From Odolaye Aremu to Kanye West: Of Music, Family, Identity and Becoming
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. It becomes self and its unique journey of becoming.
As a teenager, I began to mess with my music identity and started searching for myself in hip-hop —a place to sleep comfortably, butt naked. A home like the one my family has built for us in Apala and Fuji. I needed modern music, to connect with my age, be trendy and be vogue. But hip-hop was far from it, to me, then, it seemed too vain and was only scratching the surface of my consciousness. Yet I needed it to move on, it was as though it held the ticket to the next phase of my life. It did. So I settled and started listening to hip-hop for conversation, just to have something to say among friends who were hip-hop heads.
My childhood was musical and was filled with weekend Owanbes. My parents were socialites and were always invited to one party or the other. But, besides the party glamour and noises, my parents understood music as a strong part of their lives. Of our lives. Music wasn’t just entertainment, it was enshrined into all our memories and my siblings and I grew up to cherish it.
Growing up, every Sunday after church, music was there in the games of children of neighbours and relatives, running around the house, jumping and clapping, and later holding hands to form a circle, and dance —innocently anticipating jollof rice and roasted chicken wings and mugs of squeezed orange juice that’d settle in our tummy. Music was there with the grown-ups, in the living room, as they’d trade political views, concurring and differing there and then. In the background, it would chime felicitously beneath that calm yet intense adult conversations and joyful plays of kids.
Our four-bedroom apartment was a bungalow with a large compound. There was a big shelf in the living room, the image of its strong wood and shining edges is still clear in my head. On the shelf were carefully arranged vinyl LP albums of old African jazz and Yoruba classics, a not-too-old turntable with stereo knobs that only moved in one direction, an antenna-carrying Panasonic television, a huge VHS player and three wooden speakers claiming the edges of the shelf. In the lower compartment, there were arrangements of photo albums from my parent’s youthful days, their wedding and their children’s naming ceremonies. Those albums were the first form of entertainment to guests —before even offering them water. Once they were seated; the album went straight on their laps.
When I was little and just started picking up sounds around me, Grandpa visited often and whenever he was around, he’d hijack the music and play Odolaye Aremu, Yusuf Olatunji and Ayinla Omowura in a loyal sequence, according to his preference of the artists.
Grandpa’s sentiment towards Odolaye was profound and popular and more so, worth it. In the evening, when the sun had retired, grandpa would settle in his makeshift Agbantara and bask in Odolaye’s rendition. Odolaye’s song was otherworldly, each line of lyrics emphasized and reemphasized the fluency of his artistic mastery.
Let Odolaye Aremu go first to prepare your mind for a musical escapades and set you on a refreshed motion, then let Ayinla Omowura envelope you in the rhythm of dance-able Apala. When the tempo is getting high and it seems like your body can’t stop moving, let Yusuf Olatunji take the wheel. Allow him in. Do not rebel. Do not protest its calculated disruption. Stay there, humming to the sound and finding a home for the lyrics in your consciousness. Stay there, don’t leave. Humans need breaks, even in music. Slow. Steady and then fast, and you go again. However the playing sequence goes, always start and end with Odolaye Aremu.
This is what an old man playlist looks like, a well thought musical sentiment.
You see, Odolaye Aremu was very flamboyant with languages and forms, his music is an encapsulation of languages in their utmost decency and carefully concealed vulgarity. He was a repository of Yoruba proverbial folklore. His music would invite listeners to a soft dance before swallowing them whole. He would sing tributes and eulogize the elites while in the same vein remind them of their humble beginnings, sang about family disputes, friendship and betrayal, and of course, about the beauty of women but with less objectifying lexicons. His lyrics carried heavy moral gravitas that was patronizing and somewhat instigating but in all, soothing.
In his song, you could hear his reverence for the then-controversial Nigeria Western Region Premier, Ladoke Akintola. In fact, in 1978, he named a whole album after his death, “Iku Akintola” translated as “The Death of Akintola.” The album carefully recounts the politics behind his (Akintola) assassination in Ibadan, the capital of the Western Region during the first Nigeria’s Military Coup of January 1966.
Like the apple and the apple tree, my father did not fall very far. Besides the resemblance, they almost had the same taste in everything, music inclusive. And as it appeared, I and my siblings would inherit their music. Inheritance doesn’t only come in money and property, names (good or bad), habits, friends and enemies could be inherited as well. And it is not only musicians/artists who are likely to inherit their musical talent from their parents, music lovers, idealists and listeners who can also pick up the habit —the exact taste in music/art from their parents too.
My father enjoys Sunny Ade, Ayinde Barrista, Ebenezer Obey, Sir Kolington, and Shina Peters since they were the big deal then and of course, the rebellious Fela Anikulapo —with his high provocative and political nonconforming lyrics —is another artist my father excessively enjoyed even though, my father had reservations about Fela’s personality and thought he could be a bad influence if unregulated. Well, keep the art and thrash the artist, not Fela sha —he was a mystery and prided himself as such.
