicians to embrace contemporary western music. By 1963 when Fela returned to Nigeria, the initial hope for Ghana had been replaced with harsh economic policies and raised taxes and a president looking to consolidate his hold on the country. Nkrumah’s strict economic policies had forced many influential Ghanaians to flee to Nigeria. Musicians among the emigrants would bring highlife, a hybrid musical genre that incorporated traditional Ghanaian music with American jazz to Nigeria and start Nigeria’s highlife revolution.
When Fela returned to Nigeria, his original plan was to make a name for himself as a professional jazz musician. He started the Fela Ransome Kuti Quintet, a short-lived experiment that gave way for a revival of the Koola Lobitos with African instrumentalists and vocalists. The new wave was highlife and Fela was fascinated with it enough to and begin to create and perform music true to the genre. Much of the music released during this era was considered lost to the world, until professor Michael E. Veal, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Yale University with the help of Fela’s former manager Benson Idonije would find and restore recorded music from this era. 1963 – 1969 saw Fela experiment with a lot of music, mixing classical with contemporary. His fascination with High-Life would grow within this period, as would his dissatisfaction with the growing interest in pop music trends in the West at time.
1967
1967 would prove a disruptive year for Fela. As national unrest grew in Nigeria, leading to the Nzeogwu coup and the subsequent coup and civil war, many of Fela’s highlife rivals and collaborators would be forced to choose between swearing loyalty to Nigeria and joining the newly seceded Biafra. Most of the musicians of South Eastern origin would choose to secede and make the exodus back to the South, causing a shift away from Highlife and towards Afro-soul and early Afropop. By this time Fela had perfected his own Frankensteinian creation, Afro-beat. Afrobeat took the technicality of classical jazz, the long solos and emphasis on showmanship from classical music and the high energy performance styles of artists like James Brown and fused them into a new monster. The war meant few people were interested in listening to his new sound and while Fela continued to perform during the war, even he became disillusioned with its fallout.
While Fela’s new sound was exciting to his fanbase, it lacked any real bite. That lack of lasting impact in Nigeria manifested in many ways, including a revolving door of leaving instrumentalists and declining record sales. In 1969, he would agree to go on a tour of the US to promote the work Koola Lobitos had become prominent for. One of the goals of the tour was to help Fela cross over into the American music scene in the ways King Sunny Ade would succeed in the 90’s. He had examples to follow, Mariam Makeba and Youssouf N’dour were already enjoying fame on the continent for their activist driven music. But success eluded Fela, as his tour only managed middling success. His time, however, there would lead him to Sandra Isidore, a musician, manager and activist who would convince Fela to embrace activism. She was affiliated to the Black Panther Party, a pro-black civil rights movement that used a mix of force and persuasion to advocate for racial equality. Fela would fall hard for the principles of the movement, change his name from Ransome to Anikulapo to reflect his new ultra-African stance and change the direction of his music to challenge global oppression.
1970
Fela was only beginning to understand this new movement when a falling out with a music promoter would jeopardize his stay in the US. An anonymous tip to the Federal Immigration Service that Fela and his band were performing without a worker’s permit would set the agency on his tail and force him to return to Nigeria in 1970 or risk arrest and deportation. It was coincidental that the Civil War ended at this time, but with Fela’s recent radicalization, he returned distrustful of the new peace.
There was much to distrust about the new peace. The government instituted after the war was military and brutal to dissenting voices. There was a stronger emphasis on centralized power, all things the radicalized Fela saw as an attempt to erase the collective strength of the citizenry. Fela returned eager to challenge this. He renamed his new band Fela and the Nigeria 70 and began to perform the music he had managed to record before leaving Los Angeles in 69. To build a mythos around the new music he was performing, Fela changed the visual imagery of his band, favouring Afrocentric clothing over Westernized ones. He understood the only way his new movement would gather steam was if he was in control of the way the music was distributed. So Fela created his own nightlife spot called the Afro Spot (later renamed as the Afrika Shrine) where he served as the headlining act and controlled the show proceedings, which often including Yoruba religious rituals honouring the Orisa. He would also create the Kalakuta Republic, a recording studio and art commune, open to other social misfits distrustful of the government and looking for a more Afrocentric community.
With the Kalakuta Republic feeding into the Afrika Shrine and vice-versa Fela was able to create an isolated bubble where his music was created and consumed, and that period of isolation from the influence of the government would serve Fela well as he formulated the ideas that would drive his activism and his return to traditional Yoruba worship. Just a year after, Nigeria would experience its first oil boom, transforming the country from a marginally wealthy nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. This sudden wealth would see the nation’s leader Yakubu Gowon abandon previous policies to focus on oil wealth. The country showed promise, but civil rights were being trampled on. Kalakuta Republic was one of the few places where vocal condemnation of the military regime was encouraged and Fela’s music which excellently articulated the growing pains of independence resonated across the continent and drew the attention of the black rights movements in the United States and the United Kingdom. This attention would help turn the republic into a mecca of sorts for supporters and black celebrities looking to make ‘pilgrimage’ to the motherland. Fela would also symbolically declare the Republic a sovereign nation, independent of the government and beholden only to itself.
Fela would release 11 albums from 1971 to 1975, each album becoming increasingly specific to the Nigerian experience and deepening his use of colloquial Nigerian pidgin to describe government excess and citizen complacency. Fela’s music at this time was also characterized by a dissonance towards women’s rights. Women were an integral part of Kalakuta Republic, they cared for him, participated in his musical protests and formed a significant part of his band. But they were also the butt of his jokes and were portrayed as arrogant and complicit in the ongoing corruption in Nigeria. ‘Lady’, released in 1972 as part of the Shakara album, is an enduring example of Fela’s perception of women at the time.
1976
While Mrs Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti had been a prominent force in activism in Yoruba land, her influence was dwarfed by Fela’s outsize personality and enduring legacy. Fela’s reach was already relevant by 1976, the year former President Olusegun Obasanjo would take on power. He had spent the last half decade serving as the primary vocal opposition to the Yakubu Gowon led post-war government and two sudden successive coups not only removed him from power but threw into disarray the relative peace the country had enjoyed. In response to these events, Fela became more militant in his musical activism, actively promoting his earlier proclamations that the Kalakuta Republic was a sovereign nation and taunting the government to act on its promises. That year, he also released his most famous album Zombie, an album so visceral in its critique of government, much of the slang and descriptions in the album’s title song were quickly adopted into colloquial Nigerian pidgin and are still used unironically to this day. Pitchfork Media would retroactively name the album number 90 of the best 100 albums released anywhere in the 1970’s.
Not everyone was pleased with Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s new political leanings. General Olusegun Obasanjo, newly enthroned via a coup, was eager to assert himself as leader of the country. In response to a civil dispute between Fela and a neighbour, the government would allegedly send 1000 troops to the original Kalakuta Republic, physically assault Fela and his followers and throw the venerated Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (then living with her son) out of a second story window. The action itself would create a national uproar and elevate Fela from a minor nuisance to the government to its main opposition figure. The only thing left to do was feud.
1977
After the events of 1976, the government was wary of engaging with Fela in any meaningful way. This would turn out to be a major problem as the government began preparations to host the Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ‘77), a pan-African arts event that celebrated art from the continent. The event was originally to be held in 1975, and was postponed first by the Gowon government and then by the Murtala government. For the Obasanjo government, ensuring the festival held was their attempt to project an image of political stability and signal the end of the military upheavals in the country. Already the government had tried and failed to borrow the statue of Idia from the British Museum and had even offered to rent the artefact for 2 million dollars. When their requests were denied, the government was forced to create a replica for the event.
The government did not invite Fela to participate in the Festival, fearing anti-government propaganda. Fela slighted by the snub and furious that the government was engaging in what many considered a frivolous engagement at the expense of suffering citizens released three albums Stalemate, No Agreement and the classic Sorrow, Tears and Blood, that clearly stated what he thought of his feud with the government and the future of the nation. The Kalakuta Republic had survived a government assault and rallied stronger than ever before.
Using the Republic and Afrika Shrine as a soapbox, Fela spent the entirety of the FESTAC ‘77 celebrations berating the government interspersed with performance sets. 17,000 artists from across the continent and the world had converged on FESTAC town (a new ultra-modern town built specifically for the festival) and while the world’s eyes were on FESTAC, FESTAC’s eyes and ears were on the Afrika Shrine. Fela’s music was new, his message was unfiltered by government interference and the vibe at the Shrine was genuine. Before long, Afrika Shrine became a ‘counter FESTAC’, with attendees and exhibitors at the event shirking their duties to come to the shrine and participate in the impromptu concerts that happened there. Hugh Masekela, The Funkees, Gilberto Gil, Sun Ra and Stevie Wonder, Francois Lougah and Osibisa all performed at the Shrine, giving it international bonafides and angering the Obasanjo government even further.
‘Counter FESTAC’ marked the beginning of Fela’s most influential years as a musician and solidified Afro-beat as a global musical sensation, and the Kalakuta Republic as a creative enclave for musicians looking to revitalize their sound or connect with higher purpose. It also began the worst spate of targeted oppression against the musician and progenitor of the country’s most enduring musical genre.
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Buju emerged one of the major Afropop discoveries of this year with his romantic ballad, “Energy”, getting featured on our BEST NEW MUSIC in February when it was released. His followed up single, “Commander” has been anticipated by fans who heard the snippet of the song shared on social media. Having successfully built the hype worthy of a celebrity release, his latest song is his most pop-forward and barefaced release yet as he interpolates Beenie Man’s “Memories” for a tribute song to his first sexual intercourse experience.
