More than a soundtrack: music in community
Interviews with Yellowman & Femi Kuti and the long history of Black British music
One of the unfortunate side-effects of living in the Spotify playlist era is that music has come to feel almost like fast food. We enjoy calling up songs on our commute or at the gym; anything we want to listen to can be ordered at a moment’s notice. Like fries and milkshakes that feel far removed from farms or pastures, songs seem to exist in our headphones rather than within communities that help engender creative work.
I was particularly reminded of this dynamic a few weeks ago, while I was in London with my family. After getting off our train at St. Pancras Station, we crossed the street and headed into the British Library to explore its exhibit “Beyond the Bass Line.” Curated by the British Library’s Aleema Gray and produced in partnership with the University of Westminster, this is the first major museum exhibit devoted to Black music in Britain.
The exhibit is extraordinary on many levels. The soundscapes in particular are extremely creative and arresting. With more than 200 artifacts, the exhibit takes visitors through many different histories from five hundred years of Black musical culture in the British Isles, while offering brief educations in numerous genres and subgenres of music popular over the last several decades.
Most notable to me was the way the exhibit successfully roots the musical traditions it showcases in the communities and historic moments that have shaped them. In addition to relaying video and audio, the exhibit highlights specific and sometimes highly local places that have played especially important roles supporting Black artists and building appreciation for their work—particular record shops and dance clubs, various community carnivals and cultural centers. The entire exhibit is organized less around genre than around place, comprising sections like “In the Record Shop” and “The Frontlines.”
As Aleema Gray notes, “Black British music is more than a soundtrack.” The exhibit deftly demonstrates that music is integrally tied the time and place of its creation, and frequently serves as a critical tool for communities in times of celebration, frustration and resistance.
As a publication focused on place, Stranger’s Guide has always covered music’s ties to artists and to communities. “Beyond the Bass Line” brought me back to some of my favorite pieces we’ve run, including interviews with two extremely influential Black musicians—Nigeria’s Femi Kuti and Jamaica’s Yellowman—whose works have been in dialogue with those of musicians featured in the show. I’ve excerpted both pieces below, and highly recommend reading both, as each man describes in depth the circumstances that shaped his music as well as the battles each fought to be heard.
Unlike our Field Guides and Weekend Passports, these emails remain free for everyone, however I’m so grateful to those of you who have joined our paid tier. It’s thanks to you we can keep doing this work! If you haven’t signed up for the paid tier, maybe today’s the day?
Finally, as we head into fall, I’d like to start experimenting a little with these emails to include additional formats—perhaps first-person narratives, original interviews with authors or grouping a pieces together by theme (a bit like I’m doing today). Please vote below for your preferences. And of course if you have additional ideas, throw them in the comments.
Thanks as always for reading!
—Abby Rapoport
Photo by Pius Utomi
From “The Kuti Legacy,” Molara Wood interviews Femi Kuti. Stranger’s Guide: Lagos.
A uniquely congenial atmosphere welcomes visitors to The New Afrika Shrine in the Ikeja area of Lagos—the holy ground of Afrobeat—founded by musician Femi Kuti to preserve the legacy of his father, the legendary Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. In the US for a performance in 2010 while Fela! the musical was playing on Broadway, Fela’s son Femi Kuti told the New York Times that he would not go to the show, because it was important “spiritually and culturally” for the musical to come to Lagos and the Shrine instead. The musical eventually had a successful run in Lagos, just as today the great and the good come to The New Afrika Shrine to pay homage. High profile visitors notwithstanding, the Shrine remains a place for the people, a defiant finger to authoritarian elites and an anti-establishment symbol of Fela’s notion of the utopian rebel republic, which he termed “Kalakuta.”
The sense of community grows even stronger upon entering the capacious cavern that is the Shrine. On Thursday and Sunday nights, the Shrine is in full swing with music, food stands, drinking and dancing. It’s relatively empty on the day I visit, but there are many people milling around, including workmen applying a new lick of paint on the stage backdrop. In the private quarters behind the stage and up a flight of stairs, is Femi Kuti, first son of Afrobeat and keeper of the flame, who presides over the whole enterprise.
Now 57, Kuti started performing in his father’s Egypt 80 band in his teens, playing the keyboard and saxophone. The sax in particular has become synonymous with the musician, who formed his own band, The Positive Force, in 1986. He first gained recognition in his own right in 1988, when he toured France and Germany as part of a French cultural exchange, playing alongside the likes of reggae music legend Jimmy Cliff. Some 10 albums and four Grammy nominations later, Kuti has successfully carved his own niche musically, establishing a distinct fusion sound that has enabled him to come out of Fela’s giant shadow, even as he stays true to the spirit of Afrobeat.
[…] Fresh from a tour that saw him introduce his son Mádé to an international audience on the British band Coldplay’s new Everyday Life album, Femi Kuti sat down with Stranger’s Guide at the New Afrika Shrine to talk about his four decades in music.
Molara Wood: You’ve said that when you were young it, was expected that you’d go into music like your father, even before you chose to do so yourself. You’ve also said that, once you chose music, it wasn’t easy forging a path for yourself—and coming out of Fela’s shadow as it were—that nobody gave you a chance. And now your son also rises, playing in your band and challenging you to sax marathons on the stage. What are you doing differently from Fela’s time? What are you doing differently to make Mádé’s musical journey easier than it was for you?
