Wake Up You :: Aquarium Drunkard Interviews Uchenna Ikonne

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Following the intense and bloody Nigerian Civil War, a vibrant musical revolution bloomed in the country, with emerging groups and performers creating a fusion which blended  funk, R&B, and hard rock. The beginnings and end of this fertile scene is documented incredibly by a new two-volume collection out on  Now Again Records, Wake Up You Vol. 1 and 2: The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock, 1972-1972.  

Featuring artists like  Ify Jerry Krusade, the Strangers, the Hyykers, OFO the Black Company, the Funkees, War Head  Constriction,  and dozens more, the collections illustrate the heavier side of Nigeria’s counter culture. While the music itself is enough to warrant diving in, the accompanying books by scholar Uchenna Ikonne — the producer behind many key releases, including the recent collection, Who is William Onyeabor —   feature  insightful details and illuminating quotes from many of the artists themselves.

“About nine years ago, I teamed up with Uchenna Ikonne, when he was starting to work on his William Onyeabor anthology for Luaka Bop,” says Now Again main-man  Eothen “Egon” Alapatt. “I’d been trying to get in touch with the remaining members of the Nigerian rock scene to try to figure out how the fuck such an incredible scene could have sprung up there in the early 1970s. I’d seen Ginger Baker in Africa, so I’d seen the footage of the bands getting down and I knew about the Biafran Civil War…. But the idea that a bona fide Nigerian rock scene could come into existence right after the death and destruction of the Civil War was almost unfathomable to me: America’s Flower Power hippies were shouting peace and love many thousands of miles from the jungles of Vietnam: were Nigerian hippies really doing the same thing….as combat raged in their back yards?”

Egon says that he ripped off by “middle man after middle man” trying to reissue music from this era, so he turned to Ikonne. “He knew more than anyone, was more pissed than I was about his own countrymen robbing not only these musicians — but their brethren of this untold story, of this forgotten scene.” Egon says. “He had this Onyeabor idea that he wanted to try out, and he said if I helped fund his trip he would do it right. And he did. He spent a year there, and he found every band we were interested in, and we licensed the music we wanted directly from them, got their stories down pat, and started to put together the direction for an anthology.”

War Head Constriction :: Graceful Bird

AD caught up with Ikonne to discuss the compiling of the albums and the personal connections that fueled his work in illuminating and preserving it.

Aquarium Drunkard: This collection is fantastic, and your notes are deep and fascinating. You were born in the States but lived in Nigeria as a young man. In the notes of Wake Up You, you describe a lot of the music featured therein as lost for forgotten. How did you first discover it?

Uchenna Ikonne:  I was peripherally aware of much of it when I was a kid in the 1980s. You could still find a lot of old copies of these records in shops then. Cultural revival trends tend to work on a two-decade cycle–it usually takes around twenty years for old stuff to come back around and become cool again. So when I was coming up, these records were around ten years old and definitely were not cool. They were quaint, corny things that took up precious shelf space in the record store and frustrated you by slowing your access to the new Shalamar and Musical Youth LPs.

It was much later, around 1999 or 2000 that I was developing a movie set in early 1970s Nigeria that I started to research music for the soundtrack and I started rediscovering this stuff, realizing how incredible this music really was. And serendipitously, at this very moment record companies in the West like Soundway and Strut had started exploring this music too. So that just gave me more impetus to dive into it.

AD: The sounds featured here are wonderful – lots of funky stuff and R&B – but it seems like you focused mostly on heavier acts. Groups like War Head Constriction and the Jay U Experience seem to have acid rock or even early heavy metal leanings. Were records by psychedelic bands making their way to Nigeria or was this fuzzy, aggressive kind of rock inspired more by the social and political atmosphere of the country at the time?

Uchenna Ikonne:  I’d say both things are true. Nigerians had access to a smorgasbord of foreign rock records but I think the social climate did a lot to create the environment that was conducive to this dissonant and sometimes furious music. If you look at the 1960s, when Nigeria and other African countries had just gained independence and were looking forward to a prosperous future, the tone of the music was lilting, optimistic and romantic. After the war, having seen this dream of unity collapse into bloodshed, music that was angry, confused and screaming out loud seemed apropos for the times.

AD: Can you describe the importance of EMI in the proliferation of Afro-rock?

Uchenna Ikonne:  EMI was the first label to make a serious commitment to propagating and promoting Nigerian rock music. Probably more importantly, EMI’s producers were very aggressive in discouraging their artists from simply copying Western rock acts. They pushed their artists to redefine rock by infusing it with elements from their indigenous cultures. As a result, EMI had a reputation for putting out a very authentic type of Afro-rock.

