Monthly Archives: February 2021

Its nearly a quarter of a century since Fela Kuti passed away. Yet, the influence of his music and pan-Africanist thoughts hasnt stopped. Fela was notorious for the deployment of his Afrobeat as a critical tool against human rights violations, social injustice and insensitive cum inept leadership in Africa. And the conversation as to who best fits the profile of a successor has continued unabated.

Many Nigerian artists have gone as far as naming themselves as the reincarnation of Fela. From Dede Mabiakus endless references to his closeness to the Abami Eda the name Fela gave himself a Yoruba phrase that roughly translates to the strange one and Chief Priest, to Charles Charly Boy Oputas antics, a few have pretended to be made of the sort of defiant stuff at Felas core.

Musically, Eedris Abdulkareems success with the 2004 hit Jaga Jaga appeared to have instigated a Fela complex in him to the point that he got Felas eldest son Femi Kutis saxophone support to legitimise his tribute in the single titled Fela (2013).

There have been several other musical tributes to the memory of Fela. These have included Seyi Sodimus remarkable Fela the King (2002) and W4s rather cheesy Like fada, Like son (2012). Beyond these, pop-inclined artistes have sought to appropriate different features of the great musicians legacy. This has included drawing from the rich repertoire of Felas ensemble in embellishing their works, particularly over the last decade.

Yet, undoubtedly the most powerful of the tributes to Fela is 97 (2001) which was recorded and performed by Femi Kuti, himself an accomplished Afrobeat star.

A great deal of work has been done on protest music in Nigeria. But, in my view, studies have been reticent in appreciating the works of Femi.

I set about to fill this gap. In my study, I look at Femis music through the framework of a re-democratised Nigeria and I invariably draw equivalents with Felas works which constituted a major alternative voice through military-ruled Nigeria.

I conclude that, to source for a Fela successor outside the direct lineage of his family is to court the ridiculous that is if there is any need to source for a Fela successor to begin with.

Previous research showed that Femis consciousness through art had begun during military dictatorship in Nigeria. Songs like Wonder Wonder (1995), Plenty Nonsense (1995), Nawa (1995), Stubborn Problem (1995), Sorry Sorry (1998), What Will Tomorrow Bring (1998), and Victim of Life (1998) are standouts from Femis catalogue during that particularly dark era.

The same study posited that Fela was not the only popular musician who confronted the military and tyrannous leaders of Nigeria between independence in 1960 and Felas passing in 1997.

The study discussed the protest contributions by reggae, highlife and other Afrobeat stars during the same period. These included Sonny Okosuns, Tunji Oyelana, Wole Soyinka, Victor Essiet and The Mandators, Majek Fashek, Ras Kimono, Lagbaja and Osayomore Joseph.

Femi Kutis protest credentials spans across both military-ruled and democratic Nigeria. My research further found that hip hop has constituted an accomplice to Femi Kutis work having served as a veritable vehicle in speaking truth to power in Nigeria since re-democratisation in 1999. Contrary to its critics claims, hip hop culture in Nigeria isnt always about hedonism and the objectification of women.

Kuti himself featured American hip hop acts Mos Def and Common on Do Your Best and Missing Link off 2001s Fight to Win album.

A review of Femi Kutis discography from 1989s No Cause for Alarm to 2018s One People One World shows that through all ten albums spanning about 30 years, Femi is undoubtedly the most prolific creator of protest music in Nigeria. Add to this the maturation of his first son Omorinmade Kuti. Now 23 years old, he released his debut single Free Your Mind in 2020 to respectable acclaim in the Afrobeat genre.

Omorinmade who has grown to become an Afrobeat artist in his own right under his fathers watch, makes it even clearer that Femis proximity to the title of a Fela successor is rivalled by none.

Yet, there are no signs that the family plans to rest on past laurels. A new release, Legacy+, is out. A double record comprising Femis Stop the Hate (his 11th album) and Omorinmades debut, For(e)ward, it links three generations of the Kuti dynasty.