Kayce Keys produces the mid-tempo beat for “Commander”, blending airy percussion with synths, horns, guitar harmonies and a catchy drum riff. Buju rides the breezy instrumentals to deliver his charming set, primed to ease the nerves posing a threat to a great sexual encounter. Though his lyrics, “I Be Your Commander, Your Commander in Chief/ Baby Just Surrender, I’ma Put You at Ease”, and his laid back flow is more geared towards boot knocking, it also serves dancefloor audiences with the groovy baseline and catchy flow.
Stream Buju’s “Commander” below.
Featured Image Credits: Instagram/bujutoyourears
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
Cuppy is a wearer of many hats: Curator, DJ, producer and vocalist. Her latest release, “Abena”, is yet another instance of the great synergy that exists between Ghanian and Nigerian musicians as she brings partners Kwesi Arthur with Ceeza Milli and Shaydee for the romantic single.
The music video David Anthony directs for “Abena” reflects the romantic sentiments heard on the song as Cuppy is seen playing the muse for Ceeza Milli, Shaydee and Kwesi Arthur’s performance. Each of the three featured artists is paired with Cuppy in different scenes that seem inspired by pre-wedding shoots as they sing of their romantic feelings for the song’s star act, Cuppy, while paying tribute to aesthetic African designs.
You can watch the music video for “Abena” below.
Featured Image Credits: YouTube/Cuppy
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
Over his already expansive discography, PatricKxxLee has always worn his heart on his sleeves, speaking every dark truth about his life even if it meant painting himself as a villain. For his new single, “How Many Times Have You Been Here?<333”, he’s a demon slayer, still in search of love.
Over the nearly 3-minute length of the song, PatricKxxLee brags about his savage instincts, glorifying guns, drugs and hot women. The eerie trap beat he produces for “How Many Times Have You Been Here?<333” helps set the menacing ambience for his lyrics, saying “Pussy tight, girl is you Asian/ My bitch is hotter than Satan/ Show me a demon, I slay it/ Uppercut, give him a facelift”. Though this makes for convincing brags, he comes across as sad and struggling when he sings “I’ve been here too many times” for the song’s solemn bridge.
You can stream “How Many Times Have You Been Here?<333” below.
Larry Gaaga has proven to be more than just your average Afropop curator, collaborating with A-list Afropop stars such as 2Baba, D’Banj, Burna Boy and Davido. The Universal Music Group artist just released a new single and adds Wizkid to his catalogue, featuring the Starboy on a romantic new single titled “Low”.
Though Larry Gaaga was last heard contributing a verse on 2Baba assisted “Iworiwo”, he lets Wizkid take all the vocals on “Low” while Blaq Jerzee provides a sultry Afropop beat. Distorted and ambient synth harmonies are paired with percussion harmonies and catchy drum riffs to make for a lightweight mood piece which Wizkid rides to address his love interest. His lyrics, “Baby Keep it On The Low/ Baby Ma Pariwo” are what you would expect from a superstar of Wizkid’s status, more concerned about keeping his business private than being romantic. The music video Moe Musa directs sets Wizkid in a studio, accompanied by two exotic looking women who seem as interested in each other as they are in him. Larry Gaaga also appears in the video, drinking from glass to further highlight the lightweight vibe the song inspires.
You can watch the music video for “Low” by Larry Gaaga and Wizkid below.
Featured Image Credits: YouTube/Larry Gaaga
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
Canadian based artist, Adewolf is a sonic shapeshifter. He has been known to sing to Afropop beat on songs like “New Phone Who Be Dis?” and deliver free-flowing raps on “Dynamite”. But his musical interests are more expansive on his latest single, “Golden”; channelling his ingenious Yoruba dialect and gospel-inspired sounds.
A piano-led beat serves as the backdrop for Adewolf’s emotive performance as he produces melancholic harmonies to highlight the gloom his lyrics attempt to overcome. Rapping“Suicide creeping in my mind/ But I’m too afraid to try to take my life/ So I’m steady on, focused on my grind”, his reflective delivery focuses on his personal experience. But his lyrics paint scenarios that are relatable for any millennial that has ever battled with depression. It makes for a therapeutic listening experience with the warmth of his gospel-inspired sound and his encouraging message.
Stream Adewolf’s “Golden” below.
Featured Image Credits: Soundcloud/adewolfj3
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
Earlier this year, Lörd Isaac released “Milli”, a throwback to the G-funk fueled era of hip-hop. While his contemporary sing-song rap flow and ad-libs stay true to the trap sound of hip-hop in the 21st-century, the taunting and bragging heard in his lyrics paint an image consistent with artists in the genre, “Try’na Reach The Big League”.
The music video for Lörd Isaac’s “Milli” has just been released and it follows the rapper through heavily edited frames that show him rapping on the streets of Nigeria and the UK. Cut from his stage performances and time spent hanging with his family in Nigeria are also featured in the music video which he directs with edit assistance from OJVisuals.
You can watch the music video for Lörd Isaac’s “Milli” below.
Featured Image Credits: YouTube/Lörd Isaac
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
When we began researching for the Roots Vol. 1: Rock, War and Funk exhibition, we did so with the worry that while we might find some material about the history of Nigerian music in the 60’s and 70’s we wouldn’t find anyone who had done the work of parsing the music and the events that inspired it. We shouldn’t have worried. Uchenna Ikonne, a Nigerian music head and authority on vintage Nigerian music had paved the path for us and created a trove of information that has become a primer for many looking into Nigerian music.
Our exhibition wouldn’t have been complete without his insight, and he was gracious enough to talk to us about his inspirations, the music and the path ahead. He is a fascinating read.
NATIVE: When we began research on the history of Nigerian music before the 80’s, we found that much of the comprehensive research done on the subject was attributed to you. The sheer scale of the work you have done is impressive. How did you become so involved in the scene and how did you get started?
U. Ikonne: Thanks so much for noticing! This work is not easy and more often than not it feels incredibly thankless. Most of the time I think I’m breaking my back to do this stuff that absolutely nobody cares about except me. So it means a lot when somebody tells me that they appreciate it, and it gives me that much more motivation to keep trucking!
You know how they say “Write the book you want to read?” That’s literally what it was for me. I was trying to do some research on Nigerian music of the seventies and eighties for a film project I was working on about ten years ago, and there were absolutely no resources available. So I had no choice but to create those resources for myself. And then much to my surprise, other people seemed to be interested in it too… and the rest, history. But I can tell you: If I had been able to walk into the library and find two or three decent books on Nigerian music on the shelves, I probably would have never done any of this.
It was a while before I started to take it seriously, though… before I realized the gravity of the responsibility that comes with documenting and chronicling all this stuff. That was when I found I was able to write “Historian” on my CV without feeling stupid and pretentious.
NATIVE: A few days ago, tweets about contemporary artists being the first to export Nigerian music started a conversation about the erasure of the successes of artists from the ’60s and ’70s. Have you experienced that kind of erasure in the course of your work and how do you think it affects the growth of the Nigerian music industry?
U. Ikonne: Nigerian popular culture is in a perpetual state of erasure. In many ways, we’re like the character in the movie “Memento”; due to anterograde amnesia, he can’t create new memories. His brain essentially reboots every five minutes, so he lives in the neverending present. In Nigeria, our collective cultural memory rarely goes back further than a decade or so at any given moment and everything before that is lost. I mean, think about the nineties Nigerian music scene… who remembers that.
But that’s a big problem. Progress is not necessarily just about making new achievements; it’s about being able to sustain them and continue to build upon them. Yeah, you created a successful business, good for you. But can you keep it going long enough to pass it on to your kids so they can expand the business and pass it on to their kids so that they can expand it more and pass it on to their kids? That’s something you don’t see a lot of in Nigeria: that transgenerational progress. That’s how you climb from 1 to 2, pass the baton to the next person who goes from 2 to 3, the next jumps from 3 to 4, and so on. For us, the first person goes from 1 to 2. And then the next person starts from 1 again and gets to 2. And then the next person might hustle hard and get from 1 to 2 to 3 and even hit 4 all on their own sweat. But then the next person after them? 1 to 2… into infinity. And that affects the music business because we’re constantly starting over from scratch and feeling happy when we get to 2.
NATIVE: I know this is a little tangential, but how do you think your own personal experiences as a researcher and documentarian affect your work?
U. Ikonne: Oh yes. My personal experience–especially as I get older–has radically shifted the way I think about concepts like time, memory, history, antiquity and storytelling. And that affects the way I work. And then the work, in turn, shapes the way I view life in general.
NATIVE: While there hasn’t been a proper Afro-rock scene in Nigeria since the ’80s, traditional rock music has thrived here, with communities and scene rising out of Lagos, Kaduna, Abuja, and Jos. Why do you think this schism happened, and in what ways do you think the rockers of today can connect with Nigeria’s afro-rock history?
U. Ikonne: Well, I guess one of the things that happened to afro-rock in Nigeria was Fela sort of displaced it. Fela was actually quite inspired by the afro-rock scene in the early days and regarded the rock bands as fellow travelers who shared his mission to shake up the Nigerian music scene and raise it to international standards. But the thing about the afro-rock groups is that they were originally inspired by American and British rock, and to an extent, they really based their image on that kind of countercultural rebel posturing. But Fela was not just posturing; he was living that rebel life IRL. He was trading blows with the police and the army, getting thrown in jail, then coming out and making a record about the whole thing. Somehow it just made him seem more “real” in that way, and he soon ate up a large portion of the afro-rock audience.
