Tag: King Sunny Ade

“Whenever I hear the word culture that is when I reach for my revolver”. This quote famously misattributed to a great insider of Nazi Germany, the obese, bejeweled Hermann Goring, is a classic example of how the very notion of culture may rub people the wrong way, particularly when national pride comes in the way. Yet the entire Nazi project was itself a misbegotten cultural venture. Culture is what defines a people in their material, spiritual and intellectual essence. This is why it is often important to sidestep failure in politics in order to highlight success in other realms of human endeavour.

On September 22nd, the great Nigerian cultural icon and musical superstar, Sunday Adegeye, aka King Sunny Ade, will turn seventy to great aplomb. The mesmerizing, serially gifted Ondo-born crooner and electrifying stage wizard has been with us for so long that he seems to have become a permanent fixture of the Nigerian post-colonial culturefest. That Sunny is only turning seventy is a glorious tribute to formidable staying power and indomitable will. Nigerian politics has something to learn from Nigerian music about human resilience and the capacity for ceaseless self-surpassing.

But the word at the moment is that Sunny Ade has mysteriously absconded from the Nigerian scene for a sojourn in America, the land of endless possibilities. Like all kings, Sunny Ade is a man of confounding mystery. The bet is that Sunny will be back on time, and in the full radiance of old African royalty. The supreme irony of Sunny Ade’s life is that although born into royalty as an Ondo prince, it has taken his famed guitar and monumental self-belief to canonize him as a global monarch of mellifluous music.

Yet in another important respect, Sunny Ade’s life confirms our dictum that great expectations often happen in great but unexpected ways. The word out there is that the young Sunny Ade fled his Oshogbo homestead for Lagos on the pretext that he was going to “university” but in reality to pursue his fledgling musical career. Decades later and as a crowning feather to a glorious career, Sunny was appointed a Visiting Professor of Music at the notable Obafemi Awolowo University without having seen the four walls of a university. It doesn’t get more dizzying and gravity-defying.

Four years ago in pursuit of the stated and avowed mission of this column to honour Nigerians who have really and truly distinguished themselves in their field of endeavour, this column paid tributes to Ebenezer Obey, the other Yoruba musical titan and Sunny Ade’s great rival and historical counterfoil, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday ( “A Master-musician at seventy”). The personal parallels and points of socio-cultural convergence between the two musical geniuses remain the same and we must seek approval to borrow generously from the earlier column.

Music is one of the greatest creations of the human species. The love of harmony and concord is at the root of civilization and human development .So far nothing can rival the harmony of sweet music. The great musician is also a healer, a divine shaman and seer rolled into one and operating at the shifty margins of hope and honourable delusion. Let’s face it life itself would have been intolerable without these psychological sweeteners. Often conceived in scary solitude, music is executed at the level of communal rapture. Music is the food of the soul.

If Obey had become a great lawyer or medical practitioner as his parents had secretly wished, he could not have contributed more to the development of culture and civilization. If only Nigeria could produce politicians who work so hard, so diligently and so assiduously at their game. In less than fifty years, Sunny Ade together with his great Yoruba contemporary have taken juju music to a realm that could only be dreamed of at the beginning of the last century. In fact at that point in time, there was nothing like juju music.

It is a befitting tribute to these two great musical maestros and illustrious sons of the Yoruba race that they have turned the dreams of our forefathers to sweet actuality. Juju music has been transformed beyond our imagination. Today, the Nigerian nation and the Yoruba race are culturally richer and thanks to the fruits of their endeavour, their worthy descendants have placed the nation on the global map.

Perhaps no two other musicians have completely dominated the musical scene of their society like the two titans. Beginning from the end of the sixties, Obey and Sunny seized the musical imagination of the Yoruba society by the scruff of the neck.  Fifty years later, the duo are still at it in their different ways. While Obey ventured into gospel music, bringing his great genius for enchanting rhythm to bear on spiritual songs, Sunny, the son of a master organist, is still entertaining audience with his explosive foot works.

It was originally a musical union of contraries, forged in great rivalry and tense competition. In many respects, one was the perfect foil for the other. While Obey was calm, demure and a bit frozen and rigid on stage, Sunny was gamey and enterprising, darting and strutting like an energetic peacock; while Obey affected the airs of the traditional musical aristocrat, Sunny ambled about like a cosmopolitan modernist; while the one was a great composer of memorable lyrics with delectable rhythm to match, the other was a master craftsman and instrumentalist of juju music as electrifying orchestra.

The rivalry and urge to excel drove each to the very frontiers of improvisation and ingenuity. They both brought great innovations to bear on the genre they have inherited. Each kept the other on his toes. Obey has disclosed that he often composed in toilets and the strangest of places and could go on for several nights without sleep. Both were lucky that their era coincided with the advent of modern technology and the amplification of sound brought about by electricity.

Often, the innovation would backfire and things would go comically awry. In their passion to radicalise the music, the form sometimes went beyond the content. For example, when Sunny Ade introduced the electric piano to juju music, it elicited a sharp jibe from Ebenezer Obey:

Olomolanke o le gberu de Dugbe

E se oooo

Thereafter, the wheeled monstrosity made a dramatic disappearance from Sunny Ade’s musical repertoire never to reappear. Both musicians also suffered witty taunts and condescending jibes from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti who often counselled the upcountry yokels not to stray into areas of music beyond their professional competence. It was rumoured that Ebenezer Obey in particular took more than Afro beat percussion from the great musical genius and cultural icon, a situation which elicited some friendly fire from Fela:

Esu lonse onimoto to pami laja ooo

Esu lonse onimoto to pami laja

Aja ti mo fi np’oya meta meta 

Dende oro re….