Through Legacy+, we find a deliberate merging of Felas legend, Femis unrelenting struggle and Omorinmades forging on through youthful and possibly futuristic Afrobeat.

The sole caveat to this chain is that Felas last son Seun Kuti, also an Afrobeat artist, presents the public space in Nigeria with the most cerebral viewpoints of any artist at the present time. Following the #EndSARS protests, Seun has flown kites on the possibility of relaunching his fathers Movement of the People, a political party through which Fela attempted to run for Nigerias presidency during the Second Republic.

The truth is that no artist through Nigerias postcolonial years has contributed close to what Fela did and continues to do - for human rights and social justice. Appreciation must of course follow the efforts of Charly Boy, Eedris Abdulkareem, Dede Mabiaku, Lagbaja and Wole Soyinka. But, musically and otherwise, only Gani Fawehinmi, the late human rights lawyer, holds the semblance of a record anywhere in the neighbourhood of the organic consistency for the betterment of Nigerian lives close to Felas.

To put it simply, I re-assert the words of singer and song-writer Seyi Sodinmu:

There will never be another Fela

Fela was the King

The King of our music

Oh what a King

The King of Kalakuta

Oh what a King

From a shrine in Lagos, he gave us his music

The music of our lives

The music of our time

The awesome musician

A master composer

Songs of redemption

The fighter of oppression

The pride of Nigeria

The African superstar

Fela!

There will never be another Fela.

Read the original here:

The quest to identify Fela's successor: why it's time to end it - The Conversation CA

From the very beginning, whenever there was a crush, there was also a drink in my hand. In his novel High Fidelity, Nick Hornbys narrator Rob, an unhappy vinyl obsessive, asks himself: Which came first, the music or the misery? Did he learn to be unhappy from the sad songs he loved, or did the songs comfort him after the unhappiness was already a fact?

In my case, the question is something like this: which came first, the booze or the boys? Did I just happen to begin my romantic life at the same time as my drinking life? Or were my infatuations and love stories authored or at least fuelled by the alcohol that accompanied them?

This is not the story of a tragic, ruined woman who destroys all her relationships through drinking. In some, I drank very moderately; in most others, only to good-spirited excess, which caused no harm. There is no redemption arc here, no coming to the light. I still drink now. It is one of my personal bugbears that we seem as a culture flatly incapable of discussing many of lifes most complex issues without urgently needing to name and solve them, preferably with formal medical interventions.

And so I cant speak about a plodding, hopeless soul sickness that afflicts me at times without being cornered into describing it as depression or an anxiety disorder. This is not to say that these things dont exist; of course they do, and over the years Ive taken medication for both. But the terms and the drugs are too blunt as tools to address the infinite realm of human suffering and struggle that they sit within.

For the same reason I cant discuss drinking, how I have loved it and been frightened by it, how it has joined me in my love affairs and adventures, and silently judged me from the other side of empty flats; I cannot say any of this without using the word alcoholic. But I will.

AGED 15, I BETRAYED the first boyfriend I ever had under the influence of the little alcohol it took to get me drunk. I had recently shed a lot of puppy fat, not through the whims of nature but through smug, grim deprivation routines. I played a cruel trick on myself.

The loss of weight happened to occur at the same time as I was leaving childhood and becoming a young adult, the time that boys were beginning to look at me, and I at them. But because my debut into horny society was taking place at the same time I had become a thin person, I conflated the two experiences. I wonder now if something similar didnt happen with drinking, that it came to stand in for all manner of agreeable things it wasnt actually responsible for.

The first boyfriend smelled like sandalwood and was a passionate and brilliant musician, and I adored him. We became a foursome with another couple; the guy was my boyfriends closest friend, the girl a newly acquired pal of mine. They were the kind of people I could only have dreamed about befriending before my transformation. They appeared adult and sexy to me and exchanged witty banter with no agony or indecision.