What remaining market share afro-rock had was eaten by juju, which had previously been an old-fashioned kind of music–men wearing ‘filas’ and sitting on stools while they played the accordion. Then you got a new generation of young juju players: King Sunny Ade, Ebenezer Obey, Dele Abiodun, Prince Adekunle who started appropriating the imagery and apparatus of afro-rock. They dressed like rockers and used rock instruments like the electric guitar, bass, and keyboards, drum sets. By combining the modern presentation of rock with the juju foundation that the audience already knew and loved, they sort of rendered afro-rock obsolete by the mid-seventies. That is, in the southwest anyway. Bands in the east kept on rocking before they finally ran out of gas in the eighties
I’ve long wanted to see a return of rock in Nigeria. There have been various groups that have tried over the years but I just haven’t been feeling most of them. I’ve always felt one of the problems is that they just have bad role models because even in the west, rock has been dying a slow death for the last two decades. The afro-rockers of the seventies were inspired by Cream, Hendrix, Santana, Deep Purple… real balls-out hardcore shit. But what do the guys coming up in the 2000s have to look up to? Coldplay? Imagine Dragons? Nothing against those bands, of course, but… come on.
I’ve been encouraged, though: some of these recent Nigerian bands at least are starting showing the potential to rock hard, and I’ve been thinking about maybe trying to produce some of them. How can they connect with the afro-rock legacy? Well… we just have to expose them to it. I think The Native is in a position to be a great portal for that because you guys have the ear of the youth in a way not many others do.
NATIVE: Why do you think there has been so few attempts to catalog and document the history of Nigerian music from the Independence era forward?
U. Ikonne: Nobody cares, mostly. Or maybe I should say nobody cares enough. You always hear people say “We don’t have a maintenance culture in Nigeria.” And it’s true, but it doesn’t pertain only to buildings and roads and such. We don’t have it culturally either. People are fixated with the present moment but that’s just because they don’t realize that contemplating the past and the future are necessary to fully appreciate the full picture of our experience.
Think about how we listen to music: When you listen to a simple melody, you are only hearing one note at a time. And each individual note has no implicit melodic quality, right? It’s just a sound… a noise. But when notes are heard in sequence, as we hear each new note we process it in relation to the note we heard before it and the note we are anticipating to hear after it. We’re constantly interleaving the sound we hear in the present with the sound we heard in the past, and that we will hear in the future. And that’s how a bunch of individual notes become music. And that’s the way it is with culture–or at least how it should be. Without the past and the future, the present has no real meaning, no real resonance. Did I answer the question? Why are people not documenting and cataloging? I don’t know…. I guess maybe because there’s no money to be made doing it? lol.
NATIVE: What were the biggest challenges you experienced during your years of researching Nigeria’s first ‘golden’ age?
U. Ikonne: Without a doubt, the biggest challenge is even gaining access to music. As we’ve already established, we don’t have maintenance culture. Which means we don’t have a preservation culture either. There’s no library you can go to and find the entire history of Nigerian music neatly stacked and cataloged on the shelves. Most of the record labels that produced the music are gone, and even for the ones that still exist in some form, they don’t have the music. They didn’t keep the master tapes. EMI, which was probably the most prolific of music labels in the seventies and eighties, in the nineties they actually hired a dump truck to cart away their entire library of tapes and incinerate them. Decca, the second biggest label of that era, they dubbed over their tapes. We’re talking about erasure? They literally erased thirty years of music, just like that! So that’s the toughest thing, actually finding the music because so much of it has been lost or deliberately destroyed.
Thank God for vinyl, though. Most of the records still survive because there’s got to be at least a handful of manufactured vinyl copies still out there. Finding them and acquiring them takes a tremendous investment of time, energy and money, but you always hold out hope that the records are still somewhere out there and you’ll find them eventually, even if it means digging through a landfill where they were dumped thirty years ago. But that’s the beauty of vinyl as a medium; it has durability and permanence. As a result, it’s actually easier to research music made in the vinyl era–roughly 1960 to 1993–than it is for music made before or after.
Prior to vinyl, we used records made of shellac and they were extremely fragile. Vinyl is tough. When they first introduced vinyl records in Nigeria, to convince people to make the change (and invest in buying new record players) the head of EMI would drive his car over a vinyl record to demonstrate the resilience of the format. Shellac records? They shattered into pieces if you looked at them too hard. And that’s why so much pre-1960 music is lost to us forever–all the copies of the records broke, and the record companies didn’t keep the tapes.
Music from the nineties is just as lost because the primary format was cassette tape, and people dubbed over the tapes. The compact disc was not much better. I think we’re in even more danger to lose music today now that we’re dealing almost exclusively with digital: A lot of popular music doesn’t even exist in any physical context! People listen to music on their phones, and eventually, everybody deletes it for hard drive space, if they ever actually saved it at all. All the blog links expire. The “master tape” is a wav file on somebody’s laptop, and what happens when that laptop gets stolen or crashes? A lot of music from this era is going be completely gone in a few years.
NATIVE: In what ways do you think music from this era has influenced contemporary music?
U. Ikonne: I don’t think there’s been that much direct influence on contemporary music because there hasn’t been much dialogue between the generations in that way. Sure, you get someone like Flavour who frequently resuscitates classic song forms or that collaboration 2Baba did with Victor Olaiya a few years ago. But even then, I feel those examples are a bit too superficial, a bit too over-reverent. Almost like a kind of musical virtue-signaling: “Look at me, I’m paying tribute to my elders! Aren’t I a good boy? Not like these other disrespectful youths!” The goal of those records is not to create a hot track, but to pay obeisance. Which is not a bad thing, I guess… but not particularly helpful when you want to facilitate a dynamic musical conversation.
I’ve seen people do a lot of mental gymnastics to create those bridges of influence, though. Like all the work some critics were doing to coronate WIzkid as the heir to the afrobeat legacy. I’m not hearing it. “Listen to ‘Ojuelegba’! That is the continuation of afrobeat!” I’m like, “Is it? I don’t hear it, bro.” But mind you, there’s no reason why contemporary artists have to take inspiration from the past. Obviously they are doing quite well without it. But it would be nice if they did. It might make the texture of their work all the richer.
But the first step is to make people in this generation aware of the music of the past to begin with. Yeah, people know all the big, mainstream names like Fela, KSA, Obey, Christy Essien-Igbokwe, Shina Peters, Osadebe etc. But there was so, so, so, so, SO much more going on back then beyond just that.
NATIVE: Do you see any parallels between the music being created by this generation of artists and artists of the ’60s and ‘7os?
U. Ikonne: To some degree, yeah. There’s a similarity in terms of the swagger, the celebration of youth, sex, style, glamour, and the disregard for the concerns of their elders. That’s the thing a lot of people don’t realize about the music of our parents (and grandparents): We’re so used to viewing them as these hoary, forbidding and conservative authority figures that it’s hard to imagine that they weren’t born with grey hair, that they were once young and rebellious themselves.
And it doesn’t help that most Nigerian parents tend to be reluctant to have honest conversations with their kids about their own life experiences. It’s even a challenge when I try to interview old musicians about their younger days because they edit their histories to match their current values: “Oh, we were very responsible boys. We did not smoke, we did not drink, we did not do drugs or chase girls. We just played our songs and then we went to bed by 9 pm. And then we got up the next morning and went to church.” Come on, man! I’ve seen the pics of what you guys were up to then! I know you were balling out of control!
That’s the reason I don’t really like when people use terms like “golden oldies” to describe vintage music. Because it evokes the image that it’s music made by and for old people. Nah, man… the music maybe be old now but it was made by kids. Kids with lives and thoughts and feelings that were not too different from those of kids today.
NATIVE: NativeMag, the organization I work with is one of a handful of West African media companies that have risen out of the need to document the ‘alte’ movement; in what ways do you think these new gen curators can better document the current movement and preserve it for future generations?
U. Ikonne: Focus on developing, acquiring and archiving audiovisual materials. That’s the fatal flaw I’ve encountered when it comes to curating music of past generations. When I first got into this, I originally wanted to make a documentary about the pop music of the seventies but I ended up having to abandon the project because it was impossible to obtain the archival video. I had interviewed a lot of survivors of the scene but I didn’t want it to one of those docs that are composed entirely of talking head shots of old people reminiscing about their youth. I wanted to be able to cut away to a period film showing them in their prime, really communicating that in-the-moment fire and funk and fun… I can talk all day about those bands, I can write a whole book about them, even play you the music. But in terms of conveying their full impact, none of that compares to being able to show you an eight-minute video clip of them actually playing. But it’s not possible because most of their performances were not filmed.
A lot of bands did perform on tv quite a bit but the tv stations eventually dubbed over the tapes or burned them. Or in some cases, they just resisted being documented. There’s a story about how some indie filmmaker traveled from America to try to make a documentary about Fela and Fela demanded something like $100,000 for the rights to film him. This was back in the eighties when a hundred stacks was a lot of money for an indie filmmaker, and he didn’t have it, of course… so the doc never happened. Osadebe had similar demands, and as a result, there is very little extant video evidence of his performance. Some artists, we don’t even have photos of them.
That doesn’t seem like a huge problem in this modern-day smartphone ecosystem where everybody’s constantly snapping and videoing everything with their mobiles. But people are constantly deleting stuff too. You need to hold on to that material. Back it up and back up the backups. And I don’t mean just candid shots and videos… invest in more high-quality, stylized and structured photoshoots and documentaries. It seems to me that many artists in the movement like Odunsi and Santi are very consciously paying attention to their visual iconography anyway, and that’s really a good thing.
But just save everything, really. Voice notes, demos, photo outtakes, invoices, concert tickets an programs, artist merchandise, magazines, archive web pages. Download videos from YouTube and save them. You’re trying to preserve a 360-degree picture of the culture and all the people who participate in it. And history starts today.
