Won't get fooled again!

I'm a skeptic these days, but I wasn't one back in 1999 when I bought this record called The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits.

I'll admit that my decision to do so was guided largely by the media fanfare that surrounded the its release. This record was, apparently, a landmark collection of music from an obscure mid-century blues hero who had managed to elude recognition from the general public while accruing an esoteric cult following amongst an artistic vanguard who giddily testified to its mindbending wonder: "The innovation and possibility in this music leaves me speechless!" quoth Beck! "A revelation!" exclaimed Leonard Cohen! "Marvin is good! gushed Angelique Kidjo! "In my formative years, as an aspiring bass player, there was nothing I listened to more than Marvin Pontiac!" swore the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea!

But if the Marvin Pontiac fan club had a president, it was undoubtedly New York composer, actor and painter John Lurie, who spoke earnestly about discovering Pontiac's music as a teen in western Massachusetts, learning to play the harmonica by listening to his records and even once meeting his reclusive hero during a trip to Detroit. Having learned that the rights to Pontiac's music were available, Lurie recounted, he wasted no time in acquiring them, personally compiling and releasing the Greatest Hits package on his own Strange and Beautiful Music label.

Magazine features tended to focus on the... quirkier aspects of Pontiac's short life: Born in Detroit in 1932 as Marvin Toure, son of a Jewish mother and a Malian father (who changed the family name to "Pontiac" because he thought it sounded solidly American). When Marvin was four, his psychologically fragile mother was institutionalized and his father took him to live in Bamako for the next several years. Upon returning to the US at age 15, he played guitar and harmonica in Chicago clubs alongside the likes of Muddy Waters and Otis Spann, but his burgeoning musical career hit a bump, though, after a brawl with local harmonica player Little Walter, who accused him of stealing his harp technique. The humiliation of catching an ass-whupping from the diminutive Walter drove Pontiac out of Chicago and to Lubbock, Texas, where he worked as a plumber's assistant, allegedly got involved in a bank robbery and possibly did a bid on a chain gang.

He gave music another go in the early 1950s, recording a series of sides that melded his American and African music influences in a proto-worldbeat fusion that enjoyed some degree of success in various regional markets. But Marvin's career was hamstrung once again, this time due to his increasingly eccentric behavior: He refused to record for record labels unless the label chief came over and mowed his lawn. He was arrested for bicycling in the nude. He maintained that he had been abducted and brutally probed by alien lifeforms. By the early 1970s, he was residing in a mental hospital, where he took to dressing in the Malian garb he recalled from his childhood; the sole existing photos of Marvin Pontiac were taken during this period--they depict a tall black man swathed in a turban and boubou, wielding an acoustic guitar as if on the edge of eternity.

Who wouldn't be intrigued by a story like that? I live in a fragmented, postmodern culture perpetually fascinated with the notion of tormented, doomed geniuses so ahead of their time that they accidentally cross the threshold into the world of insanity. So yeah, I bought Marvin Pontiac's Greatest Hits based on that, aaaaaaaaaaaand...

...It was cool.

I mean, it was an aiiight record. I didn't find it to be as life-changing as the hipster hype had advertised, but I dug it well enough to listen to it repeatedly over the course of the next two or three weeks, talk it up with other music fans and even recommend it to customers at the record store where I worked.

But through all that, there was something about the music that smelled funny... Right from the very first few seconds that I listened to it, certain things just didn't compute.

Take, for instance, "I'm A Doggy," which the liner notes described as having been a minor US hit in 1952:



The first thing that came to my mind when I listened to this song is probably the first thing that came to yours: "Do this shit sound like it was recorded in 1952?"

I flipped through the liner notes, hoping to find a mention of Pontiac arriving at Philadelphia's 24-track Sigma Sound Studios to re-record the song in 1974.

Nope... Pontiac gave up music in 1970 to concentrate on re-establishing contact with the aliens who had abducted him. The liner notes are pretty clear about that. He never recorded another note till the day he was run over by a city bus in 1977.

But I was not a skeptic, so I just let it slide. Let's just keep it moving. This track is "Pancakes," which supposedly was released as a bootleg in Nigeria, of all places, and became a major sensation there:



Now I'm really feeling this song... I like the understated percussion and the insistent melody of the xylophone, and the way the lyrics No seriously--This music is really supposed to have been recorded in the 1950s?

Well, I guess they just did a helluva remastering job on this reissue, huh? Yeah... Yeah, that's the ticket! Great remastering!



Alright. I'm pretty sure that some of the Afropop styles being referenced here didn't even exist yet back then. And yo, I know his moms was Jewish and everything, but frankly, this cat sounds kinda... well, "white" to me. He sounds like a white guy doing a Negro impression, and not doing a bad job of it most of the time, but at other times, he just sounds like--

Wait a circle-jerkin' minute...!!

In a feature in MEAN magazine, the interviewer had asked Lurie:

[MEAN:] So, will you be covering any of Marvin's songs onstage?

Lurie: I don't think so. I can't really sing. I know our voices are similar.

[MEAN:] Yeah, they're very similar.

D'OH!

Of course.

Of course. So frickin' obvious! The clues were all there, really... Even in the fanfaronnade of ecstatic celebrity blurbs endorsing the album! Take, for instance, this one by David Bowie: "A dazzling collection! It strikes me that Pontiac was so uncontainably prescient that one might think that these tracks had been assembled today."

(Can't you just see Bowie--himself no stranger to alternate identities--grinning slyly and winking as he makes the above statement?)

Of course John Lurie was Marvin Pontiac. This was confirmed a few months later, when he admitted to performing all the Marvin Pontiac recordings himself and even posing in blackface for those blurry artist photos.

Well, I'll be. I'll admit that once I discovered the deception, my first impulse was to return the CD for a refund.

It's not like I was mad that the album turned out not to be what it was sold as, or even that I'd allowed myself to get taken by the hoax. My problem was that I just didn't think the hoax was particularly well played.

I actually love hoaxes. I find them to be excellent entertainment in and of themselves, even if it's just to savor the attention to detail with which the diligent hoaxer constructs a convincing facsimile of reality. When such textural fastidiousness is lacking, though, it becomes kinda embarrassing. Like spotting a visible boom mike in a movie scene, or an actor wearing a wristwatch in a Biblical epic. At first you might try to ignore the discrepenacy in the spirit of willing suspension of disbelief, but the more frequently such gaffes appear, the harder it is to commit to the story or even take it seriously at all.

That's what happened to me with Marvin Pontiac. Dammit, why didn't Lurie work harder to make it sound like it was recorded in the 1950s? I mean, shit, at the very least, I know they've got plug-ins that can simulate the audio grain of analog recordings!

To be fair, it's quite possible (and even likely) that Mr. Lurie didn't necessarily conceive Marvin Pontiac as a full-blown hoax--he just made the music he wanted to make and then thought of a cool way to generate buzz for it and some game journalists played along with him.

Still, my interest in listening to the record had evaporated virtually overnight; I had kept the CD too long to return it, so I just chucked it into a crate and never thought about it again. I had other music demanding my listening.

This was around the time that Universal was reissuing a huge chunk of Fela's catalog, and I was eating it up just as fast as they doled it out. In between releases, I stoked my appetite by devouring just about every vintage afro-funk record I could find. And that's when I found The Daktaris' Soul Explosion in some back-alley vintage vinyl hole in London.

Okay, so what have we got here? We've got a band I've never heard of, we've got a cheap, blah-looking LP cover with the screaming burst "PRODUCED IN LAGOS, NIGERIA" (no date of production or release listed) and we've got exuberant sleeve notes by someone named Peter Franklin of "Abidjan Musique" promising that the record is an explosion of funk.

Sure... Why not?

So I take the record home and give it a spin; sure enough, it is an explosion of funk. But it damn sure don't sound like no Nigerian record to me.



Something about the drums just didn't sound right. I had no way to really explain it but to say they weren't swinging in a way that sounded Nigerian to my ears. They were too rigid and regimented... Too curt and direct in their attack. Even when they were covering a Fela tune



it was more grits and gravy than garri and groundnut.

Their James Brown version was pretty heavy, though



...even though some of the vocals seemed suspect.

Looking at the credits, all the musicians seemed to have Nigerian names like "Alaji Boniface Oluremi," "Gbenro 'Mr Icee' Fakeye," "Alaji Milificent Agbede," "Femi 'Dokita' Doolittle" and "Olu 'Rocksteady' Owudemi." I figured that they must be a band of Nigerian musicians based in Munich or some other place where they hadn't eaten some correct akpu in a long time or something.