AD: You posit that the psychic effects of the civil war helped shape the tone of the music; lyrically, many of these songs feel like protest songs, but many don’t. Were songs simply geared to the youth culture in their own way counter-cultural? Were songs about love and songs about partying in their own way rebellious?

Uchenna Ikonne:  The very act of playing rock music was a counter-cultural statement in itself. And songs about romantic love, sex, and partying certainly were rebellious. In Africa, there’s a high premium placed upon respect for elders, for the culture of ancestral tradition. Children do not talk back to adults, they do as they are told. So young people singing about doing what they want to do, about making love and rejecting the ways of their parents, all of that was a shock to the system.

AD: The details regarding OFO the Black Company are very intriguing. Was the afro-centric religious pluralism of Larry Ifedioranma Jr. reflective of the spiritual interests of the counter culture at large?

Uchenna Ikonne:  The ratio of Christians to Muslims in Nigeria is roughly 50:50, with the Northern part of the country being predominantly Muslim and the Southern sector mostly Christian. Both groups view each other with deep suspicion, verging on contempt. To a large degree, the civil war had been motivated by this antipathy between the Muslim North and the Christian South. So for a southern rock group led by the son of a pastor to make a song called “Allah Wakbarr”… I can barely express how radical and upsetting that must have been.

After the success of OFO’s “Allah Wakbarr,” several other rock groups from the South also released records with Islamic-sounding titles “La’ila Allah” and the like. I’m not convinced they had much in the way of real deep interest in Islam, but there seemed to be a certain curiosity about various spiritual systems–including the pantheons of traditional African religious practices.

AD: The influence of Fela Kuti hovers over this story, both in ways that help give the scene its initial thrust but also eventually seal its fate. Can you describe a little Kuti’s complicated relationship to Nigerian rock?

Uchenna Ikonne:  Fela Kuti’s relationship to rock dates back to the earliest days of his music career. We all know Fela became Nigeria’s biggest music star in the early 1970s, but this massive success had been preceded by a decade of him struggling to achieve any serious traction in the music world. Right from the moment Fela arrived on the scene in the early sixties, he suffered criticism and rejection from the mainstream highlife music establishment for his unconventional leanings. His music was perceived as a bit too Western-oriented at a time when newly-independent African nations like Nigeria were projecting culturally nationalist agendas, trying to shrug off the “colonial” cultural influences. But the first audience that embraced him were the kids who were into rock n’ roll. After all, they were outcasts and rebels themselves due to their passion for foreign music; Fela fit right into that, to a degree.

Throughout the 1960s Fela experimented, fusing his highlife with jazz, R&B, Afro-Latin and rock. By the time that generation of outcast kids grew up and moved rock deeper into the mainstream, they had created a space where Fela’s experimentation now made sense. Fela was never really considered a rock artist himself, but he was rock adjacent. However, it turned out that Fela’s persona grew so large that it overshadowed everybody else in the rock scene and made them somewhat obsolete.

AD: In the late ‘70s rock music in Nigeria began to decline in popularity. What were some of the reasons for the public’s growing disinterest?

Uchenna Ikonne:  Changing tastes aesthetically and culturally. Somehow after the chaos of the war, the heavy and dissonant sound of rock was evocative of the zeitgeist. But as as Nigeria moved further away from the experience of the war and entered an opulent oil boom era, people came to prefer music with slicker, more celebratory stylings.

AD: Can the influence of Nigerian rock be felt in the popular music of the country today? If yes, how so?

Uchenna Ikonne:  No… not at all. Most of the kids today know nothing about this era. And by that I don’t just mean that they don’t know the details of the era; I mean they don’t know such an era ever existed, period. When I tell young Nigerians that there was a period where rock was the main thing in Nigeria, they think I’m lying. Even when I play them some of the music, they hardly know how to process it because many modern Nigerians’ idea of “rock” is like Maroon 5 or Coldplay. There are a few young rock bands in Nigeria now trying to make things happen but they’re all kind of, uh… well, you know, Maroon 5 and Coldplay.

I like to believe that afro-rock could come back someday but it’s really a long, long shot to bet on. I guess the first step is to make people aware of the rock legacy by reissuing forgotten gems like we’ve done here. Hopefully some kid today hears this stuff and decides maybe to put together a band… words / j woodbury

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