NATIVE: In what ways do you think the industry will evolve now that current interest in Nigerian music is bringing back all the international music labels that funded the primary wave of post-independence music?
U. Ikonne: That’s hard to say. It completely depends on the parties involved. While I think it’s fantastic that the wider world is showing interest in contemporary Nigerian pop, I don’t have a ton of faith in the international corporations’ ability to market it properly. They already effectively botched the efforts to sell Wizkid and Davido to the world and really… that entire industry is crumbling day by day as is.
It’s important to remember that the global preponderance of Nigerian music happened not because of the international labels but in spite of them. They never had any interest in us before but thanks to the internet we got the music out there. It was all because of the internet that you were able to go to YouTube and see video after video of Filipino teenagers singing and dancing to 2Face’s “African Queen” or girls in Trinidad winning to D’Banj. The industry didn’t make that happen. The internet has given us an avenue to disseminate our music on our own terms, and we should concentrate on that. Of course, one advantage the traditional music labels still hold is their deep purses, and we could definitely benefit from the promotional dollars. But there’s got to be a way to arrive at an arrangement where they provide the finance and let us retain control of the product presentation.
NATIVE: Who is Uchenna Ikonne, outside of music history?
U. Ikonne: Just a regular guy trying his best to be an honest man and a good writer. Or a good man and an honest writer. Either one will do.
In just three years, Odunsi The Engine has gone from college dropout bedroom-producer, to The Boy who can do no wrong. Now, he’s preparing for the next act.
Words: Seni Saraki
Photography: Shaheen Soofi
Creative Direction + Styling: VIVENDII
Assistant: Morinsola H-O
MUA: Adewojumi Aderemi
Bowo has always embraced the darkness.
Ever since he was an early teen, Odunsi (his family name by which he is most commonly known now) has felt alone. He doesn’t state it to draw sympathy, but it’s just the fact of the matter.
He grew up with his parents and four siblings – two brothers and two sisters. He credits his older brother with introducing him to R&B, by playing him a classic Donnell Jones record. It was a loving household, and he had a good relationship with his siblings, but during his teens he felt more alone than ever. “It felt like my older siblings were too old for me, and that my younger brother was too young for me. That’s when I really became who I am today.”
Odunsi would hole himself away for a year – not by choice, but due to leaving his first high school – and sneak into his mum’s room every day when she went to work, to make beats on her computer. Gifted a FruityLoops crack by the keyboardist at his local church, and Odunsi would go on to spend every available hour of freedom honing his craft. He says that, at a point, he’s sure his mum knew he was nicking her computer, but she let it slide since he wasn’t getting into trouble anymore.
Although he previously interned at studios frequented by LOS and DRB – two groups that were seen as the leaders of the revolution in Nigerian music at the time – Odunsi The Engine never saw himself as an artist.
“At the time, I was in awe. These guys were the most talented people I had seen in real life.”
The formation of beats had always intrigued him more than anything. As the Limewire generation graduated to the storied halls of Soundcloud, Odunsi began to find more kids just like him. In late 2015, after dropping out of school for the last time, Odunsi began exchanging messages with a man he is proud to call his friend and peer today: Santi. Although they are now regarded as part of the same class, Odunsi looked to Santi as an elder brother figure, at the time. Having developed a cult underground following amongst the youth population in Lagos, during his days as rapper Ozzy B, Santi’s rager fanbase only continues to grow.
“I remember Santi had tweeted one day, that he was looking for alternative beats, and someone recommended me to him.” Odunsi considered this a pivotal moment in his artistic journey. “At this point, I was only making beats for Santi – no one else. We were working on this project called The Valleys. It was very hip-hop and very dark. Then suddenly one day, Santi called me to tell me he was scrapping it and changing the direction of the tape. He sent some samples, and from that, I made ‘Steal A Dime’.”
This was Odunsi’s first real breakthrough as a producer, and his debut as a de-facto member of the Monster Boyz – the collection of creatives that has become Santi’s braintrust. Following this, came his “Star Is Born” moment: the scene-stealing verse on his next Santi collaboration, “Gangsta Fear.” This was only his third ever vocal performance, after dropping two songs on Souncloud to minimal fanfare. His verse, crystallised by the underground Lagos community, was monumental in the life of a young Odunsi. It felt like he had arrived.
Odunsi is late.
Having returned home after sound-check earlier in the day, he’s rushing to get back to the storied London venue The Garage. Just three years on from releasing “Vibrate” – a bouncy hip hop infused cut – Odunsi is headlining a sold-out 600 capacity venue in North London. He’s in a small apartment close to the venue, set up strategically by his manager Kimani Moore, to negate any possible mishaps. Sifting through looks for the night with his stylist Josephine, he can’t hide his excitement when the ‘fit he really wants to wear finally gets delivered, just hours before the show. “Mowalola just dropped this off,” he says, beckoning me to look at the custom ensemble he plans to wear to close the show. Whilst they’re not exactly the best of friends, it serves as an example of the close-knit, cross-code community that young Nigerian creatives have formed between themselves.
Odunsi has just come off a three-city U.K. tour, with London being the final stop. It’s a far cry from the boy who used to steal his mum’s laptop just to make beats. But this has been life for The Engine since he dropped his debut album, rare. Despite dropping out of school, Odunsi has always been a diligent student of the game, and this comes through tenfold on his first studio album, which he released independently, despite some public confusion behind his situation with Universal Music Nigeria – he merely signed a singles deal with them, Bowo confirms.
rare. is a blast from the past. Inspired by the Funk music he heard around the house, and then later on by The Lighthouse Family, it is a concise snapshot into the life of a rising star. He says he thought the sound would take some getting used to, as it was extremely different to his output beforehand.
“I knew I was taking a risk with the sound of the album. That’s why I spent the whole year killing features and collaborations,” he explains, speaking of his work on M.I.’s generation-bridging album Rendezvous, and the cult-classic single “Alté Cruise”.Producing the majority of the album himself, it gave Odunsi the freedom to create freely without any judgment or interference.
This leap of faith he took in himself, was manifesting into everything he ever fantasised about, alone in his room. He describes the full circle moment of returning to Accra for his album release party, years after dropping out of university there, as “a literal dream”. Everything was falling into place for The Engine, and it was all because he decided to do things his way. But the increased scrutiny, and subsequent pressure, slowly seeps into his designer armour.
Odunsi is sitting in an apartment in West London, having just returned from another gruelling 8-hour production session. It’s the weekend, but he barely knows it. He has spent the week in and out of writing labs and production sessions – some for his own music, but mostly for other people.
“I came up as a producer first, so this isn’t weird for me. Working with these writers and producers that have worked with Ed Sheeran, Young Thug, Justin Bieber …everyone. It’s crazy to be here.” He sounds content, but not exactly over the moon, as one might expect him to be. Odunsi has been in England for just over a month, and he loves it. He visits the thrift shop almost every week, and is enjoying trying out new iterations of his favourite meals – he’s currently hooked on Vapiano. However, since he’s been away, the mood back home has changed considerably.
At the end of 2018, Odunsi The Engine was the poster boy for the Alté movement. Alongside Santi, he was seen to be ushering in a new generation of Nigerian creatives who did things their own way, or no way. Whilst this was first greeted with admiration and groundswell support, the bigger it has become, the more pushback it has received from those determined to to keep the status quo.
Al Gore’s internet is a strange place. You can ignore something for so long, but the minute you decide to just “check it out”, it suddenly becomes inescapable from then on. Odunsi admits he rarely entertains social media commentary about his appearance or his music, but says the comments following the completion of his U.K. tour were slightly more barbed than usual. “I know it had nothing to do with my outfits, or my music,” he says, almost sharing the bitter taste those who put him down must have. “It’s just that these people have finally realised that these kids can actually do something. And it’s not just me – Tay, Donli, Santi, everyone. They’re scared.” He’s smiling now, almost relishing the fear they’re putting into the hearts of the old guard. He may be right, but this isn’t the first cultural revolution we’ve seen. And being a student himself, he remembers:
“LOS and DRB did what they did, so we could get here. Then even when Santi was Ozzy, he did what he did, so we could get here. Now all of us are coming together. There’s this new generation of fans that don’t even know Santi put me on. They don’t even know he was Ozzy B. And there’s another generation that Santi is bringing to the future, introducing them to us.” It almost sounds like an Avengers Assemble type situation, but he’s right. This time, it does feel different. And that’s not a slight at any revolution before them, but more an indication of changing times. The barriers that streaming has broken down are none more apparent than in Nigeria. Despite constantly being reminded of the low penetration that Apple Music (the only major streaming platform set up in the country) has made in the market, music is still travelling faster and more freely than ever before. Odunsi describes going to Port Harcourt for a university show, before the album was released, and being amazed they knew his songs so well. As an independent artist, he hadn’t made a concerted effort to crack the market yet, but they were in the loop. Not only this, but he hilariously describes how they asked him why he didn’t “bring” Santi and Lady Donli. The revolution was spreading, but still, Odunsi can’t shake the hurt.
Despite spending the weeks following his tour holed up in the studio, he was yet to start work on his sophomore album, one he thinks will define him forever. He doesn’t want to rush it, but is slightly concerned at the time it is taking to rediscover his mojo.
“This will be my most honest piece of work, so I can’t rush it. I need to live a bit more. Because of the clear sonic direction on rare. I was able to write songs without really opening up on what was happening in my life. This one will be different. I have to embrace the darkness, the opps. Things have changed, but some things are still the same.”
Throughout our conversation, Odunsi rarely shows any signs of true sadness. Vulnerability, yes – he needs it to be who he is. But rarely does a dark cloud completely consume him.