Because I was not a skeptic, I took it at face value and went on for a few weeks discussing and sharing the record with other Afrobeat fans. It even took a while before I went "hmmmmm..." about the fact that the album had been "reissued" in the US by Desco Records, a tiny NYC indie that specialized in revivalist "heavy funk." I was actually a fan of a lot of the label's output and the entertaining interviews in which co-owners Phillipe Lehman and Gabriel Roth espoused their purist agenda and fulminated against digital recording technology, jazz chords, Tower of Power, slap bass, the Berklee College of Music, Phil Collins and other maddening, anti-funky abominations of the modern music world. Indeed, one of the tracks on Soul Explosion echoed the label's stance on modern recording techniques:



(come to think of it, this is one of the more authentically Nigerian-sounding cuts)

Desco's involvement made me a little suspicious. Not only did they take pride in the fact that their records sounded like they were made in 1970, they often packaged them to look like they were made in 1970 in order to fool collectors into thinking that they really were rare and priceless vinyl relics. Could this be yet another fast one?

Of course.

Let's take a closer look at that track, "Eltsuhg Ibal Lasiti": What language is that? How do you even pronounce that title?

How about backwards?

Read from right to left, it spells out "IT IS ALL A BIG HUSTLE."

Turns out Soul Explosion had not been recorded in Lagos, Nigeria at all, but in a tiny basement studio in Brooklyn. The Daktaris were in fact The Soul Providers, Desco's house band, composed of mostly white musicians! (Lead singer/percussionist Duke Amayo was authentically Nigerian, as was one of the "assistants" listed in the credits: Babatunde Adebimpe, erstwhile roommate of Soul Providers saxophonist Martin Perna and current lead singer of TV On The Radio.)


The Desco team soon splintered, with Lehman going on to start Soul Fire Records and Roth Daptone Records. The Soul Providers also split; part of the band formed the core of the well-regarded, Perna-led Afrobeat ensemble Antibalas (left) while Roth re-organized other members as the Dap-Kings (right, with frontwoman Sharon Jones) who recently played on Amy Winehouse's hit single "Rehab" and backed the UK singer on several live engagements before her personal troubles overtook the music a little bit.

Yes, once again I failed to trust my gut instinct, and I ended up getting played. Granted, I didn't mind this time because the hoax was actually pretty well-constructed, but alas... my innocence was by now choked off and grown over by a prickly callus of skepticism.

A few days ater I discovered the Soul Explosion hoax, I received in the mail a promo disc for Soul Ecstasy: Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack, a "found" soundtrack of a "lost" chop-socky Blaxploitation movie from 1972. Even before I listened to it, I read the lurid press copy that accompanied the CD:

Summer, 1972. Soul Ecstasy opened like a naked flame in a powder magazine. It was extinguished fast. Not because it had no audience, but because its audience might have burned the theatre down. At least that's what the Establishment thought... and feared. Black Panthers collaborating with the Red Chinese, young girls kidnapped and sold to Hong Kong bordellos,

Okay... whatever, I think. This shit is fake.

stalwart young men chemically transformed into mincing drag queens--no one wanted to stop and consider the absurdity of the ideas. The safest thing to do was to close the film down before too many people even heard about it. And that's what they did.

No compete print of the film is known to exist today but we still have the script, assorted stills, a few crew photos of the production, some print reviews and most importantly--its entire soundtrack. Since the story takes place in both New York and Hong Kong, its music producer, the late Ricardo Tubbs,

Ricardo. Tubbs.

Come the fuck on.

hit on the idea of fusing, rather than contrasting, the two sounds of the locales. The result is the unique music of this record.

The Inner Thumb, whom Tubbs pieced together from bands in Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, existed only as long as it took to record this music. Its members, however, continued on to have successful careers as sidemen or band members--drummer Paul Garcia joined The Medicine Hall, which had a regional hit in the South in 1975 with "That's A No-No," bassist Rich Morel can be heard playing on five other movies scores (including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,) and guitarist Jimi Redcloud toured live with Rod Stewart.

We are lucky to have found this rare gem of a soundtrack from the too often blanched-over history of American Cinema. Enjoy the experience of the always contemporary sound of true spirit, the power that can never be silenced.

Of course it was later revealed that the "soundtrack" was the creation of a production duo known as dj me dj you, but it was actually not half bad, especially the Curtis Mayfieldesque main theme. (It's also out of print, so if you care to, you can download it HERE (Divshare) or from HERE (Megaupload).)

So that's the way I be now. Doubting Thomas like a motherfucker. When presented with some quirky, high-concept artpiece, especially one characterized by peanut butter-and-chocolate mashup of hipster fantasy fulfillment ("Imagine a world in which some obscure artist or artists take all your favorite musical, literary of political concepts and bakes them together into one delicious pie--and it's fucking delicious!!") my default response is to take it with not a grain of salt, but with a big heaping ladle. Everything is fake to me until proven otherwise.

(Hell, not too long ago I was even debating with some friends the odds that champeta is really real--as in an actual street-level mass phenomenon in Colombia, as opposed to some elaborate musical fan fiction engineered by a cabal of hash-smoking, Paris-based Colombian DJs who figured it would be cool to crossbreed cumbia with soukous, highlife, juju and Afrobeat.)

The reason this comes to mind at all is because I have a 40% off coupon to Borders burning a hole in my pocket so I was thinking about finally picking up the Mingering Mike coffee-table book. And frankly, the whole Mingering Mike phenomenon has had my Spidey-sense buzzing like crazy ever since I first heard about it.

The marvelous mythology of Mingering Mike dates back to 2003 when DJ, record collector and private investigator Dori Hadar posted on the Soul Strut boards about stumbling upon a truly bizarre find while digging at a Washington D.C. flea market. As Hadar later described it in the Fall 2004 issue of Wax Poetics:

It was a box seemingly full of records, but as I pulled them out, I saw that they weren't records at all. They were fake albums--a collection of over three dozen. Each was hand painted and intricately designed, some complete with liner notes, lyrics, imaginary labels, and in some cases, cardboard records on which the grooves had been painstakingly painted. Some of the covers were even covered in shrink-wrap, which must have been meticulously removed from real albums and pulled onto these homemade ones. Whoever had made these had also gone so far as to write the album titles and call numbers onto the spines.

Talk about attention to detail! The producer of these "fake albums" had scrupulously crafted an entire fantasy tapestry of up thirty-five imaginary record labels like Nation's Capitol, Hot'n Soulful Cookin', Decision, Spooky and Puppy Dogg that issued albums with titles like Fractured Soul and Otherwise, Tuxedo Styled, You Know Only What They Tell You, Ghetto Prince, Sickle Cell Anemia, Get'tin To The Roots Of All Evils, and From Our Mind To Yours, as well as soundtracks for movies like Bloody Vampire and Brother of the Dragon, featuring musical stars like Joseph War, Rambling Ralph, The Outsiders, Jean Lantree, The Big D, Audio Andre, The United States of America Puppet Force, and the enigmatic star that this entire universe seemed to revolve around: Mingering Mike.

Hadar's posts attracted some interest, and another D.C.-area digger named Frank Beylotte reported finding a similar stash of crudely illustrated fake albums, as well as 8-track tapes, reel-to-reel tapes, videocassettes and personal letters, including official military correspondence. So Hadar and Beylotte teamed up to compare notes and eventually tracked down the owner of the stash, a fiftysomething District resident who explained that as a teen in the 1960s, he had dreamed of soul stardom and wrote up to two thousand songs.

His ambitions never came to fruition, though: Vietnam was in full swing and he got drafted in 1968. Mike duly reported to basic training, but terrified of getting killed in the jungles of Southeast Asia, he went AWOL and hotfooted it back to D.C., spending the next six years laying low, "releasing" his music as imaginary records and becoming a major music star on the glittering stages of his own mind.

Mike's alternate-universe music stardom lasted until the later half of 1970s, when the demands of grownup life necessitated his retirement from professional dreaming. He packed his records up in storage and got a job. When he briefly fell behind in payments on his storage unit, his belongings were auctioned off and ended up in the flea markets where Hadar and Beylotte found them. Now Mingering Mike's naive daydream doodles hang on museum walls and are hailed as exemplars of contemporary American folk art, and even his dream of being a recording artist has materialized in a fashion: a 45 rpm record has been released featuring music he recorded on reel-to-reel back in the 70s.

Now that is a fucking great story. It's a like some surreal fairy tale dreamed up by Philip K. Dick, Michel Gondry and Haruki Murakami as they passed a blunt back and forth in the Dusty Grooves stockroom. And I'm not buying it.

(The story, that is... I'm probably gonna buy the book, which is a handsome volume indeed!)