I was served my first drink in a bar while in this glowing new formation, blissed out with the feeling of having finally stepped inside a TV show. I asked for a double Jack Daniels and Diet Coke, the sort of thing a happy and wild and pretty girl like me would order in the kind of show I was casting myself in.

A few months into our relationship, we were all four at a party in someones parentssuburban home. The tips of my ears were burning from the tepid white wine I was drinking, and I stepped outside. In the darkness of the garden I could make out a body stretched on a trampoline. It was the boy in the other couple, my boyfriends friend. He was uncharacteristically sad, which made me feel tender and dramatic. I lay down beside him and he talked about what was troubling him, some issue with his girlfriend. He was also drunk, and I felt completely alive and open to his emotions.

Before I could think about it, we were holding hands. Then a light came on in the doorway and it was my boyfriend, seeing us. I pulled down my dress from where it had ridden up, although we hadnt done anything more explicit than touch hands, and shaded my eyes and stared over at him with my heart thudding, the wine beating in my pulse.

None of us would ever mention it, this meaningless and minor betrayal, but as it took place something changed in me. I wouldnt have touched the boys hand if I hadnt been drinking; the drinking allowed me to pretend it never had happened. Alcohol made me behave a certain way and it gave me the ability to disappear the same behaviour it had induced. It had created movement. This was what I wanted above all things: propulsion.

AT 17, I WAS in a relationship with my first love. On weekend nights, we sat in the outhouse he slept in and kissed and watched films and put on disco lights and danced. We drew pictures together and made mix CDs and took photographs of each other, engorged on the gratuitous beauty of this new way to know another person. I skimmed from the bottles of spirits in my mothers cupboard and brought it there, one night swallowing a ghastly blistering few inches of Cointreau that I can still taste now, then pressing my numb mouth to his.

On Fridays, I would occasionally go for a drink by myself. I got changed in the school toilets and stuffed the uniform into my backpack, headed to a party later that night, but first I would go to a bar. Not one of the pubs where all the staff knew my parents and that I was underage, but one of the anonymous modern ones where nobody showed up until later in the evening.

I would slip in and have a whiskey and Diet Coke, and read my book or write in my diary and be so content, so cosy, nobody knowing where I was in that moment. I told my first love, whose father was a recovering alcoholic, how much I enjoyed the stolen, contained hour. Be careful, he said, Thats what my dad liked to do.

But I wasnt worried. There were two things I wanted from my life. I wanted to be with others, to have as much attention and affection and company as I was able to drain out of them and I also wanted to be left completely alone whenever I wanted. Nobody could predict which of these two opposing and equally urgent needs might want satisfying at a given time, least of all me. Drinking was magical because it enabled you to be with others fully, free of self-examination. And then when you wanted it to, it enabled you to be by yourself with pleasure, too.

Then I lost it all. Away from home, dropped out of university, I was in an ugly spiral of denial and mania. I buckled beneath my self-disgust, the disappointment and panic about what I would do with my future. Thinking beyond the immediate seemed likely to lead to the abandonment of any will to go on living. Concerning myself with boys, men, sex, romance, whatever this was one way to focus on individual hours and evenings. Drinking was the other, and for these lost years the two strategies bled into each other.

Because I had lost all the trappings of my identity the idea that I was smart, had a good future, was an interesting person the alcohol operated differently. It didnt just ornament the person I was, allowing me to enjoy people I did sincerely like and love. It compelled me to be someone I was not, a person I was not even very good at imitating.

I exhausted my few reserves of energy angling towards men I had nothing to say to, nothing in common with whom I did not so much as even like! simply because they looked a certain way and stayed out as late as I did. Perhaps, I thought, if going out and drinking could be the purpose of life for these people, then I could give up worrying about what mine might be.

And so I forgot about daytime and concentrated only on the pathetically shabby facsimile of hedonism I was aping, and the boys who propped it up. Mostly I shelved anyone who wanted to speak to me properly or treat me with kindness, because I couldnt afford to slow down. The point was to always keep moving. Until one day a few years have passed and you notice, finally, the only direction you have moved in is further down.