Odunsi went home shortly before flying to London. He wanted to visit his mum before he left, but the trip shook something inside of him. “She asked me why girls were dancing on me in my video, but that was it. Nothing was different,” he says, staring blankly into space. Despite everything he had accomplished up until this point, he laments that everything back home was still more or less the same. “In other countries, an artist on the same level as me would already be able to buy their mum a new house or a car or something. Look at America, once a rapper blows up, a year later they’re good.” He emphasises the “good” to indicate he’s talking about their financial situation. Money isn’t something Odunsi primarily concerns himself about, but as he approaches his 23rd birthday, he feels more responsibility to provide for those around him.
And he’s embracing this responsibility, even when it comes to his relationship with his peers and the industry as a whole.
“I want to understand how to move with my gift. Santi is a practical leader, he’s very methodical. Like Santi will call a meeting and say ‘yo guys, this is how we’re moving this year’ and everyone listens. I’ve never been that person. I kind of just go out there and try to lay my out blueprint, that you can follow if you want.”
Part of this blueprint, is bringing his shade of darkness to the Pop music landscape in the country. Traditionally looked down upon, Odunsi wants to change the perception of what we hear on the radio and on the dance-floor. As a producer at heart, he’s quick to draw inspirations from the records most may see as vapid. He talks about the deep connotations behind street-hits like Harrysong’s “Reggae Blues”, whilst hitting the woah to a Solange and Playboi Carti collaboration.
Odunsi spent the year leading up to his album testing the waters. In the dark of the night, he started an anonymous Soundcloud page under the alias “friday cruise.” Throughout this year, he would preview singles, references, riffs and mumblings to his few dedicated fans that unearthed the hidden gem. It became vital outlet for him to dip his toe in and read the room – and one that even his peers utilised, as the Iwar brothers both released loosies on cruise. “friday cruise” also served as the birth of the R&B Odunsi we see on “Tipsy”, and one he says we will be saying a lot more in the future. “I want to make the best pop music coming out of Nigeria, whilst redefining what Nigerian pop music even is. I want to bring my darkness to Pop.”
***
Odunsi’s flight is tomorrow, and he’s finally ready to leave London. His demeanour has changed significantly from the Boy from Magodo, with the bleached-blonde hair and wide smile. He’s going out more, religiously drenched in black. Iask him if he thinks he’s changed since rare. and he answers frightening honestly.
“Before the album, I was so happy with my fanbase. Dropping songs and doing shows, and knowing they loved me and I loved them. But now, after seeing all I’ve seen, I need to be the greatest. Whatever that means.”
He pauses for a moment, packing the duffel bag he originally came with, into fresh suitcase of new things.
“I need to start the second album. It’s time now.”
Teni broke the mould and beat the odds, now she’s just having fun with it.
Words: Joey Akan
Photography: TSE
Styling: VIVENDII
Assistant: Fadekemi Tejuoso
Beside me is the most agitated fan in Lagos. It’s the last Friday of the year, and we’re at Muri Okunola Park for the third edition of NATIVELAND. The most guerrilla of NATIVELANDs yet; tickets only went on sale last weekend, and the infamously-guarded line-up was revealed just 48 hours ago. However, somehow, there are over 6,000 ragers here, ready for the last turn up of the year. We’re well into the night, and Pretty Boy D-O is running through his critically-acclaimed EP. As the crowd chants along to “Chop Elbow”, the young girl next to me is still fidgeting, constantly checking the lock-screen of her phone, I assume to keep track of the time. Her friends assure her that she will be fine, though she seems unconvinced. My curiosity got the best of me. “My curfew is at midnight and I’m travelling tomorrow,” she tells me. “If I don’t see Teni today, I won’t see her till next year”
Love is the dominant sentiment that has catapulted 25-year-old Teniola Apata to success. In a country where actual record sales figures and streams are seldom disclosed, fan love is one of the strongest metrics to measure the impact of an artist. A great indicator of that is found in public spaces like NATIVELAND, where the reaction to the music is raw, unfiltered and instant. Teni has this in abundance. Through five short minutes, she crammed in a performance where the crowd screamed her songs, performed abridged acapella versions with her, and begged for more as she signed out with the the customary, “Thank you, I love you!”
Over the past three Decembers, Lagos has cemented itself as the hub of African pop music, transforming itself into a carnival city of live music. Almost every day from the first week of the month, there are music events and showcases lined up throughout the city. Every corner holds something new; a young upstart with a niche fanbase hosting a an intimate concert, a veteran performer, putting up an event to make retirement a little bit rosier, big corporations celebrating a profitable year with themed luxury bashes, pop stars shutting down streets with traffic from their grand jamboree.
It’s the perfect revellers’ heaven. Only a few elite artists are influential enough to be booked for performances at ‘all’ these events. Teni joined that league in 2018. At the start of the year, she was only a promising upstart with a flair for comedy, who had a decent single, “Fargin”. By December, things had changed drastically. She had become a juggernaut. On most days, she shuffled through concerts, dropping unique performances, and picking up cheques. On one particular night, she pulled off four events in Lagos, and made a 130 km road trip in the dead of the night to Ibadan, where a crowd of over 1000 people were gathered for a concert, waiting for her to show up. She arrived in the early hours and went straight to the stage where her weary fans found new strength to turn up.
***
Teni is having lunch.
We’re at the cover shoot, taking a break between two looks, and Teni is posted up in the corner of the studio, digging into a rice and chicken combo box, sneaking glances at her iPhone between bites. Bags and boxes – her accoutrements for the photoshoot – are her closest companions. To her far right, perched by a clothes rack, are Odunsi The Engine and BOJ – her colleagues turned friends who came to show support; but Teni opts for pre-game solitude.
At the other end of the small studio, photographer Thompson Ekong (TSE) pensively paces the set, audibly contemplating which artistic direction to take the shoot that is to come, flanked by Jimmy Vivendii, the stylist for the day. Camera in hand, TSE closes in on the backdrop. Beckoning to two assistants to bring the ladder in for some last minute adjustments, TSE fiddles with the wiring of the projector, distorting the plain backdrop with a visual of a burning flame.
Teni is done. Now changed into her second outfit, she takes centre stage and, just like all the comedic clips that litter her social media, she begins to dominate the room with her humour. First she hugs the flames, calling out the opps who are “blocking her fire.” The room laughs. Next she demands for music to be played, then quickly calls for it to be reduced, accommodating requests for videos of her to be made. Teni looks into the camera, preps herself, and lets the words fly: “My name is Teni, I am going for everything I have ever dreamt of…”
Teni strikes you as someone who has been waiting for this moment her entire life. But, by convention, this moment isn’t meant to be happening. Teni isn’t pop star material, but here we are, a room full of people, everyone playing a role to make her shine the brightest. Gender stereotypes in the music industry stipulates that the quintessential female pop star has to tick a few boxes: ooze “sexiness” – whatever that means and possess palpable sensuality – not sure who’s judging. In many ways she’s the opposite of all the archaic stereotypes, but you wouldn’t know it, when you watch her serenading men and women alike at her live shows.
Teni defies all the rules.
And it is this defiance that scares the industry. It is what prompted Nigerian journalist Osagie Alonge to dismiss Teni out of hand, and straight into a writers’ room, as she does not have “the look”.The argument, that many share but few have publicly aired, is that conformism is the only way to guarantee success. This may have been true of the early-mid 2010s, when all the top names in the industry simply followed a seasonal recipe for hit-making, but with 2018 came the long-awaited confirmation that Nigerian music was at last diversifying. Now, success is no longer dictated by who can best replicate the dominant sound of the moment – talent has never been so defining.
The day that followed Osagz’s moot assessment of Teni’s future, was even more chaotic than the episode itself. Tweeters bashed the tabloid audio-piece, specifically its most notorious voice Osagz, whose gauche comments on Teni’s appearance were joined by an unsolicited exposé of Wizkid’s personal affairs. Wizkid spoke up, threatening Osagz with lawsuits, andWizkid FC pulled up to the Pulse HQ. Teni, on the other hand, handled the situation with much more composure.
“That is his opinion. How can I judge a man for his opinion? Hey, this man is not going to kill me, he’s just saying what he thinks about you and is that a crime?” Teni challenges me. In truth, Osagz’s words weren’t particularly groundbreaking, he simply made the mistake of loudly asserting a common belief that women can only succeed at one thing, rooted in the assumption that the system hasn’t progressed. It was bothersome, but it didn’t bother Teni. She refuses to let this analysis weigh her down; “Success is the best revenge,” she says with a smile.
“Everybody used to say ‘Teni you have to look like this, you have to do this.’ I needed to prove to a lot of people – not the naysayers, – but the young girls like myself, you can be yourself and win.”
Any millennial who grew up in Nigeria can tell you that the sparse collection of female musicians who have risen to high acclaim all tick boxes prescribed by the androcentric music industry. Artists who veered from the norm have, for the most part, been booted out. These days, rising female acts are encourage to emulate the course of the Number One African Bad Girl, the uncontested female lead for almost a decade now.
But Teni isn’t trying to emulate Tiwa Savage, Teni isn’t trying to emulate anyone. She can’t -the industry has been void of any aspirational female figures to whom Teni could relate. Growing up, there were no plus-size female singers wearing buba and shokoto, styled with Air Max 97s and a bright pink durag, performing explicit songs about sexual affairs. When she was starting out, there were no comedic musicians who fearlessly flaunted the kind of wackiness that is only reserved for close companions, on social media for their fans to join in the cruise. There has never been anyone as uninhibited and unconventional as Teni, but thanks to Teni there definitely will be in the years to come. She has become the role model she was missing.