I dunno... Somehow, it's just too... perfect for me. It's like it was deliberately designed with all the elements to appeal to one such as myself: Unabashed soul music fanaticism? Check. Aesthetic obsession with the physical minutiae of vinyl records? Roger that! A sensitive misfit protagonist who escapes the ugliness of reality by retreating into a rich fantasy world? Yup! Hell, it's even got a private eye in it! Throw in a tortured relationship with Christian piety and I'd think it was some shit I wrote!

Like Hov said: We don't believe you, you need more people. And by "more people," I mean one person. The one individual who seemingly has never been seen by anyone: Mingering Mike himself. It seems that after decades of dreaming of stardom, now that it is upon him, he has developed an acute shyness and wishes to remain in the shadows, revealing neither his face nor his real name (It has been reported that his name is Mike Stevens, but Hadar denies this.) I guess it's understandable that Mike--who has built a normal life for himself over the past 30 years--might desire to maintain his privacy or even that he might be discomfited by the way his private fantasies have suddenly been made public... But I can't help it: his mysterious non-appearance just takes my mind back to those blurry Marvin Pontiac photos.

And it makes my me start questioning other things, too... Like the tracks found on the "Minger Player" on Mingering Mike website. They were supposedly taken from Mike's old tape recordings, but what year are they from? Something about the style of beatboxing he's using sounds more post-hip-hop than hambone to me!

But if Mingering Mike were a hoax, wouldn't journalists with much sharper investigative chops than me have figured it out by now? He's been featured on NPR, in The Washington Post and The New York Times. These aren't some dandy-ass trendspotting zines we're talking about here: this is The Paper of Record! But then again, didn't those esteemed publications let themselves get suckered by fraudsters like JT LeRoy and James Frey?

Aaaaaahhhh... I'm probably just being over-skeptical. I mean, I think Mingering Mike is real... Lord knows, I want him to be real because it's like the coolest story ever and testifies to the fact that there is some genuine wonder left in these cynical times. But shit, can you blame me for being wary about it? None other than our Chief Executive stated sagely: "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... uh, you can't get fooled again!"

Movies I want to see

It's a bit weird to think that here we are in the fourth quarter of 2007 and I have been to the movies, like, once this year--whereas in days of auld it was not unusual for me to venture to the picture shows two, three, sometimes four times a week! Now, I've come to casually detest the movie theater with the skyrocketing ticket prices, the unruly crowds, the uncomfortable seats, the ear-assaulting volume, the commercials that hold you hostage during the previews... Give me the relative comfort and control of the home-viewing experience any day.

Thing is, I really haven't been doing much of that lately, either: A knee-high stack unwatched DVDs has accumulated on my floor over the course of the year, including two Netflix movies that I've had at home for the past two months. Two months! It used to be a religious point of duty for me to turn those things around in 24 hours or less! (That's just me and my innate Igbo obsession with maximizing value, I guess; I feel like I'm not making the most of the subscription if I'm receiving less than eight movies a week.)

I hate to admit it to myself, but it seems that the interminable, soul-fraying process of producing a movie (and yes, we are still doing that even though I haven't talked about it in ages) might be dampening my passion for watching the darn things recreationally.

This trend must be reversed. Thus have I resolved to watch a whole gang of flicks before the end of the year. Two in particular that I'm raring to see right now both come from Brazil.

Tata Amaral's Antônia: O Filme, lists among its co-producers Fernando Meirelles, who is best known to international viewers as the director of the modern classic City of God. Like that film, Antônia is a gritty drama following the lives of youths in Brazil's favelas, but where Meirelles' examined the pathology of violence afflicting the manchildren in a particularly notorious Rio de Janeiro slum, Amaral turns an eye toward the world of lowerclass young women from the outskirts of grey, industrial São Paulo struggling to make it in the music world. Real-life Brazilian R&B and hip-hop performers Negra Li, Cindy Mendes, Leilah Moreno and Quelynah bring the film's eponymous singing quartet to life onscreen and music veterans like rap pioneer Thaíde and funk queen Sandra de Sá show up in supporting roles.



(I couldn't embed the subtitled trailer, but you can watch it here on the US website. You might want to take a look at the Brazilian site, too.

Antônia has has been a smashing success in Brazil and has (again like City of God) inspired a popular TV series reuniting the same cast.

At first, I kinda second-guessed myself about wanting to see this movie; is this, after all, really the kind of thing I'm into? If you were to strip away the "exotic" setting, you'd pretty much be left with Honey, Save The Last Dance, Glitter, or some other music 'n' tears chick melodrama about the redemptive power of following your dreams. But on the real though, what would you want to do that for?

In the past, I've occasionally had to fend off accusations of being a pretentious, latte-sipping hipster who watches foreign films "just because they're foreign." If I had a nickel for every time I heard "You wouldn't watch that movie if it had the exact same story but was made in America"... Well, I would have a big ol' bag of nickels.

There's probably some truth to the allegation... But ultimately, it's a rather simpleminded criterion (no pun), isn't it? After all, there is so more to a movie than just "the story." Hell, working in the field, I have realized that a lot of times it is one of the least concerns, because most of the time, people watch movies for all sorts of reasons that don't have a good goshdarn to do with "the story": The special effects are bananas. Tom Hanks is likeable. It's supposed to have a really cool car chase in it. That famous director directed it. That popular comedian is in it. Clive Owen exposes his buttocks. Yuen Woo-Ping coordinated the fight scenes. It features beautiful location shots of Bora Bora. It's based on that video game I like. Jessica Alba's body double exposes her buttocks.

I do often find myself attracted to movies that are set in foreign locales, and preferably offering something of a street-level POV rather than the exoticizing gaze of the tourist. And what's wrong with that? Since the introduction of synchronized sound, cinema has become seen as some sort of adjunct to the theatre, but it's still really a completely different kind of animal. At the heart of it, cinema is not so much about "the story" as it is about the spectacle: People go to the movies because they like to look at cool shit. And for one such as myself, "cool shit" includes Brazilian urban settings and nubile negras. So sue me.

Speaking of cool shit to look at, why don't you feast your peepers on this trailer right chea:

Manda_bala-h.ref
Uploaded by kafehole

I first caught wind of Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) a few weeks ago when Afflicted Yard referenced it, but I didn't even realize it was a real, actual movie until Undercover Black Man bigged it up. A five-year labor of love by the young American filmmaker Jason Kohn, Manda Bala is a multilevel documentary about corruption in Brazil, including a disturbing glimpse into the booming kidnapping industry. Kohn is a protege of Errol Morris and clearly adheres to the old master's ethos of infusing the documentary with as much pure cinematic punch as any fictional feature, so if nothing else, we can expect it to be cool to look at (and to listen to--the soundtrack is blazing). Manda Bala (Send A Bullet) is currently in limited release.* I guess you can find showtimes at the movie's website.

Oh yes... One more Brazilian movie just caught my notice, though I have no idea when it's opening round these parts: Tropa de Elite, the sophomore feature from José Padilha, who directed the acclaimed documentary, Bus 174:



Even without subtitles, it looks riveting!



*I just realized that the fact that Manda Bala opened here about two weeks ago somehow escaped my notice and it looks like it's already gone! Oh well... Guess I'll have to wait for the DVD (which is just fine by me, of course).

Afrikan Boy - "One Day I Went To Lidl"

I certainly do not endorse shoplifting in Lidl, ASDA or elsewhere, but I think I am quite feeling this track (and broke-ass homemade video) by Afrikan Boy.



Afrikan Boy is the youf who featured on the song "Hussel" off of M.I.A.'s Kala; I think the kid's got a future.

It's refreshing to hear a UK-based Nigerian rapper repping in something of an authentic Naija voice--Yeah, yeah... I should probably know better than anyone that the phrase "authentic Naija voice" is pretty nebulous, and a slope we don't want to go slipping down. But I guess what I'm saying is that unlike a lot of Nigerian rappers in Jand (and even many back home in Nigeria) Afrikan Boy does not seem to draw too heavily upon the vocal approach of American hip-hop or even Jamaican dancehall and ragga. Likewise, he doesn't "ovah-Naijarize" the thing too much like a few MCs in the Diaspora who crank up their Nigerian accents to the point of parody.

His flow is rudimentary and occasionally awkward, and sometimes his rhyme sense misses the mark by miles, but I hear the seed of something original there. The cadence and repetitive end-rhymes create an inbuilt call-and-response that brings to mind Nigerian nursery rhymes and children's songs like

O-yi-bo (PE-pe)
If-you-eat (PE-pe!)
You-go-see (PE-pe!)

or

Bas-sey, Bas-sey (YES-YES!)
You are dan-cing (YES-YES!)
When I told you (YES-YES!)
To learn your spel-lings (YES-YES)
But you are dan-cing (YES-YES!)
I can-not stand it (YES-YES!)
I bet-ter fol-low (YES-YES!)
(YES-YES!)