“If care is not taken with Fela, you’d start smoking Igbo,” and you know, back then, smoking Igbo is the peak of hooliganism and no parent wants to give birth to a hooligan. So they’d only play Fela in the house when he (my father) and his friends wanted to make references to some of Fela’s constantly manifesting prophecies.
In high school, knowing line-for-line the lyrics of some particular songs (not Fuji or Apala, they called those ones touts or razz) controlled respect, you would be treated like royalty, as if you had rubies and dollar bills glued all over your body. Girls gravitated towards trendy pop music and as expected, boys who could sing those kinds of songs were the ones who got their attention.
There was a particular lanky boy Gideon Adegoke who could rap the whole of Eminem’s album. He had cousins who brought hip-hop CDs from America during holidays. I wanted to be like Gideon, badly. I wanted girls to like me. This was my only reality, my only struggle then. The struggle to balance the modern pop culture with the one at home that had already become a family ritual, and which was already moulding my identity.
Music is like that, it hardly begins from a place of nothingness or choice, and one’s subscription for a particular kind of music is mostly a product of experience or recommendation or grooming or collection of them all. If you are an early music person, you probably started listening from your father’s or uncle’s jukebox and unconsciously, it became a part of you. It is like grooming you to synchronize and identify with some particular genre and growing out of it is as difficult as every other proclaimed societal norm injected in our psych, from childhood.
The kind of music you listen to from childhood would stay with you —if not forever —for a very long time; you can hardly grow out of it. Music sticks. Choose to forget it all you like, once it comes up, your brain tells you that’s your childhood jam, just like every other serious voyage of memories.
The chronology of the music I listened to, from my grandfather to my father has become a legacy. An identity. It has become a family way of preserving culture and sanity, of not giving it all away. A kind of localizing anti-westernization. I make Fuji and Apala playlists and share with my siblings, it is an exchange of identity token. It is how we remember who we are. How we remember home.
In Uni, I tried listening to more hip-hop. My friend Kelvin gave me old KRS-0ne and Talib Kwali CDs he collected from his Americanah uncle’s stash. Okay, rap is utterly beautiful and doesn’t have to be vain, those CDs were the bomb. I listened to every single song until I could rap their lyrics word for word. But there wasn’t a catharsis, no serious shift in musical paradigm. Then, I met Common and Kanye West. Kelvin casually took my phone and transferred the College Dropout album, and urged me to listen.
The aesthetics of lyrical dynamism in good rap music is unmatched by any other genre.
Rap is as mathematical as it is artistic.
The sound experimentation in College Dropout weirdly gave me a nostalgic feeling of a crazily bold artist, an abnormal artist —like Fela, who, by far, doesn’t make music for just entertainment. Kanye West came across as a prophet with loads of prophecies to foretell. Ultimately, the album was stuffed with tracks that were also stuffed with lyrics that resonated with my then feeling of dropping out of college. It romanticized my resentment for school. Kanye West became the first rap artist I could relate with, and then Common and then J. Cole and Hopsin and MI and others.
Hip-hop gradually became as thrilling as Fela and Barrista and Grandpa’s Odolaye. Like layers of belly fat, I began to shed what I had called my music identity and my hip-hop muscles began to gather. Now, I had the rubies and dollar bills feeling. The feeling of acceptance, recognition, of respect. Still, it felt like I’ve forgotten a part of me —the essence of it all. , but this time I was mature enough to know that music is beyond an evening in the garden. It’s a whole life of its own, it will range as far as you are willing to allow it. You can love it all, maybe you can’t —but the musical expression is limitless.
Musical exodus or evolution or migration or whatever term is comfortable for you to call it can be inevitable. It, in itself, is a progression of the human race, it is almost essential for music to transform with each generation.
Grandpa gave my father Apala, but as my father progressed in life, he found fuji/highlife/afrobeat/juju. And then my father passed on his musical discovery onto me. It is only natural that I make my own discovery as I too progress.
“I love Rap, Reggae, and Fuji,” I say when asked, “What kind of music do you listen to?” I have learned to embellish my local tastes with western dessert so as not to look too archaic. Or I’ve learned how to sneak in my cultural identity into modern pop culture so as not to appear detached from my origin. It doesn’t go beyond these two reasons.
On the good side, my somewhat diverse musical journey has gradually transformed into a lens that fortifies me to identify with people who have entirely different tastes in music, or those who are music generalists. I love conscious music and I hate that people look down on those who love otherwise, people who only want to dance and have a good time. Even though I’m not that person, their tastes are as legit as mine. After all, good music can be relative or what you think it is.
That is just the fact 💯💯💯💯💯
Hello i like your music All the time