“I feel very grateful, but I feel like I have so much more to do,” She tells me as we sit to talk. “I feel like a whole generation is depending on me to break certain stereotypes and to open certain doors, especially for the female child, not only in this country, but the African mentality.”
Teni was destined for stardom, destined to inspire the generations that follow her, from as early as two years old. Born in 1993, to Nigerian civil war hero and retired Nigerian Army Brigadier-General, S. O. Apata, Teni was only two years old when her father was assassinated, on January 8, 1995.
“I always watch my father’s funeral,” she tells me very calmy. “It reminds me I won’t be here forever. I need to make sure that every day is productive. I have to follow my dreams and live my life to the fullest by my own terms and in my own way. Not what Joey or my mum wants me to do, but what Teni wants to do. My father was a fearless man; a man that used to chase armed robbers, very brave, a philanthropist. But he’s was laying there, breathless, and I’m like ‘fuck! That’s going to be me one day and I cannot escape this.’ I might as well just face my dreams squarely and say ‘you know what;? Teni is going to do what Teni wants to do regardless.”
Teni’s mortality is always with her. She’s made peace with the truth of life; Nothing is assured and tomorrow is never given. She’s raised it up a few times in our conversation. It’s a daily reminder for her that life is unpredictable, and no one makes it out alive. This knowledge of our limited time on earth, inspires her to live more, do more, sing more, prank her friends more, and spread joy via every channel and platform. All of this is surreal for her. She’s unconventional and rambunctious. Her hair never leaves the comfort of her signature durag. This current good run was a prayer and a distant dream. But sitting in this parking lot, she knows it real. Her dreams came home. She made it.
Through it all, Teni’s father remains her greatest inspiration for her work ethic and the oracle of her success, thanks to his decades-old prophesy into her life and that of her elder sister, Niniola.
“I always ask my sister, ‘how come both of us are in this music industry and doing well?’ I tell her, I just think God is pitying daddy o! I’m not even joking because my father always used to say his children would be superstars. When his friends come around, he has this camcorder, he’ll tell Nini to come and dance for his friends and she would dance and entertain them and ’he used to tell them, ‘she’s going to be a superstar, my children are going to be superstars’” she recalls.
Niniola’s superstar status came first. In 2015, she broke through the Nigerian music scene, with the little-explored genre of House music. Prior to this venture, Niniola was working full-time at their family school business, and guess who encouraged her to quit? Teni. Their family was livid.
“They were all calling me and saying, ‘You’re a bad person, how can you tell her to quit?’ Teni remembers. “It’s because they knew that Nini is good with administration – telling people what to do. But I grew up listening to Nini sing.” So, after a few conversations with her baby sister, Niniola called a family meeting and left the business. Her first single “Soke” became a hit, as has everything after.
Niniola’s success eased the blow for Teni’s parents when she finally decided to join her sister in music. For all the talk about how technology and information has influenced Africans to reconstruct their value systems, in Nigeria, much of the older generation still believe in traditional job security, rather than creative endeavours. This was rampant in the 80s and 90s. Music especially was regarded as the profession of choice for those with no options left. Parents wanted their kids to secure an education and work through corporate jobs. It’s a conventional and stable path, one that almost ensures a regular dignified life. These days, a lot of that has changed, but not without resistance.
“Look at Nini now, Nini paved the way for me because when Nini did it, my parents didn’t believe it was possible. Although they still didn’t want me to do it, they know that I’m a stubborn goat. They always call me a stubborn goat and they knew I was still going to do what I wanted to do.“
Now that “stubborn goat” is well on her way to being The GOAT.
After her whirlwind 2018, Teni is working on her debut project, to capitalise on her current momentum. This is the first night of recording and her to-do list, growing by the minute, is terrifyingly lengthy. On Instagram, one of her favourite utterances is “That’s how star do.” Well, stars also face burnout and pressure from the weight of expectations. She admits that she’s resigned herself to the rigours of her success and that she’s still learning on the job. She still wants to be a writer, and not just a performer, as she reminisces on her big break, penning “Like Dat’ for Davido. “It was a learning curve for me, but writing comes naturally. I will continue to make music for myself and others till I can’t do it anymore.” She doesn’t see writing as restrictive, but rather just another way to express herself. She does however think more can be done to encourage young girls to access varied corridors in the music industry. “Right now other than Nini, I’m listening to an artist called Tems, who is great. But the environment needs to be less toxic, more structure needs to be put in place.” She’s not wrong – and this is a problem not consigned to just Nigeria. In a 2018 USC Anneberg Inclusion Initiative Study, it was found that only 2% of music producers and 3% of engineers across popular music are women. Whilst the Western market makes strides to correct this, such as the Recording Academy’s Taskforce on Diversity and Inclusion, Nigeria, and Africa at large still needs to wake up
After her rookie-of-the-year worthy season, it would be understandable if Teni was feeling a bit of pressure going into the next act. Whilst a handful of phenomenal singles is a good starting point, the crafting of an album is an entirely different beast. But she’s calm.“It’s not a lot of weight, neither is it a lot of pressure because I’m having fun,” she explains. “The typical Teni doesn’t care. I’m living my life as a normal human being. If there’s traffic, I will come down and enter okada and I’ve heard people say ah! You’re a superstar, you’re not supposed to be entering okada’. But if I die, they are not going to write superstar on my grave, right? I’m going to be buried like every other person. So I’m human, and I don’t want to lose my humanity, just to be the same Teni. I will always evolve, but I don’t want to be pressured into a fake life that isn’t for me.”
Teni could have been a WNBA player. She was offered a scholarship to play basketball at college, but her mum told her in no uncertain terms that she was not going to school to do anything other than read her books. Whilst that dream died, Teni still carries the drive of a player going to the draft. That is why none of what is happening now is fazing her. It took her 7 years to finish school, because she spent hours driving from Atlanta to New York, just to record. Such was her determination to make it, against all odds, that she made this sacrifice. She forgave her mum for pushing back again, when she told a young Teni she had a dream that music wasn’t for her (Nigerian mums and dreams, we’ve all been there). But Teni knew. Her mission was ordained. Now her mum gives her business advice on how to save her money and make smart investments.
Everything that stood in Teni’s way has been conquered. Now she is face to face with her dreams, a showdown she’s been preparing for her whole life. Teni is about to conquer those too, and she’s opening up a whole new realm of possibility for the young girls that follow her as she does it.
Joey Akan is an award-winning music journalist based in Lagos, Nigeria. He is a public relations consultant and commentator on African music and pop culture.
How one of Africa’s most innovative contemporary musicians reinvented his way to becoming a force in the strongest cultural rebellion in recent years.
Words: Toye Sokunbi
Photography: Wathek Allal
There were no shawls for the Birth of Santi, nor were there any roses at Suzie’s Funeral.
These are the names of the two defining projects in the musical journey of Santi. The former brought an unceremonious end to Osayaba Ize-Iyamu’s Diaries Of A Loner mixtapeseries, along with his meta-persona as OzzyB – once seen by many of the earlier users of the Nigerian inter-webs as the saviour of Rap. The latter, a purge; from a hell-scape of vices which he describes were holding him back from reaching the place the “journey” was taking him.
“On Diaries of a Loner, I was on an unclear road using a very rough map to navigate”, Santi says as we start to discuss his roots in Hip-Hop, “Now I can see the whole map. It’s just left to decide where to go.”
Purposeful clarity makes things easier these days, but he is also keen to add, not much has changed. He still envisions himself as a growing artist, spends a chunk of his time by himself and wholesomely trusts in the divine timing of all things.
During our conversation, time, as a concept, is one of the first elemental indicators of Santi’s hyperrealistic artistic view. He doesn’t necessarily dismiss his days as a rapper as a formative phase in his artistry, but he also makes literal allusions to his early musical influences. “People will be surprised [to hear that] ‘okay yeah, he used to be a rapper-rapper before.’ But for me, It’s like, that’s just the side I showed you first. I mean, a 18-year-old guy, in 2010, Lagos, what other kind of music was I going to make?”
—
Where’s Ozzy?
5 years before Santi started to cobble up his first Diaries of Loner mixtape with his then go-to-producer BankyOnDBeatz, MTV Base kicked off operations in Lagos. Prior to this, Channel O had thrived as the premier music-dedicated cable broadcast in Africa for many years, bringing all the sounds of the continent to one channel, for premium after-school viewing. The arrival of the Viacom-owned music giant transformed the landscape of the music industry we know today. Starting with 2Face’s “African Queen”, the first music video MTV Base aired in ‘05, progressive improvements in the quality and texture of Afro-Pop happened rapidly over the next decade.
Off-air, Nigeria’s growing MTV-Generation was being moulded by the spread of cable TV, mobile technology and digital sharing. Santi remembers laying on his bed, staring at the ceiling while listening to the Ja Rule, DMX and 2Pac CDs his dad bought him, off the staticky computer speakers in his room: “I used to daydream to the stories they were rapping.”
By the time he was gearing up to release his first tape in 2011, the major hip-hop records influencing his sound included an odd but well-fitting pairing of M.I’s genre-defying classic Talk About It, and Drake’s similarly veiled genre-mashing, So Far Gone.
“The day Talk About It dropped, I copped multiple CDs on the way to school and handed them out to my classmates, like ‘bump this shit’”. As a child who had grown up spending a lot of time in his own head, Santi tells me Drake’s emotive imagery and the ambient soundboards on the mixtape stuck with him the most because it fuelled his imaginative mind.
If there is anything Diaries of A Loner is a testament to, it’s how Santi draws his influences from his surroundings in real time, evolving almost instantaneously. The name “OzzyB” itself, was inspired by British collective, So Solid Crew, whose members also had cartoonish pseudonyms. That alongside his past life as a high school freestyler brought the first iteration of Santi as a rapper named Ozzy B to life.