And then there's his style of humor, the subject matter and references he makes, even in his tossed-off metaphors ("out there we are grinding like pepper")... I hear him laying down building blocks with which to build an authentic, original Naija rap style that doesn't ape international trends.

(Mind you, I am by no means suggesting that Afrikan Boy is the only Nigerian rapper doing this, but for whatever reason I find myself especially appreciative of his efforts.)

Here's his Myspace.

"Made in Nigeria" Part 4 up on Boogieheads Radio

Of course, y'all already knew that because you already subscribed to the podcast, right?

Boogie and funk sounds from the 1980s this time. I mentioned before that I previously did a post commenting and giving some background on the songs obafunkie jR played on the last 80s special, but I never posted it. I'll try to do that later this week (I've barely posted anything at all in the past two weeks, huh? Yeah... been kinda busy, unfortunately). I'll probably do the same for this episode, I guess. Eventually.

Anyway, go check out the show at Boogieheads dot com.

9/11/2007

I'm not going to vote today, but if I did... I guess it would be for Ye.

And now I'm mad at myself for even acknowledging this bullshit.

*sigh* I never get tired of watching A Soldier's Story

One of my favorite movies and one of my favorite plays. (The movie version has a better ending than A Soldier's Play, though.)

The whole ensemble in this 1984 flick is so on point (especially the young Denzel Washington and the woefully underrated Howard E. Rollins, Jr.) but Adolph Caesar's performance as Sgt. Waters is just on a whole 'nother level altogether.



What a masterfully nuanced portrait of a tortured, complicated man, dripping with menace and pathos!

Damn shame he passed away so early.

A l'il 70s MPB for ya

I meant to write a proper post today but I didn't really get the time. Still, I didn't want this day to go by without me posting something. How about some Brazilian pop from the 1970s?



Yeah, I know; incredibly crappy picture. I don't have a scanner and I couldn't find any good pics for this compilation online.

The picture doesn't matter, though... It's all about the music here, and this is a pretty decent (if somewhat MOR) overview of the decade, with samba, forro, Phillyesque soul (listen for a guest spot by Brasil Soul Brother No 1 Tim Maia on Fabio's "Até Parece Que Foi Sonho"), funk, rock, and even a track from Os Mutantes' beardy prog-rock phase after they kicked the chick out of the band for not being beardy enough! Iê Xango! You even got MILTON on there!

So yeah... Enjoy an' shit.

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New "Made In Nigeria" special on Boogieheads Radio!

obafunkie jR is a London-based DJ/record collector specializing in funk, "modern soul" and most especially (as the name would suggest) boogie music. Over the past several months I've greatly enjoyed checking out his online radio show/podcast (especially since I've been getting back in touch with my own boogie roots after many years of basically repudiating my sordid Eighties history).

Do I hear you ask, "But Uchenna, what nature of fish or fowl is this 'boogie music' of which you speak?"

No? I don't? Well, a couple of people have asked me this question lately, so I'll just go ahead and answer it here anyway.

"Boogie" is one of the names casually applied to the post-disco R&B that emerged in the late 1970s as the disco craze--already alienating black audiences with its deracinated take on funk, musical facelessness and campy excess--was succumbing to the massive backlash that would force it back into the underground. In boogie, the disco's frantic robot gallop was slowed down to more relaxed and organic bounce, usually anchored by sumptuous basslines (often with a dash of slap 'n' pop) and bristling chicken scratch guitar. Basically, think of something like, say, "Boogie Oogie Oogie"



and you're on the right track.

This style, which held sway until around the mid-80s when the machines took over completely, was occasionally also called "street music" or "roller-skating music"--as roller rinks started replacing discotheques as the primary centers for social engagement and dancing in black neighborhoods. In the UK, it was sometimes called "two-step" because (I assume) with its upbeat and downbeat groove, with two accented "on" beats beats per measure, it stood in marked contrast to disco's relentless "four on the floor." This is the sound that was hot when I first really started listening to the radio and actively digging music. In Nigeria, we mostly still called it "disco," though.

Speaking of Nigeria, obafunkie jR is also extremely knowledgable about the funk and boogie music that came out of that lively nation in the 1970s and 80s, and he just returned from from Lagos after a summer spent excavating precious nuggets of vintage vinyl. His latest show is part 3 of his ongoing "Made in Nigeria" series. (The last installment, dedicated to the "Soundz of the 80s" actually inspired a blog entry I wrote a few months ago but never posted... I think I'll put it up tomorrow.)

Check out the latest show at Boogieheads dot com and by all means, subscribe to his podcast, he plays some killer stuff.

(To check out the previous "Made in Nigeria" shows, click on "Guest dj Shows")

Sir Victor Uwaifo - Greatest Hits Vol. 1

Just decided to drop something right quick before the weekend since I haven't had time to post anything the past couple of days. Since Victor Uwaifo's name has come up quick a bit lately, I figured I'd throw up some more of his stuff and this is the only thing I have on hand right now in a ready digital format.

I bought this CD a few years ago from a street vendor in Aba, but I never actually listened to it until this morning. Having done that, I'd say that "Greatest Hits" might be a slight overstatement. Don't get me wrong: it's got some great tunes (as well as some miserable dreck from the 80s) but all in all, it's a pretty conservative compilation and not at all representative of his most accomplished and experimental work.

But then again, who's to say that "accomplished and experimental work" necessarily equals "greatest hits"? Still, I think he has a lot more popular--and better--work than what's what's collected here.

Shit... What am I doing? I'm supposed to be making you want to listen to it, aren't I?

Alright... It's a good collection, really. I ain't mad at it at all. I just wish it had more stuff on it. Well, I'll try to see if there's a Vol. 2.



DiV

MEGA

Hmmm... I'm listening to the CD again as I type this and I just realized that there's some weird skipping sound at about 5:20 on track 1, "Guitar Boy." If anybody else hears it and is bothered by it, let me know and I'll re-post that track separately. (Fortunately, it's one of his most popular songs so I've got it on a bunch of different compilations.)

Update: Here's "Guitar Boy"... I aspologize for the DivShare, but I had already uploaded this like a month ago; I think that was before Div started acting screwy, too. Anyway, I tested the link and it DLed in like 3 seconds, so we should be good.

The things one finds on YouTube...

Well, this is kinda interesting. To me, anyway. Kinda.

Considering that I've previously expressed dismay over the lousy preservation treatment that's been accorded a lot of old Nigerian movies and TV shows, it kinda makes me happy to see stuff like this.

I don't know where they got this from... For all I know, it could have been ripped from the iNollywood site, in which case it's probably ancient history to the folks who use their service. I don't use their service, so it's new to me:



Basi and Company debuted in 1985, the brainchild of author and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, then hot off the success of his self-published Civil War novel Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English and collection of poems Songs in a Time of War. Basi was much lighter fare, though; a sitcom centered around a loveable trickster named Basi (or Mr. B) who comes to Lagos with dreams of becoming a millionaire but ends up living in a one-room flat surrounded by a colorful characters like his dimwitted sidekick Alali, Dandy the bartender and the golddigging Segi, all of whom he drags into his weekly moneymaking schemes while trying to stay one step ahead of his flamboyant landlady, "Madam the Madam."

Basi and Company was more than just a hit show--although it certainly was that; it was almost definitely the most popular television program to ever hit the Nigerian airwaves at that point and even gained followings in other African countries--it was an all-over marketing phenomenon. You had Basi T-shirts, Basi books, Basi hats, and the national popularity of buzz phrases like "If you want to be a millionaire, think like a millionaire!" "It's just a matter of CASH!" "I'm hungry, Mr. B!" and "Come in if you're handsome and rich!"

Looking back on it now, I'd say a large part of the show's success could be attributed to Saro-Wiwa's skillful use of certain mind-control techniques long employed by British and American TV comedies, namely the laugh track (this was the first Nigerian show to feature one) and characterization by way of punchy catchphrases that are repeated at least once per episode, though often much, much more (a.k.a. The Ever-Popular "Are You 'Avin' a Larf?" Effect).

That much aside, it was pretty well put-together (at first, anyway). I won't claim to have been a major fan of the show (I could probably count the number of full episodes I watched on one hand and still have enough fingers left over to stroke my goatee and thumb my nose--I mostly gave up on watching NTA network shows when my own favorites Second Chance and The Bala Miller Show were unceremoniously yanked off the air in '85) but the few times I checked it out, it seemed pretty entertaining, and its broad lambaste of the mid-1980s Nigerian get-rich-quick mentality really resonated with the audience.