IN MY EARLY TO MID-20s, I lived with a man who didnt drink the way that I and most of my friends did. By now I was steadily, if meagrely, employed and partied with much less vehemence, but still we would be out and drunk at least once a week. He was a little older than me and I felt implicitly shamed by his comparative sedateness and curbed my habits. I was afraid he would come to his senses otherwise, go and find someone very different from who I was. I have never been able to fully shake the suspicion that when people tell me they love me, they are, in some sense, joking.

Drinking with the next one, the one who came after my cohabitation, was the most fun. So theatrical, such a performance. Fitting for a love that felt so dazzling and innovative and promising and, when examined, turned out not really to be there at all.

With him, there were 14 cocktails I was only pretending to be able to afford, in a dimly lit Dublin smoking garden. There was murky rich beer with an astonishingly high alcohol percentage, sitting on a pavement in Denmark eating smoked-fish sandwiches. Two-for-one nasty little old-fashioneds in a Peckham happy hour, tossed back with lustful abandon and one hand up my dress. Like the happiness that drinking creates, it was conjured, ephemeral. All of it was based on a false premise I was willing myself not to see through. It wasnt real, it had to end but, ah, what doesnt. Its hard to regret.

Unrequited love is a funny complaint, an embarrassing one when there are so many exciting and attractive and decent people in the world. Its surprising how much it still hurts to think about it, this failure of mine. How amazing it was to realise that this person with whom I felt intuitively and perfectly in tune, who understood things about me nobody else ever had, and was an inexhaustible reserve of fascinating thoughts did not experience me in the same way.

I wish he had received me with complete indifference, which would be easier to accept. Instead, he just liked me well enough until he met someone to really be with. A few times after we had been drinking a lot, as he was falling asleep, the words did leave his mouth: I love you. And although I knew they werent true, I leaned over him in the bed, my face close to his, mouth open, as though I could eat them.

This is another thing that drinking does, this thinning of veils, spirits and souls, consciousness and unconsciousness: I dont love you, I love you. Some references to the pagan festival of Samhain, when the barrier between worlds is breachable, mention the role of excessive alcohol. In our world this happens, too, the scraping back to things hidden, the descent below normal surface. The problem is that what is revealed isnt necessarily the truth. Being drunk sometimes leads to long-buried secrets emerging, catharsis, certainly. But it can also incite emotions and ideas that simply dont exist in waking life.

There was a guy friend of mine who, during my late teens, I was close to but had no romantic desire for. One night when we were both pissed at a house party, I saw him kissing a girl and was inconsolable, crying for hours. The next day I could not understand my reaction. I didnt want him; I felt nothing about him kissing this person. It was alarming to know that a feeling could be created like that. The alcohol had attached some arbitrary emotion that had risen to the top of my subconscious soup to my friend and his kiss.

I drink less now than I used to. I lack the concentrated fury of my youth. I dont feel as bad, I dont feel as good. These are the truces we make, and then at times wonder why we bothered, missing all the vivacity that made up life back then. Somehow this past year did the thing that years of self-recrimination failed to, and made me moderate. I have a single drink and find myself frustrated and bored by its inability to get me anywhere, to do anything.

The main attraction of drinking is gone for now: the illusion of movement, the way it set off a course of events you couldnt always predict. Now, whether I have one drink or 10, I know Ill still be where I started, in the nook of my sofa with the TV on at half volume, anxiously biting hangnails.

Maybe when this is over, Ill descend into Bacchanalian retribution and drink to excess every night. But I think that my body has learned the lesson, whether I wanted it to or not, that there is no magic inherent in the bottle. That what I felt to be its magic was only ever other people. Guardian

Acts of Desperation is published on March 4th by Jonathan Cape

Excerpt from:

Megan Nolan: At 15, I betrayed my boyfriend under the influence of the little alcohol it took - The Irish Times