Music is described as the food of soul, I agree. There is something deeply spiritual about music no matter how vulgar. It creates like nothing else; it sips into the marrow and spirit of man and subconsciously dictates our reactions to life. Some have referred to Musicians, however unserious, as Prophets. I agree.
I love music. I have a rigorous passion for it, but regrettably I have also been deeply cultural in my appreciation of it, and because of its deep rooted vocabulary I will still limit some language in this write-up to its vulgar description from my root in order not to lose its meaningfulness. It’s like reading the Vulgate Bible or the Arabic Quran. These tend to lose their deep rooted meanings once translated to English, which is why I hope to stay with some local vocabularies as I describe my experience. I shall try to describe the meaning in parenthesis though.
Sir Shina Peters and Abass Akande (Obesere) in my opinion are the protagonists of the sexual revolutions in Nigeria. The musical craze that started during the late 80s is mysterious. Many of the music albums that erupted immediately after the release of SSPs ‘Ace’ were nothing but vulgar and over erotic .There began an unusual boom in the sex trade during this period: School boys started dating girls openly, vulgarity and foul language became rampant, eroticism was institutionalised, abortion became an open illegality and teenage delinquency was as rampart and widespread as dust. Multitudes mortgaged a part of their souls to the lust of Babylon. The musical Pandora’s Box that was opened during these years is what has borne the entire boom we have today.
There has always existed a real appreciation of ‘alujo’ (beat and dance) and ‘saje’ (levity) during my teenage years; nothing was esteemed of music if it doesn’t have those rhythmic beats in which you can dance. We cared little or nothing for the sluggish, slow moving, sheepish rhythms of old timers. But underneath the boundary of ‘alujo’ and ‘saje’ lay the shackles of obscenities and eroticism that arrived later when Obesere’s first album was released in the early 90s, what occurred was not simply a new dimension of ‘saje’ and ‘alujo’, what happened was an escalation of obscenities and the complete demise of the wisdom of oldies. With the duo of Shina Peters and Obesere, conservative musicians were left with little choice than to be bought over into the craze or die out of the industry and the populace also either massively followed suit or loose a great deal of their jolliness in ‘alujo’ and ‘saje’, in the attempt to run off the chains of eroticism. I found myself a party of the latter. There began the death of wisdom.
I simply blanked and labelled some songs as purely evil. How on heart would you listen and dance to a music like Obesere without being obsessed with obscenities? I ran! Looking now at our age, lithered with musical obscenities and lyrical frivolity, I am torn between two choice when advising young ones: either to tell them that it is no use running like I did, or to affirm that they run like I did, (for it ultimately benefited me, albeit on the long term), but I wont tell them neither. Run if you would, but mind the danger of being Pharisaic, of being spiritually aloof from the plights of the downtrodden, of not being whom you are meant to be. I am also well aware of the multitudes that have not run like I did and have been overcome by the deluge of musical craze that has permeated all the 21st century which is a direct result the ordeal of many today.
Compare music with wine, woman, sex, and drug. If you make the wrong choice, it permeates all your being and takes over your senses and drives your will and kills you. These things are spirits. I surely loved the beatings and rhythms of Obesere’s song, which, even more than Shina Peters, was accountable for our societal sexual revolution.
More than my fear of being corrupted then was the fear of being thought of as being corrupt by the masses. The expectation of the masses was my dictate, labelling and caging my nomenclature into what they think I should be and not, deep inside me, what I was made for. I was standing for something, but I was losing the naturality of my being, I was losing myself by not owning up to what I loved. It took me more than 20 years to break off from the shackles of ‘alujo’ (beat and dance) and into the vast wisdom lurking beneath the lyrics of songs of the ‘condemned’ like Obesere, while still retaining my love of beats, dance and rhythms. I found lying beneath the erotic surface of songs and beats, vast depth of wisdom and teachings. How was this possible? Without the journey back, it would be nearly impossible separating the vast tares from the wheat.
Our society is littered with ‘don’t’ morals, which is often escapist. If we refuse to ‘do’, there shall be no journey forth, and understandably, ‘do’ morals without the ‘journey back’ is a risky business. And our liberty should also not be occasions for scandals.
I confess that you can make a journey back and come forth to look at anything in the face. As someone said: evil does not lie in things, evil stems from a corrupt mind. When your mind is pure, nothing is impure. I was determined not to be affected, so I lingered in the arena of societal dictatorship and nomenclature. If you would be free, there is a limit to which you can be nice, likewise when you have not fallen or known sin, do not count yourself worthy of being counted among the court of the elect. We would like never to fall. Many have fallen and have stood up becoming invincible. Go and watch the film Matrix. People’s falls are often their journey back.
Obesere says and I quote; ‘O’o loogun arindo, o lo n je aayan, wa wule bi danu….’. Meaning: When you don’t have a tummy palliative and you are eating cockroach, you will simply vomit what you have in your stomach. The 21st century is not built for the survival of the fundamentalist who believes that running away from corruption is an antidote (like I did), nor is it built for the ‘yuppie’ who takes everything as a given and delves into all the bits and pieces proffered by modernity. No, the survival of the 21st century lies in he who knows how to journey back so that he can journey forth without being harmed by the spirit of modernity, manifested in many things and the particular issue we discuss of: music. I call our age an age of quantum, where two plus two is no longer equal to four. Morpheus told Neo in the Matrix film: ‘No one can tell you what the Matrix is; you need to experience it yourself’.
Life is like this; don’t delve into things until you are ready. Guidance is important but don’t let your guardian become your God. We all have one Master. The little lesson in my musical conversion story is about moving on and not being stopped. It’s about the journey forth. We should not presume yet we should not despair; nothing is impossible and no area is out of bound, but you are to be alert to the capability of your resources. There is a great error that lies underneath ‘generalising’; only laziness and ignorance facilitates our generalising.
Postscript: After my Obesereic conversion, the sky became my limit. I still have some nostalgia about the demise of Juju and Fuji music. I still listen mostly to them because I find a ready made appreciation of the wisdom therein because I was born during the Fuji and Juju age, but amidst the noise and higgledy leapture of 9ja music , I have come to appreciate depth out of them, I appreciate the new rhythm of Davido, Olamide , Nice, 2 Face and Whiz Kid. I know who to listen to when I want to meditate and the man that is appropriate when I want to dance.
For those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s , we can be tempted to be judgemental about the recent western music. For instance what have we to learn from Rihanna, Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga if not nudity and obscenity? I thought as much until I started watching programs like Nigerian Idol and X Factor and their songs were being subtitled on the screen. Blank what you see , even the most obscene musical song has a deep spiritual meaning, but you must journey back to facilitate your passage out of eroticism that can affect your being negatively.
My final advice: ‘O’o loogun arindo, ma lo je aayan o, waa wule bi danu, o o ni se gbangba girijigba’
Meaning: ‘Do not try this at home’