Based on the ads at the beginning, I'm going to guess that this episode is from 1988--not a particularly enriching point in Basi and Company's run, really. You see, the part of Mr. B was originated by Albert Egbe, who I always thought was much too old for the role (he must have been in his late 30s if not early 40s) but was an incredibly engaging and likeable performer who brought the character wonderfully to life. In 1987, Egbe exited the show over money disputes with Saro-Wiwa; considering that Egbe's likeness was so intractably associated with the character, it looked like there was no way for Basi and Company to continue without him. But somehow, Saro-Wiwa reeled in young up-and-comer Zulu Adigwe to fill Basi's cap and T-shirt and soldiered on. This was universally accepted as the show's shark-jumping moment.

(I remember my father telling me that they actually explained Mr. B's radically changed appearance with some bizarre Doctor Who-esque plotline about Basi going to the moon and undergoing a physical metamorphosis! My dad can be a big kidder sometimes, so I was never really sure whether or not he made up that story. But considering the fact that Saro-Wiwa often novelized his teleplays and he later published a children's book called Mr. B on the Moon, I guess it's probably true.)

At this point, it was like Saro-Wiwa wasn't even trying very hard anymore. Production values nosedived as he delegated more and more. The scripts felt phoned-in. It was as if Saro-Wiwa himself was bored with the show, or maybe he was just too distracted to give it his full attention, seeing as he had accepted an appointment from President Babangida to shepherd the proposed 1990 transition to civilian rule (which didn't happen, of course).


The show limped along for a few more years, during which time Saro-Wiwa continued to expand the Basi and Company brand via a successful series of children's books, published teleplays and other spinoffs. Zulu Adigwe even released a record as Mr. B, based on the character's catchphrase (He can be seen singing the song at the beginning of this clip).

Basi and Company finally went off the air in 1990, as Ken Saro-Wiwa began to concentrate more and more on the causes for which he is best-remembered today: Campaigning against the Nigerian government's and Royal Dutch Shell's abuse and exploitation of the environment and people in the oil-producing Delta region of the country. In 1994, when Sani Abacha's government (with the tacit encouragement of Shell) detained him and eight other activists on a trumped-up murder charge, Saro-Wiwa became a cause celebre for human rights advocates the world over. After a rigged trial, Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues were hanged on November 10, 1995. In the years since, he's taken on the stature of a kind of contemporary Martin Luther King-type figure on account of his activism, so it's nice to see some of his other work out there.

Another interesting note: The opening credits list the Production Manager as "Nkem Owoh." I will assume this is the same Nkem Owoh who in recent years has achieved immense fame as a comedic actor, particular in the mega-grossing Osuofia in London films and the accompanying "I Go Chop Your Dollar" clip that generated a good deal of controversy when it appeared online a few years ago.

It was just a satirical in-character novelty song narrated from the POV of a 419er, but some of these onyibo people were piiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed... They even showed the video on 20/20 and Dateline NBC and they were practically exploding with outrage: It was bad enough that scores of innocent, honest Americans were being scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year when all they had tried to do was help a fellow human being out the pure goodness of their hearts and aid the besieged son of a deceased African dictator in laundering millions of embezzled dollars! And now these unwashed cockroaches skittering around in some podunk Third World shithole like Nigeria had the nerve to make a music video mocking them and bragging "white man, I will eat your dollars"??!!??



I think the line that really burned dem belly had to have been "419 is just a game... You are the LOSER... I am the WINNER!" (Probably "I BE THE MASTER!" too.) Chris Hanson was positively brimming with the kind of moral indignation that he's never mustered up when standing in a suburban kitchen chatting with CanIRapeUAnally312, who's insisting that even though he's just driven four hours to meet with a 13-year-old boy with condoms, KY Warming Formula and a ball gag in his glove compartment, his only intention was to caution the kid of the dangers of hooking up online!

But like I was saying: It's cool to see these old shows people preserved in some form even though my main priority right now is rescuing vintage musical performances. I'd love to see the musical numbers from Victor Uwaifo's variety shows make an appearance. I know he's got to have every single one saved... I mean, Victor Uwaifo has a friggin' museum where he's preserved his first guitar that he made from an oil can and some string when he was knee-high to a cricket and framed clippings of about every story that's ever been written about him. Considering the fact that he owned his own TV production facility back then, he's got to have all the tapes. Someone should convince him to put them joints out on DVD or something.

(Come to think of it, Saro-Wiwa was an independent producer who owned all his masters, too... And these clips look like they were taken from the masters. How did they get here? *shrug*)



Anyways, if you want to watch the rest of "The Transistor Radio," here's

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

The Portuguese had a word for it. (Part 2)

Before I moved to the US to continue with university college in the early 90s, my grandmother actually said to me, all serious-like, "Now you must go back to your country, where you can be happy." I said nothing and nodded sagely, but in my mind I was kinda like, "Damn, is it that serious?" I mean, don't trip: I completely considered Nigeria to be "my country," but it was pretty clear to me and most people around me that I just never seemed to completely fit in there. The idea that America was "my country" ultimately was based less on the fact that I happened to have been born there than on the perception that America was a country full of oddballs and eccentrics, so I'd probably feel right at home there.

Of course, it didn't work out that way. When I got to America, I found that regardless of whatever my birth certificate may have claimed, I was definitely a foreigner, and most people never let me forget that. Like I said before, you never really know or appreciate your country until you leave it; it seemed like I became more Nigerian with each day I lived in the US. (Actually, more than that, I found myself becoming more African, which was a bit of a new experience altogether.)

Still, my existence felt somewhat clouded by alienation: I was an outsider in the mainstream society, and while there was a pretty sizable Nigerian community in Boston, I really didn't feel welcome among that crowd either. I'm pretty sure most of them thought I was gay. At this point, the only two groups I felt fully embraced by were Latinos and Haitians. (Do I repeat myself? Yes, technically, Haitians are Latinos, but you know what I mean.)

So I'm not particularly surprised one night, about a year and a half after my arrival, when I'm on the bus going home from work and some middle-aged Haitian guy steps up and casually strikes up a conversation with me in Kreyol like we're Port-au-Prince pallies or something. He prattles on a mile a minute for about a half a minute, before I cut him off mid-mile with a helpless shake of the head and a polite "M'pa pale kreyol."

Undeterred, he switches to English: "You fwom Afwica."

Pause: I kinda hate it when people start conversations like that because it's usually a prelude to all kinds of annoying assumptions. "Yeah," I sigh.

"I know dat! I know dat!" he exclaims. "You know how I know?"

He's obviously quite pleased with his successful deduction and wants to celebrate by verbally illuminating his logical process like Sherlock Holmes explaining the trail of clues to his dimwitted audience stand-in Watson. Why deny him the pleasure? I figure. "How?" I ask.

Basking in satisfaction, he leans in to whisper in my ear. "You wea'ing shoes." he says.

Huh?

Now, based on prevailing stereotypes, I guess I'd've understood if he assumed I were African if I wasn't wearing shoes, but how does wearing shoes...?

"You wea'ing shoes," he repeats, sensing my confusion. "Not sneakers. And you wea'ing pantalon, not jeans. So I know you either Haitian or Afwican."

"How do you know I'm not just a professional?" Of course, I'm not a professional; I work in a record store. But I am a bit bothered by his stereotyping and also concerned about the degree to which my mode of dress allows me to be so easily profiled. Yes, I don't usually wear sneakers, but I don't think it has anything to do with where I'm from--I just happen to find a lot of the sneaker styles of the 90s to be immensely ugly. As for the trousers, well, I just didn't have any clean jeans to wear that day. I notice that he is similarly attired, in slacks and casual shoes, with a button-up shirt.

"Also," he continues, ignoring my question. "If you was fwom Amewica, your pants would be down here."

He gestures to a latitude just south of his buttcheeks and laughs. I laugh, too.

"You a musician?" he asks, nodding towards the big, battered hardshell guitar case sitting next to me. I just started taking lessons and I had one before work that evening.

"No, I'm just learning."

"You playing Afwican music?" he ventures excitedly.

"Nah, mostly soul like... Curtis Mayfield? And reggae." Pause. Grimace. "But my teacher keeps making learn Eagles songs."

"'Hotel California'?"

"More like 'Lyin' Eyes' and 'Take It Easy.'"

"I am a musician," he declares. "I used to be a musician. I play bass." He pronounces it like the fish. "I used to play Afwican music."

"Oh really? What kind of African music?"