After the first mixtape dropped, Santi began to feel uneasy with the limitations of verse structure and rhyme scheme that came with rapping in the early 2010s. Two things were happening in his life at this time: He fell deeply for someone, and also discovered Vampire Weekend and Santigold, two more of his major far-reaching influences.
“I didn’t even know what they [Vampire Weekend] were talking about, but it made me so sad every time I listened to them and thought about the girl,” Santi tells me.“Music is feeling” he believes. “Santigold had this song ‘Lights Out’, and every time I listened to it, I always felt like she was taking me on a journey, and even though I didn’t know where we were going, it didn’t matter ‘cause the drive was so mad.”
Santi appears to be very content with living with such ambiguities. While giving me a breakdown of what eventually happened to the crush that drove him to alternative music, he drifts into scenes from his childhood memories. “I was a shy weird child. At home I was very quiet, and in school, I was this wild guy. It was weird.”
It’s hard to explain what it means to be pressed for words if you haven’t grown up in a conservative country like Nigeria. In Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart, after the arrival of missionaries to Umuofia, families and households started to splinter as younger family members started to break away from traditional religions. Santi’s home vs school duality mirrors that same clash between tradition and change that has always resulted from deep communication gaps between generations, due to difference in beliefs, education and societal expectations.
For any young person who had (or is having) this “normal” Nigerian childhood, the most consistent everyday struggle is safe self-expression. This is the story of the birth of Santi.
“In high school, I liked this girl in my class and I didn’t know how to tell her”, Santi began, “So I started to write stories based on the school but I’d change the name of the characters. My classmates were so into them! And they would always beg me to write new episodes. I used to do them weekly, I was just having fun really. Next thing I know, the girl figured out who she was in my stories and became friends with me”. Santi’s little high-school drama serials were probably banned by the school authorities, but we don’t talk about that. Especially after he grimly added the school shut down a few years ago.
Fast forward to Santi’s second gap year out of school in 2012, his frustrations with Hip-Hop as a primary mode of expression coincided with his eventual decision to quit school altogether. He briefly talks about his parents’ initial resistance, dramatising typical Nigerian parent anxieties, then quickly moves past it. I don’t think his “deep crush” worked out, but he also offers no more information on that subject. The light bulb moment to start experimenting, however, happened just as he began writing for his second project. “Something was changing in me. I feel like I had to switch up, but I also didn’t want to do it out of nowhere. I had to show everyone my process, and that’s why I made Birth of Santi.”
The Birth of Santi marked the early days of Santi’s Monster Boyz – the collective he now operates within. Even now, nearly 7 years after he began working on the project, Diaries of a Loner: Birth of Santi still listens like a very raw genre-blending masterstroke. Producer GMK who’d recently completed flight school at the time, joined Santi’s long-time collaborator, BankyOnDBeatz behind the boards. With the exception of opening track, “Waste Your Time”, produced by Retro Dee (Now known as Genio Bambino), both producers managed to craft an avant-garde alternative-Afro-Pop album, packed with an eclectic mash of contemporary sounds.
The 12-track mixtape doesn’t follow a single theme through-and-through, but it was a collection of sounds steeped heavily in the music that dominated the era. A large portion B.O.S still had a hip-hop filter but there was a clear sign Santi was veering into more musically adventurous terrains.
“Summer of ’95”, a promise for the true potential of Hip-Hop and Afro-Caribbean fusions predating Drake’s “One Dance”, segues into conventional Jollof Music like “Money In A Bundle”. Experimental rap songs like “Monster Sorrows”, a stand-out cut with layered vocals that could have easily fit into Kendrick Lamar’s good kid M.A.A.D city, leads up to closing track, “Lagos Party”, a disrespectfully-underrated cut laced with Popcaan-influenced patois.
Once the rollout was done, Santi also categorically decided his days as a rapper were over. According to him, that part of his artistry already served its purpose. “Rapping to me was being rebellious, like ‘I don’t want to do anything I don’t want to do’.” he says.“But music is a feeling. Even if you don’t understand the lyrics, there is a feeling you can get from hearing sounds that can take you to a place, or help you remember memories distinctively andI wanted to show feelings”. He returned to school once again, this time around in Dubai — where he’s lived ever since.
It had been important for Santi to show the world his transition with his previous project, but the aftermath left fans with more questions than answers, with regards to what to expect next. Birth Of Santi serves as the closest interpolation between the Santi we know now, and the Ozzy B we grew up with. Santi found himself at a crossroad – a familiar feeling throughout his artistic and human journey. Ozzy B holds a very special place in the hearts of 20-somethings who yearn for their teens. It reminds us of the days of Hulkshare and Limelinx, the days of DatPiff and NotJustOK tags all over songs, the days of thinking Nigeria had its first true Rap Messiah. Ozzy B was one of our own. So for Santi to make the decision to put him down, it felt personal – like your best friend moving away just before the summer started, despite all the plans you’d made. There’s a startling sense of entitlement fans develop with artists. We fall in love with one version of a person and their art, and demand nothing more – or less – than this exact thing. The entitlement is mirrored around the music world; from the longing for the return of “Old Kanye” to fans clamouring for The Weeknd to revisit the dark hallways of the House of Balloons, music lovers need their fix: And it better be the right dosage.
One can only imagine the pressure that accompanies the diversion from the comfort zone for both artists and their fans. It takes an artist so utterly convinced of their vision, to be able to step away from what they know, and step into the unknown – especially when the former is working so well for them.
Santi understood the gravity of the decision he was making, and did not make it lightly. He did not make any grand announcements, official statements or tie himself into a release schedule. He simply picked up what he already knew, and went into his sanctuary – the cave that is his mind. With a broadened palette for daring compositions, gained from summers trawling the fringe genres Santigold had introduced him to through her fantastic eponymous album, Santi was ready for the next phase in his metamorphosis. The artist formerly Known as Ozzy B had not quite killed his former self, but simply shed its skin, to prepare for a fresh battle.
Thank You Suzie
When Santi emerged from his cave in the winter of 2015, something was different.
In the time that had passed, the African music landscape had changed drastically, for the better. Mainstream behemoths like Davido and Wizkid were becoming bonafide crossover superstars, utilising both pan-African and international collaborations in the respective missions; the bridge between the UK and Nigeria was growing stronger by the day, thanks for the likes Mr Eazi and Maleek Berry; and even the South had something to say, with Cassper Nyovest selling out his first 20,000 capacity arena, and an 18-year-old Nasty C making a claim for the vacant Hip-Hop throne.
In what turned out to be the beginnings of Suzie’s Funeral, Santi started exchanging music with a 19-year old producer-artist called Bowo – known to many now, as Odunsi The Engine. “I sent this a kid a beat sample for me with a hip-hop vibe. But when he sent it back, It didn’t work. So I told him to work on it some more, then [he] returned it with these dancehall drums and that’s how we made ‘Steal A Dime’”. There was no project on the horizon at the time, but the resulting track was their first official collaboration and Odunsi’s induction as an extended member of The Monster Boyz.
“Because of how much time I spend in my cave, the few times I come out to see what’s going on, I see that there are kids who are now finding themselves and confidently going through ‘the process’.” Santi explains of his first encounters with a fresh-faced Odunsi. “It was like looking at yourself because you know they have also had to fight self-doubt, or African parents who think choosing music is throwing your life away.” Santi disconnected from an industry he thought ill-fitting, and when he returned, he found there were kids just like him. The next chapter had begun.
***
On the 30th of June 2016, Santi introduced us to Suzie.
“Suzie’s Funeral happened at a strange time in my life,” Santi explains, with a hint of sorrow in his voice. “I was losing friends, I had too many vices and I was in a place I didn’t like”. To rid himself of these post-adolescent habits that he felt were sabotaging his growth, Santi looked inwards once again and conjured Suzie: a fictional character who became his muse for the the mixtape that changed everything.
“Suzie and I got on this journey to an unknown place”, Santi narrated. “We didn’t know where we were going, or what we were looking for but we sha knew, we would know when we saw it. As we went further and further along, the journey became more dangerous. Demons…monsters…evil people. Just as we were about to reach the destination, the obstacles became even harder to beat. Suzie decided to stay behind and fight so I could go on to reach my dreams. She sacrificed herself. Suzie’s Funeral is the tribute to all the love, vices and people I had to leave behind to become the very Santi you know today.”
Santi intentionally avoided dropping any singles before the mixtape, as he wanted his latest re-introduction to be on his terms: as a full body of work. He still raps on tracks like “The Running”and “Demon Flow”, but the most progressive standouts off the album featured a mash of Afro-Caribbean mannerisms on alternative electronic production, as seen on the standout record “Gangsta Fear”. The dichotomy between Santi’s incantation-like verses and Odunsi’s crystal clear delivery was the latest feather in their growing relationship.
“I was at home chilling one afternoon when GMK sent me the beat,” Santi tells me of how the song was made. “I went to my studio, recorded this freestyle on it and sent it back. Then Odunsi added a verse that I never heard until the day before they dropped the song and called it ‘Gangsta Fear’” The mutual trust between the brotherhood dubbed Monster Boyz is plain to see, and it is one that they continue to build on. No other track on Suzie’s Funeral captures the universe the project was set in more vividly, and this was exemplified brilliantly in the accomplishing visuals, directed by Santi himself.
In the video, Santi and Odunsi are pictured in an unspecified shanty, somewhere in Lagos. Unlike similarly executed videos since, where squalor and poverty have been used as some sort of trendy new Instagram filter, Santi and co-director, Ademola Falomo, capture the subtleties of everyday ghetto life instead. Santi is seemingly drugged-out in the opening scenes, while Odunsi is seen contemplating, leading up to the video closing at a party with the Monster Boyz.
