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

2 The “Apolitical” Avant-Pop Hustler

2 The “Apolitical” Avant-Pop Hustler Contexts I have borrowed the military metaphor of the avant-garde—advance guard—to describe the ¤rst phase of Fela’s musical evolution as avant-pop— advance pop. By this I mean a form of popular music that is self-consciously experimental, new, and distinct from existing forms in its sociocultural context . Such music transgresses the boundaries of established styles, the meanings those styles reference, and the social norms they support or imply. The avantpop is the form of Fela’s musical practice from when he started in Britain in the late 1950s through his return in the early 1960s until the end of the decade. His band was at various times during that period known as Fela Ransome-Kuti and the Highlife Rakers,the Fela Ransome-Kuti Quintet,but mostly as—once brie®y discarded and then reassumed—Fela Ransome-Kuti and the Koola Lobitos. The particular genre of his music during this time was the hybrid called highlife jazz. This was a composite that synthesized an older form, highlife, and a newer one, jazz, that was then beginning to make an inroad among the elite in West African capitals. Highlife emerged in the coastal cities of Anglophone West Africa such as Accra and Lagos in the early decades of the twentieth century. In its stylistic varieties such as the brass band, the guitar band, or the most widespread and popular, the ballroom dance band, highlife is a fusion of local dance melodies and rhythms and imported European brass, string, and woodwind instruments .1 The sonic properties were strange—there were no indigenous orchestras with such a wide assemblage of horns—but the familiar tunes and songs amply compensated for this. It is best to conceive of highlife as the product of a mutually disciplining relationship between foreign instruments and indigenous melodies. It quickly became so popular that by the end of the 1930s, there were already dozens of bands in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria playing local tunes as well as European concert music in soft, abbreviated versions and favorite ballroom types such as foxtrots, two-steps, and waltzes. These European forms diminished in signi¤cance in the late 1940s as highlife came in contact with AfroCuban dance-music varieties such as mambo, rumba, and cha-cha. From a creative blending of these and other indigenous materials, Ghanaian E. T. Mensah ,2 generally regarded as the “grandfather” of highlife, fashioned the modern form of dance-band highlife; through Mensah’s performance tours, that particular modern form spread to and became the vogue in other places, most notably Nigeria. Newly established local branches of European recording companies signi¤cantly contributed to the spread and popularity of highlife. By the close of the 1940s, these companies had produced thousands of 78 rpm shellac discs of highlife for the West African market.3 The name “highlife” literally and unashamedly indexes the class character of the music it refers to as for the elite, meaning, in context, the westernized elite. Highlife’s means of production—the instruments as well as the elaborate and lengthy period of training needed to master them—excluded all but the privileged , lucky, or well connected. The mode and protocols of its consumption— the classy night club with, of course, an equally classy entrance fee and strict codes about dressing and being in couples—left no one in doubt as to the status of the clientele.4 At the peak of its popularity in Nigeria in the 1950s to mid1960s , highlife boasted such distinguished bandleaders as Bobby Benson, Victor Olaiya, Eddie Okonta, Zeal Onyia, Stephen Osita Osadebey, Cardinal Rex Lawson , Roy Chicago, and Celestine Ukwu. Those were the giddy years of Nigeria’s struggle for independence from colonial rule (which was ¤nally won in 1960) and the ¤rst few years of victory celebration before the civil war (1967–1970) hastened the already spreading gangrene of the failure of the postcolonial state and consequent general public disillusionment. The music embodied the heroic struggle and optimism of the years before the fall. The mastery and incorporation of instruments from diverse climes testi¤ed to the creativity and cultural resilience of the colonized as well as the expansiveness of the mindset of the anticolonial struggle. After all, the struggle was conducted mostly in English, and the model of government the nationalists struggled to establish after they overthrew European colonial rule was borrowed from Europe. Their great expectation was that the new system would work well...