"Mewengue and salsa," he proclaims proudly.

"That's not African music," I offer delicately, trying to keep the "duh" out of my voice.

"Yes, it is!" he insists. "Spanish music is Afwican music!"

Okay, thinks I. This conversation got ludicrous real quick, didn't it?

"You don't know?" he laughs, not bothering keep the "duh" out of his voice. "Spanish music come fwom Afwica. It's all the same widdim, you know? The widdim."

I thought about this exchange a few weeks later when I started hearing dance band highlife in my sleep. For several nights, voluptuous basslines scored my dreams, peppered with skeletal, off-kilter percussion patterns. One night, I woke up and was surprised to find that I still heard the music: the deep, loping bassline and lopsided percussion was actually seeping through the thin walls of my apartment. Still half asleep, I opened the door and stepped out to ascertain the source of the music--the rhythm emerged, fully dressed up with horns, flutes and guitars and it became clear that what I was hearing wasn't highlife at all, just the Puerto Ricans next door blasting salsa in the middle of the night.

Spanish music is African music, the Haitian dude had said. What did that really mean? Well, obviously I knew that the transatlantic slave trade had extended to the Caribbean and South America and as a result there was some African lineage present in the people and, by extension, the music of those regions, but I never thought too deeply about how (and why) it manifested itself. Suddenly, I was wondering why the basslines in salsa sounded like highlife and why the basic organizing rhythm pattern in much Afro-Latin music, the clave, was just about identical to a Calabar rhythm called tinkoriko and most all, why I was so damned disappointed that the sound I'd heard was not highlife?

I was homesick, I had to admit. I missed Calabar. And while I'd never considered myself a fan of it before, I missed that damn highlife music. Like it or not, it was a part of my consciousness, triggering comforting memories of rainy Calabar mornings, listening to those easygoing clave rhythms and tart, coppery horns while getting ready for school. Or hanging out on the fringes of "grownup" parties with friends, trying to get loaded on free drinks and talk to girls while the heavy-of-foot old folks shuffled to languorous rhythms, singing along to the choruses with a mix of pleasure and sadness for the good old days that seemed to get gooder the older they got. I wanted a little bit of that feeling, but I didn't have any highlife music on hand. And it was quite rare to find highlife CDs in American stores back then. The closest I could get to that feeling was through Latin music: Fania Records, new-wave salsa, old-school Cuban son... I just immersed myself in it.

(Some people found this odd, though; during one of my National Guard weekends, my squad sergeant--an African-American gentleman in his late 30s with whom I had bonded over regular discussions of early-80s R&B and "boogie" music--found some Arsenio Rodriguez and Ruben Blades tapes in my bag and sat me down for a lecture.

"Look, son," he said. "I know you wanna fuck some of these fine-ass Puerto Rican girls out here, and if I was young and single, I'd probably wanna do the same. But you gotta be yourself, man. You ain't gotta start listening to this 'La Cucaracha' shit to make these Latin girls like you. Just be yourself. You ain't gotta go to them. Let them come to you." )

So I listened to a lot of Afro-Cuban music. And I read books like Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit and Black Music of Two Worlds and The Latin Tinge (both by John Storm Roberts). I learned about how the traditional music of African slaves survived south of the US and developed into various forms of Latin American music, then was imported back home in the 1930s to inspire the creation of modern African music. Learning about the legacy of African art in the New World imbued me with a renewed understanding of African culture back home.

Not long thereafter, while re-stocking the shelves in the World Music department, I came across a CD called Money No Be Sand. My attention arrested by the pidgin title, I took a closer look: 1960s Afro-lypso, Pidgin Highlife, Afro-Soul, Afro-Rock is what the sub-title read. And it boasted liner notes by John Storm Roberts! Intrigued, I took the CD home with me.

Now, remember that the World Music establishment at this time was fairly ignorant about highlife. Most of them didn't even know what it was. If you ever heard mention of highlife, it was usually in reference to Fela, because it was generally known that his music was "a fusion of James Brown's funk, Miles Davis's jazz and traditional Nigerian highlife music (whatever that is)." I remember the trade mags struggling to find the vocabulary to even describe this compilation. Most of them settled on "nutty" and "weird and wonderful," and perhaps predictably, they gravitated towards its more familiar aspects ie the awkward but endearing attempts at Western styles: Jimi Solanke & The Junkers' Yoruba garage rock on "E Je Ka Jo," The Ramblers Dance Band's spirited take on The Tennors' reggae classic "Ride Yu Donkey," Charlotte Dada's cool and haunting Latin-inflected interpretation of The Beatles' "Don't Let Me Down."

It was the more straight-ahead highlife numbers that seized my imagination, though: I think part of the reason I never fully got highlife before was because I just didn't understand the context it was coming from. Maybe because of the festering wounds of the Civil War and the crash of the initial optimism that followed independence, our parents never talked in too much detail about the Sixties. Sure, we read books that were written during that era, but I really don't think people from my generation came close to understanding the excitement of being the first generation of Africans to live fully in a world of modernity and glamour, in which they were free to shape their own destinies. Most of my age-mates thought of highlife as dusty old "traditional" music; what we didn't understand was that highlife was anything but. As the German African art scholar Ulli Beier put it in 1966:

"'Highlife' is a reaction against the austerity of traditional African life. It is a way of life that believes in pleasure, music, drinking, free love, and ostentatious spending of money. The Onitsha writers speak about this new generation: schoolboys, teachers, drivers, clerks--people who have not yet gone very far in being 'westernized', but who already find themselves in sharp opposition to traditional ways of life."

Listening to the songs on Money No Be Sand, I finally got that, and I could see for the first time how this music reflected the aspirations, the sensuality, the passion of a young generation navigating a brave new world and looking forward to the future with nothing but hope.

One thing I still couldn't put a finger on, though, was why that inherent wistfulness. That undercurrent of sadness I always heard in the music. That frayed feeling to its harmony. But once again, Latin America helped me develop the conceptual vocabulary by which to think and talk about African music.

Back when I used to watch Fantástico, I was always mesmerized by the bittersweet flavor that seemed to characterize much Brazilian music. The melodies were so pretty and lilting, but they also had a strange... incompleteness to them. Like something that was perpetually missing, creating an instability that was never fully resolved: a lingering sense of longing or sadness even when the music was upbeat (such as in this discofied Gal Costa number I used to love):



Years later, I would learn that there was a name for this wistful tension between sorrow and joy: saudade, a uniquely Lusophone concept that was famously untranslatable into English. My Cape Verdean roommate tried, though; he told me it was "homesickness... but not really." A Brazilian coworker described it as "like sadness where you're happy to be sad." Probably the most succinct definition I've come across is the one by writer A.F.G. Bell from his book, In Portugal:

The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.

Is there a word for that in any African language? There should be, because I hear it in many different musics all along the West African coast and even as far down as in Congo. Is it the legacy of the Portuguese explorers and traders who, by virtue of being the first Europeans to set foot in these areas, set Africa on course to modernity (a journey that has seemed like a boon and a curse, often at the same time)? Or is it more likely some deeper, older impulse in the African psyche that recognizes pleasure and pain as two sides of the same coin, that renders songs of joy in gloomy minor keys and dirges as celebratory frolicks?

Aaaaahhh... Questions, questions. What do I know? Just listen to this music, people.



> DOWNLOAD DIVSHARE! (i hope*) <

> MEGAUPLOAD <

> ZSHARE <


*I know DivShare's been "acting like bra and pant" lately, but I tested this link and it downloaded at a decent rate; it came through in less than a minute.

Moving on...

And then the next morning you really feel sore.

Over the past week, I've been pretty bummed out (to say the very least) about the whole hard drive thing. I mean, I had braced myself for the worst the moment I heard the drive emitting that ominous clicking sound the weekend before last, and by last Saturday, when the body was officially committed to the ground, I thought I had already pretty much gotten all my mourning out of the way. But then when I woke up on Sunday morning, it really started to pain me. I lost all my gotdamned music, man!

Fortunately, I had backed up a lot of my data... But then, a whole lot more of it I had not. And sure enough, most of the stuff I didn't back up was the stuff that's probably hardest to find. For some reason, I tended to back up albums more than individual tracks, so the rare, random mp3s I found in odd places, the custom mixes, the exclusive tracks... Gone, baby, gone.

And then there's the hundreds of personal photos, like a thousand reference photos for TOO MUCH BEAUTIFUL WOMAN and other projects, notes, drafts, randomly recorded ideas, sketches, bookmarks, journal entries, pricey applications obtained via fortuitous or dubious means that now have to be re-acquired...