Femi Kuti: The first thing is that [Mádé] has got a solid foundation by training at one of the best universities, so he’s not illiterate musically. Everything I’ve done, I’ve achieved 99% on my own; I had to teach myself everything just by watching.
I was supposed to be a failure … all my father’s friends and family, nobody gave me hope. I even think at some point my father was having his doubts, too. It was not until I left my father to go back to my mother that I realized the gravity of what I was going to encounter in my life. This is the fight between my father and myself, because what he did was he just put me out there to the wolves.
Of course, I would be eaten. How does your child survive if you don’t train him? [But Fela said] I will survive. And I think his experiment did work, but it was a big risk. I would never take that kind of risk with any of my children. If I am going to send you out to a war zone, I will arm you fully and I will make sure you come back safely. I will ensure you come back victorious and that’s the difference.
My father took a risk. He was hoping and praying that I’d be successful. How? He didn’t know himself; he just said: “Be successful.” For me, it doesn’t work like that, so I arm [my son] and I prepare him for the turbulences he will probably face. He’s a wonderful boy because he has listened.
Photo by Marlon James
From “King Yellowman,” Garnette Cadogan interviews Yellowman. Stranger’s Guide: Caribbean.
Climbing quiet, verdant hills that lead to a house peeking over a rambunctious Kingston, I visit Winston Foster, popularly known by his stage name Yellowman, to discuss a musical career spent attracting the affection and ire of reggae fans. In the early eighties, after the death of Bob Marley, fans of Jamaican popular music were impatient for a new star that embodied Marley’s rebel style and roots-reggae sound. What they got was Yellowman, an albino who delivered rebelliousness through an irreverent, comic, catchy style over an assertive new sound named dancehall. And although political concerns drove some of his songs, what most steered them was his ribald lyrics—termed “slackness” in Jamaica—which propelled him to global fame, and, perhaps, helped shift how some saw albinos. Often mistreated and made alien—scorned as if they were lepers whose condition were contagious—albinos were now, in Yellowman’s songs, a sex symbol. “Hi, my name is Yellowman. And in the ghetto they call me Mr. Sexy.” So begins one song in which the albino toaster repeats the boast, “Them a mad over me… girl a go crazy over me.” Its bawdy flavor notwithstanding, the song uses humor to push against the borders of listeners’ imagination. “Albinos were never on the forefront of society,” he tells me, as he speaks of using music to “break down that barrier.” In his voice was the defense, not only the pleasure, of many.
“I’m a soldier,” Yellowman declares early in my visit, and repeats shortly before I leave, as if to bookend our conversation with an image he wants to inscribe in my memory. But he need not insist: it was his perseverance, his dogged resistance against obstacle after another, that brought me to his home. In 1984, as he jumped on the global stage, he was diagnosed with cancer and given a few years to live. Corrective surgery took away the tumor and a significant portion of his face, but seemingly none of his wit or fight. He’s still here. Still here: that phrase, said to me with gumption and gratitude, had the ring of a mantra. “I can’t stop. I cannot stop. I don’t see myself stopping because I grow with this in me, music. This talent is not influenced by anybody, this talent handed down to me by the Almighty.” That’s him, assuring me that he’ll never stop performing, reinforcing his belief that music is bound up in his DNA, as if by divine fiat.
…
Garnette Cadogan: How were you raised?
Yellowman: Me did find myself in… an orphanage. Before the orphan days, the childhood days, in the baby days, the people who found me, found [me] in a shopping bag in a trash can. Garbage bin. The garbage collector found me. Took me to that orphanage, Maxfield Park Children’s Home. That’s where I find myself as a little child growing up.
And from there, I move to another orphanage home, Swift-Purcell. After a few years there, I move to Alpha Boys’ Home. And from Alpha Boys’ Home, I move to Eventide Home; not really an orphanage home, it’s a home for people who are neglected. While I’m in Eventide Home, I start to develop the music thing.
After that, I say, “Make me try the studios.” I start to go to studios, and then I get turn way from all the studios. From Joe Gibbs, Channel One, Music Works, Aquarius. Sonic Sounds, Dynamic Sounds. All of them. Me get turned out. People run me away. Because back in the day, the skin color—it was very difficult, discrimination me did face. Even now, I still face it. Growing up in that way, I put all of them things together and make it strength.
The way how me come up in the music business, the way how people discriminate and disrespect, rip off, turn me away from studios—All of those things, I put together as strength.
Cadogan: What did people say when they turned you away?
Yellowman: Them say, “Come outta the studio, boy.” And sometimes me get abuse physically. A man would kick me out, use him foot and kick me out. And push me out. That’s how it go.
Cadogan: Because of your complexion?
Yellowman: Yeah, them never like me. In my days, they called us dundus. Internationally, they call us albino. Mulatto, dundus, all sort of names. And yellowman was one of the discrimination names, so that becomes national. So everybody pick up the name and say, “It’s a very catchy name.” From that till now, them call me Yellowman and King Yellowman.
Cadogan: When did you start calling yourself Yellowman in a way that reclaimed the name?
Yellowman: The late ’70s going into the early ’80s. People used to discriminate and call me all type of names, but Yellowman caught on. Me just leave the name.