In celebrating the great duo, what is often forgotten is the influence of their local cultural milieu or what we propose as the tyranny of the mother culture on their music. In the case of Ebenezer Obey, the leisurely aristocratic beat with its brilliant talking drum as gloriously finessed by Mutiu Kekere Jimoh, the diminutive prodigy, reminds one of the Shakara music so beloved by the ancient Egba aristocracy.

Shakara music with its sonorous crooning has influences of northern music as carried across Iseyin and the old Oyo plains. In the case of Sunny Ade, the pulsating muscular beat bears echoes of the coastal contacts of the old Ondo merchant class as seen in the music of the great duet, Suberu Oni and the Why Worry Orchestra and of course many forgotten and unheralded yoyogbe and gbatueyo folk musicians from the bowels of Egin  culture and civilization.

The talking drum is a great innovation in traditional music with its own intricate dynamics and inner logic. It is worthy of further scholarly inquiries.  Depending on the mood of the drummer and the occasion, the talking drum sometimes complements the lyrical beat. At other times, it subverts the overall architecture of music by rebellious innuendoes. And when it is short of victims, it subverts itself like an eccentric ventriloquist.

For example, when Ebenezer Obey sang the praise of Eji Gbadero who was later to meet a gruesome end at the executioners ’stakes, the talking drum went into a rapture of delirious approval:

Omo Gbadero, dami, dami dami

Ariwo majesin kii p’alakara

Dami dami dami.

But as soon as Sunny Ade begins singing about two lady fish hawkers in Ita Faji, the impish drummer began quietly upbraiding his master:

Obinrin dudu obirin pupa

 Olorun maje o kuku obinrin.

As it is in politics, so it is in music. In the dialogic imagination of the post-empire Yoruba people, there can be no authoritarian master voice. Snooper takes immense delight in decoding this class struggle even within the arena of music. Perhaps a peep into the very origins of juju music is in order at this point.

As we have pointed out, juju music is very much a twentieth century phenomenon. The name juju itself is a corruption of voodoo, or African magic. Lagos was where it all began. There, freed slaves, their descendants and other metropolitan wannabes brought music back from Brazil, the Caribbean and Latin America. Lagos was a melting pot and port of strange music. Snooper could even detect a dash of the Dominican meringue music so beloved by the assassinated Trujillo aka the goat..

Juju music began as lower class music fit for palm wine bars located in the inner city of old Lagos. It was the native antidote to High Life music and its more accomplished and refined instrumentation which was meant for the new coastal elite and burgeoning middle class. There were many great  artists of juju music who preceded both  Obey and Sunny but of particular historical significance were Ojoge Daniel, Julius Araba,  Fatai Rolling Dollar, Tunde King, Rose Adetola, Kokoro, the blind minstrel, Tunde Thomas a.k.a Nightingale and the great Ijesha crooner, I.K Dairo. As Einstein famously observed, a genius can see further because he is climbing on the back of earlier geniuses. These were the men on whose back Obey and Sunny rode to greater stardom and prosperity.

There was also the intangible element of luck which Napoleon rates higher than sheer competence.  Obey and Sunny have been fabulously lucky in the historical conjuncture that threw them up. Sometimes there are priests without a religion and sometimes there is a religion without priests. The arrival of Obey and Sunny on the stage and the scene coincided with the dramatic explosion of petrodollar revenues.

Tycoons, ersatz billionaires, emergency contractors, military buccaneers, land speculators, board members, metropolitan middlemen and sharp-eyed financial fixers also arrived on the scene. This new-monied class rewarded Obey and Sunny for their pains on a scale that was hitherto unimaginable and drove them to rarefied heights of self-surpassing excellence. Sectaries of class contentions should note that we are describing a historical process and not conducting a moral inquisition.

Of the two musical avatars, it was Sunny Ade that was obviously more innovative and restless. There was a becalming and befitting equanimity about Obey which reminds one of the old Yoruba nobility. But it was Sunny Ade’s permanent experimentations, his restless innovations and creative edginess that eventually propelled him to global superstardom. According to Sunny himself, he was forced to borrow from modernist music when the ancient Yoruba instrumentations proved too archaic and simply inadaptable.

But when it works, and when the form does not appear to outstrip the content, the fusion of the modern and the ancient is a glorious collage of superior music. The murmurs and tremors of internal dislocations as the medley marinates can be quite disarming and beguiling at the same time. It is a moot point as to whether Sunny himself knows how a particular beat will end or whether he simply surrenders himself to the corralling power of sheer musical genius.

Thus a classic like omo wumi begins like a temperate semi-Highlife beat only to mutate into pulsating Ilorin drumming and echoes of Dadakuada music in the Oyinbo onitaba and bami shererere section. A wonderful panegyric to the ancient Alaafin throne and its current king incorporates the stately royal drumming of the ancient Yoruba Empire with unforgettable lyrics of feudal state power and its storied custodians. A brilliant homage to Erelu Abiola Dosumu turns praise-singing into a sublime art with its catchy rhythm and distant echoes of the Eyo masquerade and old Lagos royal beat.

It has been said that when a man is diligent in his work, he will stand tall and walk before kings. In the case of Sunny Ade, he has not only walked tall and stood before kings, he has become a king in his own right, and before our very eyes too. He has done both his country and nationality proud. As he begins his autumnal descent into immortality, here is wishing the master guitarist many happy returns.