On the more immediate level, a lot of the music and pics I wanted to put up here in posts I had lined up for the near future is also gone. But what are ya gonna do? *sigh* Really, I have nobody to blame but myself... So I might as well just man up, take the L, and move on.

There. Manned up. Moving on. Moaning about it no more.

One thing, though: Please forgive if I occasionally have to bum some music from y'all... Including stuff you might have originally gotten from me. For instance, those of you with whom I traded music at that other place where we were sharing Brazilian, Congolese, Latin and Highlife music a few months ago? If you have that Giants of Danceband Highlife compilation I put up back then, hooketh thy boy up.

Moving on.

Sir Victor Uwaifo & His TitiBitis of Africa - Jackpot

Yes, I finally got my computer back today (Woo-hoo!). Yes, all my data really is gone (D'OH!).

Such is life. I no fit die.

Anyway, here's a nice album that Jon and I were discussing in the comments of the "Portuguese" post. I was able to find it somewhere while trying to re-plant the seeds of my digital music collection. I apologize in advance for the DivShare... I know it's been acting up of late but it's kinda the best I can do for now. Just to make things a little easier, I throw in supplementary Megaupload link, 'ey?





> DOWNLOAD IT FROM DIVSHARE! (I HOPE!) <

or

> DOWNLOAD IT FROM MEGAUPLOAD! <

> OR ZSHARE EVEN! <

EDIT: Just realized that the tracks are mislabeled on the album sleeve and also in this file... The one that says "Ewere Noyoyo" is actually "Sakpaide Special," and vice versa. I don't want to have to re-upload these (though I probably will end up doing so later anyway because that's how obsessive I am) so please, correct that error when you download, please!

Status: Involuntary hiatus

Well, I didn't expect to still be computerless at this point in the week, but alas, I am and probably will remain so for the next few days. Nevertheless, I will try to get the second part of "The Portuguese Had a Word For It" up by tomorrow (had hoped to do it today but I couldn't squeeze in the time at work).

What really sucks is that I wanted to add some music and photos to the post but all that stuff is stuck on my hard drive (I mean, I hope it's still stuck on my hard drive! hahahaha whimper)... Thankfully I managed to upload some stuff before the crash and I have enough posts in the vault to last a few days.

In the meantime, though, I'd recommend that you check out something much cooler: John Beadle's new African music blog, Likembe.

I can remember a time not too long ago--I'm talking about maybe the mid-to-late 1990s--when there were hardly any authoritative resources or even reasonably trustworthy reference materials on African popular music. And what little there was usually was oriented mostly towards music of the "grioty" variety that was pretty big amongst the world music set back then. I can understand why, mind you... That stuff does present a rather attractive image of African music: Heroically tasteful, sufficiently exotic and un-westernized, part of a tradition stretching back several centuries, exuding an aura of dignity and regal austerity.

Next to such noble notions, my knowledge of loudly, proudly tawdry Nigerian pop music from the 1960s, 70s and 80s seemed pretty inconsequential, if not even slightly embarrassing. Frankly, I didn't even really think of it as "knowledge" per se... It was more like nostalgic trivia: hazy childhood memories of songs that very few people seemed to remember and certainly nobody I knew remotely cared about. So yeah, I didn't talk about it that much.

All that changed when I discovered the African Music Homepage.

The African pop discographies that Mr. Beadle and Prof. Endo assembled completely floored me, and at the same time validated me in a weird way. Before then, I don't recall ever having seen African popular music--and Nigerian pop in particular--documented with such painstaking attention to detail. It was a revelation to see these seemingly insignificant records that even people back home viewed as gaudy trash catalogued with the rigor and esteem one observes only amongst moldy figs and the curators Northern Soul.

All of a sudden, I felt that I was in my own way a keeper of a tradition, and that I should do what I could to preserve this legacy before it disappeared completely.

I reckoned that maybe I should write a book. Then I reckoned that maybe John should write a book, as he knows much, much more than I do.

While no plans for such a volume have been announced as yet, I'm really excited to see that he's doing the next best thing in the form of a blog. He's already been quite an encouraging presence in the African music blogosphere, chipping in at Benn Loxo and Matsuli Music, not to mention helping out round hereabouts when I've been too lazy busy to digitize records to share with you, my dear friends. So I'm pretty excited to see what he does over in his own storefront.

So run on over to Likembe and get yourself schooled. I know that's what I'm about to do (before my allotted hour on this library computer runs out!).





*John Collins' West African Pop Roots and Music Makers of West Africa are notable exceptions (hey, does anybody know what's up with his new Highlife Time, by the way? I need to get a copy of that!) and Ronnie Graham's The Da Capo Guide to Contemporary African Music was a very noble effort, as well.

The Portuguese had a word for it. (Part 1)

Don't know if y'all know this, but today is Vinyl Record Day, celebrating the 130th anniversary of the Phonograph (even though technically, Edison's invention originally played wax cylinders and then shellac plates before the vinyl record came into vogue in the 1940s... but you get the idea). As a result, a lot of music blogs are running shamelessly fetishistic tributes to vinyl today and I originally intended to do the same, but alas, it looks like my hard drive seems to have imploded yesterday, taking with it my collection of vinyl cover art and label scans (not to mention like 30 gigs of music and countless photos), so while I struggle to hold back the tears over here, I'll just throw up this rambling-ass entry I wrote a few weeks ago but never posted.

(Edit: I just realized that this posted up as a Saturday, August 11 entry, so I guess I should confirm that Vinyl Record Day was actually on Sunday, August 12. I guess because I posted very early on Sunday morning, Blogger's clock interpreted it as still being Saturday. *shrug*)

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I've mentioned before that Latin American music has often served as a conduit and template for my understanding of African music, and to be honest, it's always bothered me a little bit. I mean, what does that say about me? Is my mind really so colonized by The West that I can't even think about and take pride in my own cultural heritage without relating it in some way to forms that are "exotic" and even "neo-African," but still fundamentally western?

I don't think I'm really alone in this, though... After all, didn't Fela say that he never really appreciate African culture until he saw Black Americans wearing dashikis on 125th Street in Harlem? And who was the wise man who said that in order to truly understand one's country, one must leave it? I really do believe that: you need to take a few steps away in order to see the forest and not just the trees. Plus, it can exceedingly difficult to actually concentrate and get a decent perspective on African culture while actually in modern Africa; one interesting thing about living in so-called "Third World" countries is the way you're so often deluged by avalanches of cultural detritus dumped from every other corner of the globe. For instance, I'm sure that many Nigerians d'un certain age will remember when one of the most popular shows on television was a very strange German game show called Telematch:



Yes, it was just as inane as it looks from the intro, kinda like a live-action Laff-a-Lympics (which was, by the way, another pretty popular program, along with other forgettable, low-rent Hanna-Barbera fare like Clue Club).

Probably my favorite of all these bizarre imports, though, was an over-the-top variety show from Brazil called Fantástico - O Show Da Vida:



Watching Fantástico was a bit like falling through a looking-glass into a wonderland where it was always carnaval, exploding with riotous color, light and movement, somewhat frightening imagery, broad humor and probably a little more stark sexuality than most would be comfortable with in a family program. Above all that, though, the show sticks out in my mind for igniting my lifelong passion for Brazilian music via the performances by MPB icons like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Maria Bethania:



or former Mutante Rita Lee (who kinda scared me back in the day):



(Fantástico is actually still on TV in Brazil; I caught it a couple of times last year during the brief period that I had TV Globo in my cable package, but it was a crushing disappointment. Everything I had loved about it was gone: the freewheeling whimsy, the glorious rococo, the camp stylings, the freaky production numbers. What was left was vacuous showbiz junket interviews and "news" stories about UFOs and the face of the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing in a bowl of oatmeal. Turns out that sometime in the early 1990s, the format had been changed from variety show to Hard Copy-like newsmagazine. It was like having bamboo shoots shoved up under my childhood. You really can't go home again, I guess.)

It's not like we spent all day rotting our brains in front of the boob tube, though... Back then, most TV stations didn't even start their daily broadcast until four in the evening. The constant distraction of crappy homegrown digital movies was as yet undreamed of and only a few folks had VCRs anyway, so to amuse ourselves, we kids spent a lot of time reading.

Crazy shit, I know... But this really happened.

Now I'm not gonna bullshit you and make like we were working our way through The Great Books in our free time; mostly it was pulpy trash like James Hadley Chase (hardboiled American crime stories as written by an ex-Royal Air Force pilot who had never even been to America) or Enid Blyton's polite and painfully English young adventurer yarns (Hullo! Well-scrubbed middle-class children foil dastardly smugglers and make it home in time for tea and sandwiches? Good old Julian, Dick and Anne, George and Timmy the dog! Hurrah!) or, for starter readers, the lightweight juvenilia of the African Reader's series.

