Is New Nigerian Music In Search Of A Critic?

New generation acts; Wande Coal, M.I, Banky W, eLDee, Dr. Sid & Sound Sultan

Let us begin by quickly getting the obvious facts out of the way: at no other time has new Nigerian music enjoyed as much continental and global acclaim as it currently does. It has never been this easy to become a star in Nigeria. Today, with a few, largely affordable digital equipment, a catchy hook and radio time, almost anybody can achieve relative fame in no time. While continental acceptance is not exactly new to Nigerian music, the dominance of Nigerian artistes at continental awards tells a delightful story of growth and development. Beyond fame and fortune, new Nigerian music has thrown up an industry of producers, managers, PR consultants, stylists, event planners, brand managers, blogs, websites, magazines, reviewers and much more. Today, multi-nationals handout awe-inspiring brand ambassador contracts to Nigerian artistes, young Nigerian have found unprecedented fame and fortune through music, so much so that if the music content of your event or party is not about 80% Nigerian, you may as well close shop. On a collective scale, it has never been this good.

New Nigerian music is not homogeneous and I have simply used it as a convenient term to distinguish from Juju, Fuji and other musical forms that also continue to enjoy wide acceptance at the moment. By new Nigerian music I am referring to forms like rap, hip hop, alternative music and rock, soul, R&B etc. I also acknowledge that technically these forms are not ‘new’, as they didn’t start yesterday, but they are ‘new’ in that they as distinct from our indigenous music forms.

While the celebration of this phenomenon has been great, the corresponding critical evaluation has been seriously deficient. Every single time I have heard artistes say something in the line of “All you haters criticising my music, do your own and let’s see or go hug a transformer!” I have felt as if someone defecated in potty and slammed it on the artiste’s head and the artiste went about thinking he was wearing a hat. How can you ask not to be criticised? I suspect that the problem lies with our understanding of criticism. We generally take criticism to mean condemnation rather than evaluation. To ask not to be criticised is to ask not to be evaluated, not to be assessed and I doubt if that’s the true desire of any artiste.

Truth be told, we are not a nation with a lot of tolerance for criticism. One of the country’s top arts writer and newspaper editor once told me of how he was slapped by the nation’s leading dramatist for daring to write an unfavourable critique of his play. Yes, a slap. Politicians do not fare better. Our national history is filled with detentions, imprisonments, harassments, torture and assassinations, all resulting from our leaders’ inability to live with critical evaluations that do not favour them. We shouldn’t be too surprised then that today most artistes are quick to label every dissenting voice a ‘hater’, someone who isn’t happy about their new found success, someone whose sole purpose in life is to bring them down.

However, if we say that most Nigerian artistes have a disdain for criticism, may we also say that the Nigerian media has failed in creating what can be called a true critical tradition? If you threw a stone into blogosphere today, you are likely to hit a Nigerian music reviewer on the head. Blogs, websites and social-networking sites are replete with Nigerian music reviewers who pontificate on Nigerian music daily. But, can we truly call anyone of them a worthy critic? Has anyone committed time and resources to studying music and music trends? Has anyone invested enough time and resources in this study for us to be able to accord respect to his/her opinions? Nigerian newspapers haven’t fared better. Journalists who write about the entertainment industry have been too busy glorifying the industry and acting as paid agents of PR outfits. Their reviews, at best, do not read better than personal paid announcements for artistes. I do not know of one journalist working in any Nigerian newspaper who is solely dedicated to interrogating Nigerian music, outside Benson Idonije of The Guardian. While Uncle Ben pays little or no attention to new Nigerian music, probably because it doesn’t pander to his music tastes, no one else in any Nigerian media pays worthy attention to Nigerian music as he has done for decades now. Surely it must be a shame that an old man in his 70s is the only worthy music critic a nation can point to! This is what you get when journalists run PR outfits on the side and padi-padi criticism is the order of the day.

Let us move beyond these challenges and for a minute dream of the flourishing of a critical tradition in Nigerian music; what should that tradition look like? Truth be told, I do not know. How does one pontificate on something so subjective? However, I do hope that we will not fall into the egocentric trap of prescriptive criticism, where a critic gets drunk on his own sense of importance and begins to prescribe to his audience what music to listen to, what music to buy and which to stay away from, or how this artiste is better than that one. I strongly believe that this isn’t the critic’s job: the critic should evaluate each work on its own strength or lack of and then leave the final choice to the audience. Criticism is a subjective field and in the final analysis, the audience is the final critic as their patronage or otherwise is the true test of an artiste’s strength.

Artistes are generally emotional people and their works are their babies that must not be harmed. This is understandable, especially as it is from the same emotional curve that great works are brought forth. However, asking your PR people, groupies and their grandmothers to scream down every dissenting voice on Twitter in a hailstorm of ‘hater!!!’ isn’t going to get you anywhere. Granted, there are attention-seeking people who will say nasty things about your work to satisfy their warped sense of importance (and this qualifies as ‘hating’ in my book), yet, there are many more who just sincerely feel that the job was not well done and they should have the right to say so. To lump all unfavourable criticism together and label as ‘hating’ is to be blind to possibilities that lie in self re-examination brought about by honest criticism.

There is a lot to be happy about concerning new Nigerian music. The possibilities are huge and even with all the success achieved thus far, I believe that we have barely scratched the surface. If these possibilities are to be achieved, a corresponding critical tradition must evolve; one that talks to the industry with due respect while not shying away from telling truth that may hurt. Let us not forget that ten years ago, if you raced on a street in Lagos, you most-likely will run into a Nollywood movie crew; today Nollywood is comatose. It certainly will be foolish to think it cannot happen to new Nigerian music.