Arrest the Music!: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics

10 Conclusion: Afrobeat after Fela

10 Conclusion: Afrobeat after Fela Unity into Multiplicity Ancient lore has it that the Yoruba pantheon was originally composed of one entity, the primogenitor or original one, and its servant, Atunda, literally, recreation. As the deity was hoeing its farm on the slopes one day, Atunda rolled a huge boulder that smashed the original deity into a thousand and one fragments .1 Several of the scattered shards metamorphosed into the many different deities, each taking its unique temperament from the character of its constituting splinter. Unity became multiplicity, and contingency replaced essence. Thus, the Yoruba pantheon emerged from and as an act of revolution. Fela was the “original one” of afrobeat till a few years before his death. Now there is a®owering of re-creations of afrobeat, each taking its character from this or that fragment of the essence-afrobeat. Given the uniqueness of Fela’s music and his noted reluctance, indeed outright failure, to cultivate new entrants to the genre, the current ®owering is nothing short of a revolution.2 There are several reasons why young aspiring Nigerian musicians did not take to playing afrobeat much earlier, apart from Fela’s own apparent disinterest in encouraging a dispersal of the genre. Although Fela had been playing afrobeat for over three years before he became “political,” the genre quickly took on a binding identity as “political music” by the time promising musicians could have studied it enough to be con¤dent in expressing themselves in it. Given that Fela himself did not set out to be “political”but was imposed upon by historical circumstances to be so—and so he grew into the mode organically—it would have been a great challenge indeed for a musician to set up shop in the same way as Fela. This is especially so when we remember that Fela was not just “political ” in this or that track in one album out of ¤ve but made “politicalness” the very fabric of his musical practice. Retroactively, afrobeat became a “quintessentially political” genre. This is already a prohibitive implicit demand from would-be afrobeat musicians; it becomes even more so when such a musician¤gures into the calculation Fela’s sacri¤ces that made afrobeat so political: endless persecution by the state. It is a testament to the enduring image of afrobeat as essentially a “political” music that most of those who play that genre today feel bound, in one way or another, to take on the political themes of Fela. A related reason is that afrobeat, of all Nigerian popular music genres, is the one most identi¤ed with a particular inventor-¤gure who was the only exemplar of the genre for a long time. Fela’s brand of antiestablishment politics and the unique counterculture he built from which afrobeat derived sustenance further solidi¤ed the popular impression of afrobeat as another name for charismatic Fela. To play afrobeat music was literally to be trespassing in Fela’s territory. Veteran drummer Tony Allen left Fela with rancor in the late 1970s and went solo. In spite of the fact that he was generally regarded as the one who put the beat in afrobeat, he never thrived as an afrobeat musician. Afrobeat was apparently more than the drums, and only Fela held the key to the other components of its identity.3 In addition, to choose afrobeat as a budding musician is to decide both musically and ideologically against the panegyric form. In a cultural context where all the richest and most famous musicians play nothing but panegyric music, the great economic risk of that decision is truly chastening. Most Nigerian popular musicians are from humble origins, and in addition to their talent and the love of music they may have, the dream of af®uence is hardly a hidden inspiration for going into the profession. Indeed, this was for a long time a subterranean source of con®ict between Fela and the original Africa 70 musicians . They took a risk with Fela’s antipanegyric music and were lucky and wildly successful. The unspoken rule and practice among the panegyric musicians such as the juju stars was to spread the wealth somewhat among band members—thinly, but at least enough to ideologically temper the egregious and unequal gulf between bandleader and musicians; a pervasive discourse of kinship—borrowing from the Yoruba regard for kinship relations—now transferred into business relations helps cement the ideological work. But afrobeat was a “political” music and Fela was deep...