The African Reader's Library was conceived by African Universities Press in the early 1960s to serve as, I guess, a junior broda to the groundbreaking Heinemann African Writers Series. Several of its popular titles, like Onuora Nzekwu and Michael Crowder's Eze Goes To School, or The Village School and One Week, One Trouble (both by Anezi Okoro) were typically Horatio Alger tales or picaresque stories built around the exploits of young boys (always young boys) on their rocky quest for education.

By the time I was reading them in the early 80s, these novels were around 20 years old, but I never really noticed. After all, most seven-year-olds don't really think to read the publication info on the copyright page, and aside from the occasional curious monetary references (pounds and shillings rather than naira and kobo), there wasn't much in the actual texts that made them come off as particularly dated.

I still remember the first time I encountered a scene in one of those stories that was so anachronistic and jarring to my sensibilities as to make me acutely aware that the book in my hands was a relic of distant (and bizarre) times past: It was in Nkem Nwankwo's Tales Out Of School (or maybe it was the sequel, More Tales Out Of School, I forget). In this scene, a classroom full of secondary school students in Form One or Form Two--that is, eleven and twelve-year-olds--are fooling around in class, celebrating their defiance of some evil authoritarian prefect or teacher by drumming on their desks, playing invisible horns and singing highlife songs. This scene was so shocking that I actually put the book down in bewilderment.

Highlife? I wondered. Why on earth are these kids playing "old man music"?

Yes, I really did call it that. Before I learned the proper name "highlife," I--along with my sisters and many of our peers--generally referred to it as "old man music" and associated it with two broad, sometimes overlapping images:

1) the sour, leather-skinned old coot on your street who would never return your ball when it landed in his yard, choosing instead to remind you (just in case you had forgotten his last wild-eyed rant) that he had Fought Side-by-Side With The White Man™ in the Burma Theater so that scoundrels of no caliber such as yourself could be free to make “ah bloody hell of ah noise!” He would then affect clipped British diction as he fumed about “louts and scallywags” before returning indoors (confiscated ball under his arm) to his Chief Inyang Nta Henshaw records.

2) seedy drinking parlours populated by rheumy, hairy-eared leches, rank gin fumes seeping from their pores as they feasted upon dog meat and clumsily tried to seduce bubbleheaded, barely pubescent schoolgirls. (I once asked my cousin why highlife music was so called; he explained to me with all seriousness that the appellation was meant to be ironic. I believed him since so many of the people I identified with highlife were... Well, kinda lowlifes, really.)

Now, allow me to clarify a bit here: When I say that highlife was “old man music,” my issue was not (just) that the people who listened to it were old or that it wasn’t the latest flavor of the minute blazing its way up the hit parade. After all, most of the music I was digging at the time was stuff like classic Motown, Elvis, The Beatles, The Fifth Dimension--fifteen to twenty-year-old platters extracted from my parents’ record stack (when you haven’t even been on this earth up to a decade yourself, everything is new to you).

Also, I actually did like some highlife myself. I loved the aggressively flashy and forward "Ekassa" style of Sir Victor Uwaifo, for instance, and occasionally savored the mellow ambience engendered at family celebrations in the village by the gentle, muted wah-wah groove of Osadebe and the like. For some reason, though, I never really thought of that stuff as being "highlife" at the time. I can't remember exactly what I categorized it as, but I know that when I thought "highlife"--especially living in Calabar--I was thinking about the old-school "dance band" music with its quaint horn charts and spartan "palmwine" guitar style (so named for its association with drunkenness).

I couldn't conceptualize this sound as the theme music for hot-blooded Nigerian youth any more than I could imagine that a moldy old geezer like the Ol' Solja up the street had ever been bright-eyed and lusty, or fallen in love or had hopes and dreams beyond getting his jollies off by seizing errant footballs from hapless youngsters. Something about the music sounded inherently old and evocative of a faded glamour and vitality. There was a certain note of sadness and loss in it, and a languor to even the uptempo numbers that made it the perfect soundtrack for those whose best days were definitively behind them. Which is probably why I associated it so closely with Calabar.

"Calabar" was what Portuguese sailors called the Efik fishing settlement they encountered on the Bight of Bonny in the 15th century (They accientally also gave the name "Calabar" to a nearby Ijaw settlement, so the Efik area became "Old Calabar" and the Ijaw "New Calabar") and developed into probably the number one port for the trade in slaves. It's estimated that for up to 30% of all Africans shipped off to the New World in chains, Calabar Beach was the last thing they saw before being tossed into the dank hold.

(A good number of those enslaved Africans ended up in Cuba, by the way. There, slaves from Calabar became known as Carabali, and were greatly feared for their fierceness in combat and their clandestine, ultra-masculine Ekpe cult, which served as the foundation for the super-secret Cuban Abakuá society, the fount of seminal Afro-Cuban musical forms such as rumba and guaguanco.)

(See? I'm doing it again!)

Oh yes, one other interesting factoid about Calabar's macabre slaving past: From it we find possibly the oldest literary work by a Nigerian writing in English, The Diary of Antera Duke, being three years in the life of an Efik chief, 18th January 1785 to 31st January 1788. Only a fragment of it survives today, but it's an intriguing read indeed; Duke records in colorful broken English the day-to-day life of a local slave kingpin: Putting on his "whiteman trousers" to chill out and drink tea with the European slavers. Venturing out on expeditions to neighboring towns and villages to round up captives to sell to the whites. Storming a local bar and decapitating its patrons as a human sacrifice to his ancestors. (Legends such as this persisted as terrifying fables during my childhood; whenever an Obong--the ceremonial paramount ruler of Calabar--died, parents wouldn't let their kids leave the house until it had been announced that he'd been safely buried, as it was rumored that the Obong's minions still beheaded random people in order to properly inter the king.)

Even after the slave trade was abolished, Calabar remained a major trading port and the British kept it as the seat of government for for the Niger Coast Protectorate, making it, in essence, the first capital of Nigeria. With its modern roads, and other amenities such as the first post office in the country, the first primary school and one of the first and best secondary schools (the legendary Hope Waddell Training Institute), Calabar became known as "the Canaan City," the land of milk and honey. Even when the Brits shifted their administrative center to Lagos in 1906, Calabar retained a certain glamour as a cultural center, especially for its music. You see, Calabar was the home of the Niger Coast Constabulary Band, a police band that played loud, John Philip Sousa-style military marches on modern brass instruments. The influence of the Niger Coast Constabulary Band propagated a strong tradition of brass orchestras in Calabar, chief amongst them the legendary Calabar Brass Band, who would parade through the main streets of town playing their Africanized take on Salvation Army music with a gaggle of revelers trailing behind them.

When Calabar's economy started to decline in the 1930s, a lot of musicians left town to resettle in more happening cities, taking with them the distinctive Calabar brass sound that would infuse a very elegant and "modern" elan (and volume) to various local folk musics that up until then were built largely around low-impact instruments like guitars and mandolins, rattles, tambourines, empty bottles and tabletops. The Calabar Brass Band relocated to Lagos, where they continued their tradition of parading across the island and, under the alias "Lagos Mozart Orchestra," recorded sides such as "Ore Mi Kini Se?" ("What Did You Do, My Friend?"):

Lagos Mozart Orchestra - "Ore Mi Kini Se?"

The Calabar sound inspired many young players to pick up horns and was integral to the development of highlife. Calabar was a place that was frequently immortalized in song and just about every highlife dance band worth their salt had a "Calabar" number or two in their repertoire.

(Incidentally, here are two, both from Ghanaian bands: Jerry Hansen's Ramblers and King Bruce & the Black Beats:

Ramblers Dance Band - "Ekombi"

King Bruce & the Black Beats - "Abasi Do"

That was all over by the time I was growing up in Calabar, though.

Over the past decade, recently-departed Cross River State governor Donald Duke has done much to sexy up the Calabar's image, promoting it as one of the most progressive, pleasant and livable cities in the country. Still, my predominant image of it is one of a provincial town full of mold-covered, colonial-style architecture (Kinda like how I imagine Old Havana, I guess). My Calabar was a ghost town, a land that time had passed by, and nothing was more symbolic of that than its hoary old horn highlife which had seemingly fallen out of favor everywhere else in the country since after the war. Calabar was a place where young people complained how "dead" it was, and dreamed of getting the hell out of soon as they were old enough.

So once I was old enough, I got the hell out.

(Alright, y'all... I said it was rambling. And you know I hate long, long entries, so I'll just cut it off here and post the rest later.)