If you hadn’t noticed how immensely self-aware Santi’s universe was before “Gangsta Fear”, the mid-video interlude before Odunsi’s verse is a great reference point. The scene cuts from Santi and Odunsi to vintage Associated Press footage of a riot on the streets of Lagos, then glitches into a reel of retro-filtered clips of nightlife and Lagos’ Ikoyi Club. Just before the music continues, a flash graphic with the lone text ‘$1 = ₦500’ flashes, then Odunsi returns to the screen singing his infamous opening lines “She wanna go shopping in Dubai. Shorty make a grown man cry…”
In a country where a chunk of the population still lives below the poverty line, a bunch of teenagers with iPhones, flaunting designer fits seems like an obvious invitation for vitriol intended for their assumedly wealthy families. No doubt, people are poor in Nigeria, but like every misrepresented cultural space, the problem here is with the dangers of a single narrative – and Santi’s visuals are rebelling against this. “Gangsta Fear” dropped in the same year that Nigeria officially went into a recession, after months of economic ‘stagflation’. The ports froze, black market rates for the dollar went as high as five hundred Naira while the cost of literally everything shot to the skies. Headlines were flooded with constant reports of hidden stashes of money being uncovered at unassuming locations. On the other side of the coin, a bustling community of creatives were finding their voices, with a newly energised Santi at the forefront of the rebellion.
To remove the context from a subject is to rob it of a history that justifies its value or existence. One of the more refreshing aspects about our conversation is how Santi doesn’t shy away like from speaking for his “Alté” contemporaries like Odunsi The Engine, Lady Donli and Tay Iwar. Instead of giving a straight-forward response when I ask if he has his kept competitive spirit from his rap days with regards to his peers, Santi gives a sharper summary of the venerating circumstance they all share in common: the freedom to create without limits.
Suzie’s Funeral was Santi at his most expressive: he had finally let us into the new world he created for himself. “I wanted kids to feel how I felt in class parties when Sean Paul came on. I wanted to tap into that feeling, in my own way.” He still thinks there are elements of the OzzyB in Santi, but the key difference was that he was finally making music in a way that felt true to who he was trying to be. “The thing with rapping is that, that was me expressing myself using the music I listened to. But the act itself didn’t feel like me. I haven’t stopped rapping, I just don’t rap in 16s anymore.”
It’s a particularly poignant and self-aware observation from Santi here, one which encompasses the new realm of consciousness he seems to have accessed. If you search hard enough on Youtube, you’ll find one of Santi’s earliest Youtube accounts, Osayaba213, adorned with a collection of freestyles and an Arsene Wenger display picture. This was a teenager in 2010 Lagos, who grew up on 9ice, M.I. and Naeto C, who idolised Lil Wayne and Drake. Why wouldn’t rapping be his first medium of self-expression? It makes complete sense, and is really quite simple when thought about, but it’s rare for for one to make such a blunt analysis of self. He’s almost looking at himself, outside of his own body, able to judge everything at face-value, with no added sentiment or even sympathy.
We barely knew Suzie – introduced to her like a toddler at the funeral of a long lost aunt – but she was without a doubt the most important figure in the life of Santi so far. Just as he built on the foundations of OzzyB to become Santi, he made another bold step in leaving behind his partner, knowing he could only complete the mission alone.
Santi 3.0
It’s hard to tell if Santi is a talker or not, if you’re only asking polar questions. When you leave him to speak at length, pop culture references tumble out of him unabated. No matter how obscure the subject, a quick allusion to a film, song, artist or anime character, could be chipped in to make metaphors more vivid. He uses these influences when creating: whether it’s his own music or the visuals he directs for his peers – which fall somewhere in between Wes Anderson and Old Nollywood. When I ask him to summarise his career so far into three major landmarks, Santi says “On Diaries of a Loner, I was starting a journey to an unknown place. Birth of Santi came as I found somethings that would help me create the map for my journey. With Suzie’s Funeral, parts of the map are now clearer. I am in more control than I thought I was, and there are all these directions, left, right, u-turn, that I could go. Now with Mandy [& The Jungle] I can see the whole map.”
Ambiguity means possibility to Santi. He picked this up from how expansively Anime characters are woven into a cinematic narrative. He waxes lyrical about Light, the lead character In Death Note, one of Santi’s favourite shows of all time. Based around magical death note that can be used to kill people by scribbling down their names, Light, initially starts out as a principled good guy. He follows the footsteps of his father who was a police officer and only used the note to kill actual criminals. But over the course of the series, he falls victim to the corruption of absolute power, goes on a killing spree and even lets his own sister die to avoid exposing his own evil deeds. Santi does not only embrace this potential for duality in expression, he also allows his mind to explore possibilities for interpretation that deconstructs pre-existing stereotypes. As we start to discuss his Gothic-Nollywood inspired visual for “Freaky”, the first single off his debut album Mandy & The Jungle, he excitedly lists Tade Ogidan and Chico Ejiro as two of his favourite Nigerian directors who inspired him by pushing the boundaries of what is possible. His list of visionaries also includes controversial preacher and movie producer, Helen Ukpabio, who Santi used a clip from her horror classic, End of The Wicked, in the trailer for “Freaky” last year, to much criticism.
Mrs. Ukapbio rose to popularity in the late 90s for producing Christian supernatural-horror movies that started a wave of panic about child-witch cults in many parts of the country. She infamously published a book on how to identify child witches, where she claimed babies below the age of two who fall ill often or cry at night are possessed by demons.
Santi doesn’t make light of the allegations against Ukpabio’s legacy, but he staunchly advises me to separate the art from the artist in this instance, emphasising some of the universal themes of fantasy, rebellion and death of innocence that made her films wholesome instead. Whilst he doesn’t quite sympathise with her, there seems to be a hint of him relating to her, in the case of potentially being misunderstood by the Nigerian masses. Santi, as the de-facto leader of his peers, has taken the brunt of the skepticism for the growing Alté community, the latest: a ludicrous accusation of the promotion of cultism. In line with his tendency to stay in his cave, he doesn’t bite at the scandalous suggestions, or his comparison to pop stars in the limelight. He would rather let the music speak, like he always. “Everything will be much clearer when the album is out,” he states rather eerily.
Mandy & The Jungle is the title of Santi’s debut album, and with it comes the introduction of the latest character on Santi’s journey.
“Mandy is a story in itself, and the songs on the album are a soundtrack to the universe,” Santi explains. “There’s a girl called Mandy. She’s very quiet. Each day she waits to die, because she doesn’t have anything to live for. She thinks she’s going crazy because she keeps hearing her name. She doesn’t know she has this power over a whole legion of people.” Santi says the album is inspired by his belief in the power in the energy of women, and is a metaphor for gaining strength from within, something he has done his whole life. “You might think you are weak or powerless, but you have no clue the power you have inside you. That’s the world of Mandy & The Jungle.”
Santi emphasises the clear distinction between Mandy and his previous projects: already he has released three singles, with three stunning visuals to match. He’s also preparing comic books based on the album, which he wants fans to read to appreciate the full universe. He knows the pressure that comes with his debut album, but he appears to be relishing it. “I feel like I opened up a bit on this album,” he states candidly. “I wasn’t as vague or mysterious as I’ve been, I said things more clearly.” As excited as he is about the album and the content surrounding it, he tries not to get carried away with the increased popularity and aggressive label courting. He’s phenomenally humble about the interest, but he is not surprised.
Santi has been preparing for this moment his entire life; ever since he shed the sleeve of OzzyB, and birthed Santi; ever since he left Suzie to die, on the road to Mandy; this is the end of that journey, and simultaneously the start of a new one. He’s calm when he explains conversations with the president of OVO, and planning collaborations with Wizkid. He wants to go to Europe for the summer, and teach them Santinese. These are no longer the pipe dreams of the Osayaba that wrote serials for his classmates, this is his life now.
“The key to all of this, is days and days of experimenting. This didn’t just happen. i’m not going to sit here and tell you that.”
Santi knows what it’s taken to get here – and he knows what it will take to go even further. He’s always had his mind, his cave, his most familiar crutch in his time of need. But now, he has his ragers. As Santi has transformed over the years, leaving parts of himself behind, he has taken on more supporters, those prepared to fly his flag through hell and high waters. A quick look at the 6,000 strong crowd at NATIVELAND chanting the infectious chorus of “Rapid Fire” is just a glimpse into the army he has built.
Santi’s Rebellion is well under-way. Bend the knee.
Toye is the Team lead at Native Nigeria. Tweet at him@ToyeSokunbi
Steven Caise just released a new single, “Pull Up”, a love song, disguised as a party anthem. Though most Afropop songs tend to be that way, designed to serve dancefloor audiences at clubs, Steven Caise offers more context for his deviating lyrics, singing “Every time I Smoke Igbo, Smoke Clario, I Swear To God, My Brain Dey Blow Up oh”. But beyond that, the ‘Freestyle’ tag might offer the best explanation.
Dayo Blaq provides the backing vocals and the lightweight production for “Pull Up”, setting the mood of the song to mimic the buzz from being intoxicated. Through the layers of Afropop drum riffs, synth harmonies, percussion, flute samples, Steven Caise sing-raps a sultry set with patois and reggae inspired vocals, trying to charm a love interest while showing off.
You can stream “Pull Up” below.
Featured Image Credits: Instagram/stevencaise
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You are meeting Debola at a strange time in his life. He wandered into a dream and lost his way back. Tweet at him@debola_abimbolu
