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

6 On the Shop Floor: The Social Production of Afrobeat

6 On the Shop Floor: The Social Production of Afrobeat Art as Practice In this age of compact discs, MP3 players, and electronic music ¤les exchanging hands on the Internet, the hegemonic conception of art as an object , a thing, a product, has never had seemingly better support. However, it is very unlikely that anyone would mistakenly apply that impoverished idea of art to Fela’s afrobeat. This in itself is part of the theoretical signi¤cance of Fela’s art; it compels us to follow the much more enriching conceptual direction of art as process, as practice imbricated in tangled, thoroughly social conditions and relations of production, dissemination, and consumption.1 I stress “compel ” because the conditions of production are more rather than less unhidden in afrobeat, and some of them are so transparent that they have become part of the public perception of the music itself. Technological mass reproduction notwithstanding , afrobeat is no “culinary” music completely ¤nished and coded ready for passive consumption.2 Unlike most genres, it comes unusually proofed against easy rei¤cation. This helps to advance my goal in this chapter, which is to examine some of the varieties and expenses of extrasonic labor that go into the social production of the enthralling sound and the gigantic image of its public face, Fela. With scores of instrumentalists, singers, dancers, and myriad other personnel—graphic artists, photographers, drivers, messengers, attorneys, security aides, and more—Fela ran what was easily the largest musical organization in Africa. Afrobeat is thus far more than the ¤nished music. “The Boys” In close to thirty years, nearly 120 musicians worked at various times for Fela on afrobeat as saxophonists,trumpeters,®ugelhornists,guitarists,trombonists , pianists, drummers, conga players, shekere and maracas shakers, and stick hitters.3 For a musical group that was organized around a permanent band rather than hired musicians for recordings and concerts, this is quite a large number. But Fela’s band was always large; the horn section alone sometimes featured up to a dozen, and the whole band itself up to thirty, musicians. This is no doubt an indication of the fame and prestige of afrobeat and its power to continuously attract a stream of talent. Indeed, from the 1970s to early 1990s, there was no more original phenomenon on the African popular music scene than afrobeat or a bandleader with greater international reputation. Fela’s band in its different incarnations, Africa 70 and Egypt 80, featured musicians not just from Nigeria but also from neighboring African countries and outside the continent . This was so in spite of the fact that though afrobeat remained a popular genre, there were no other bands playing exactly the same music that musicians could go to if they were to fall out with Fela. Very skilled individual instrumentalists could always get jobs with other bands playing other genres, but they would be working with entirely different sound arrangements and approaches to musical production. Since Fela’s reputation was very well known, especially his controversial lifestyle, his political views and activities, and his regular encounters with the law and the risks that involved, only those committed enough to withstand all these risks ever worked with Fela. It is thus a sign of the wide acceptance of his vision and musical practice even among musicians that he was able to command so much professional attention. But there are far less salutary aspects of the large size. For one thing, it hardly makes much economic sense, especially for a commercial out¤t that was operating in a context where bootlegging and even of¤cial violations of copyright— by government radio and television stations—are endemic. Even in the very best of times, such as Afrika 70 had for most of the 1970s until the army invasion of Kalakuta Republic in 1977, all it meant was that each musician was paid only a little bit more than usual on a regular basis. Fela put his musicians on a salary, and it is indeed a tribute to his openness and perceived fairness in these matters that he was able to maintain a high degree of stability in his personnel for nearly a decade. Fela justi¤ed the large band size by referring to, as usual, “African culture .” “To play African music, you cannot economize,” he argued contentiously, The culture of Africa is not based on economy, it is based on naturalness, being natural. And if you try to put money ¤rst before the culture, then you will...