WizKid’s entire career isn’t worth Fela’s flip flops

IS Ayodeji Balogun, the pompous monkey who recently rated himself above the Afrobeats king, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, useless? No. As Wole Soyinka said in the aftermath of the 2002 Miss World riots in the North, sometimes, society is relieved by seeming trivialities. WizKid is one of such trivialities.

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, easily the greatest musician ever to have emerged from the African continent, was a well-known pioneering multi-instrumentalist who primarily played the saxophone, keyboards/piano, trumpet, electric guitar, and drums, frequently switching between these instruments during live performances. If you invited him for a performance, the first thing that would strike you was his stagecraft. Except you were a highly talented manager, you couldn’t set up Fela’s stage. It was phenomenal. And when he started performing, he did it LIVE, exactly like Juju and Fuji musicians do. In other words, you would see Fela and his band boys recreating the very music you had heard in an album, together with his dancers showcasing their craft. Their performance was total theatre.

Conversely, what is called “performance” today is mere imitation. So if Davido or Kizz Daniel is “performing”, what you will see them doing is singing along with their music blared from loudspeakers. In other words, apart from the presence of the musician in question and a few of his/her back-up singers, it is almost as if you are merely playing a cassette or disk. Let me put this in another way: if you wanted to know Fela and every member of his band, then you simply came to his stage. That doesn’t happen today, although a few of the artistes are trying to incorporate some elements of live drumming and trumpeting, say, into their performances.

Because they are called “musicians” when in actual fact they would not be musicians at all if judged by the old standards, and because they make tons of money while producing “albums” that are intellectually empty/subversive, a demon of arrogance has seized many of the new musicians. And recently, WizKid, who fancies himself the 01 of Nigerian music when his colleague Davido is clearly superior and more popular, rated himself above Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in a fit of bestial arrogance. And since that moment of lunacy, some ruffians have been backing him in his heresy. Yes, the generation that finds joy in these empty lines, “See you sitting in the corner (don’t dull)/Wearing Dolce & Gabbana (don’t dull)/Our boys don hammer (don’t dull)”, has suddenly seen the need to trample on an actual musician, a master performer whose guitar alone is bigger than many of their idols put together.

If Wizkid is not a better musician than Davido, Kizz Daniel,  2Face or D’Banj, how can he jump many impossible miles to rank above Fela, a man who is vastly superior to even King Sunny Ade? The fact that he would even entertain such a thought, let alone verbalise it, shows that he is senseless. As a “musician”, WizKid has very little, if any, of sense to communicate to anyone. His use of Yoruba, when he tries to incorporate it into his music, is demonstrably pedestrian, and he can hardly use a proverb. In one typical example, he mixes the children’s rhyme monini, monini with incantations (“Tan ba le’ni lon ma mu”), sounding like a complete dunce: “Monini Monini..tan ba le’ni na ma mu, Ola lo ma mu/Ma se f’oya.” (“Monini Monini, if they say they will catch today, it’s tomorrow they will catch/Have no fear.” To a Yoruba ear, this sounds silly or funny in a crazy kind of way. Parents, you need to train your children well before sending them to the market.

READ ALSO: Fela Kuti becomes first African to get Grammys Lifetime Achievement Award

If a dunce in all his madness will not strip his mother naked or slap a soldier, then how can anyone rationalise his assault on an icon on the basis of anger? The Yoruba say that even if a dog is going rabid, it still will recognise the presence of fire. They also say that it is what a person has in mind that drunkenness brings out. And just in case this perpetual boy actually thinks himself to be bigger than Fela, then let me present just four lines from Fela’s Beast of No Nation that show why he (WizKid) can never attain Fela’s status even in a hundred years. Hear Fela: “Botha na friend to Thatcher & Reagan/Botha na friend to some other leaders too/And together dem wan dash us human rights/Animal wan dash us human rights.”

In these four lines, Fela has already presented a critique of global politics, racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, demonstrating acute awareness of world affairs. Profoundly illiterate, ideologically empty noisemakers making billions from an artistically impoverished and intellectually low generation should learn to mind the thorns. Let WizKid find out who Botha, Thatcher and Reagan were, before ever denigrating Fela.

Fela looked at dictators right in the face and damned them. No, he wasn’t singing “Folake pakurumo.” He was of a higher order. He was arrested over 200 times, brutalised and jailed just because of his music. But he remained unbowed. When people wondered why he should keep putting himself in harm’s way (“No be talk like dis dem  take to carry me go prison o?”), he told them the authorities had just unleashed his revolutionary beast. And he referenced a callous statement by the murderous South African Prime Minister to make his point: “No be me dey talk, na Prime Minister Botha dey talkee-oh/No be me dey talk, na Prime Minister Botha dey talkee-oh/Him say, this uprising will bring out the beast in us.” In other words: if you think madness is your exclusive property, you have another thing coming!  In another case, Fela sang that governments from around the African continent would hear ‘pansa pansa” from him as long as they kept oppressing the people. Soldiers and policemen beat him to stupor on many occasions, yet he remained defiant. Soldiers actually invaded his home, threw his mother down the stairs, and destroyed everything in sight, including all his recording instruments.

 Fela looked at a military dictator, Muhammadu Buhari, in the face and called him a beast. Unlike WizKid, he couldn’t honour engagements on many occasions simply because he was in jail. I remember his spat with Musa Bamaiyi. But even when WizKid tries desperately to copy Fela, his lyrics remain banal: “Ni ojuelegba/They know my story/For Mo’Dogg’s studio/I been hustle to work.” This is about his struggle with poverty and non-fame, but even though it is the best he can do, it still falls criminally short of anything that would warrant a Fela comparison. Fela was a global icon without social media: his lines were anthems for freedom fighters around the world. Fela was conscientising a generation: “Open you eye everywhere/Archbishop na miliki/Pope na enjoyment/Imam na gbaladun/Archbishop dey enjoy/Pope self dey enjoy/Imam self dey enjoy/My brother wetin you say?” And even in death, he was worth a tidy $10 million despite having expended millions on total strangers.

WizKid, you apparently lack proper upbringing. The next time, before you open your gutter mouth and mention Fela, “Oya ask your mommy, ask your daddy” questions.