Our Music Is Dying Slowly, And Still Smiling 2

P Square, very popular Nigerian Hip-hop Singers who are twin brothers.

LIFE-LINES

~ By Femi Akintunde-Johnson

Our Music Is Dying Slowly, And Still Smiling 2

My final line last week: “The Nigerian music industry is dying; and frankly, it will, or probably have to die patapata, before it can truly rise, and take its due position, in the light of things. Incidentally, the best hands to give it life, are the same starving it of the elixir for irreversible success – the young Nigerian artistes. How?”

Yes, piracy is bad for any intellectual work, especially if the product is mostly driven by profit (as it is with Nigerian popular music). All over the world, the fight against piracy is fought at frenetic pace, because the killer-disease is spreading faster than earlier thought. Nowadays, in the US, the sale of recorded CD’s is panting far behind the sales of blank CD’s. You can guess where CDs are going. Music executives are storming the courts to put legitimate e-music dispensers out of business so as to prolong near-certain extinction of the more than 150-year old American music industry. And that is America where piracy has gone absolutely and bizarrely digital, and which has a clear cut infrastructure. However, in Nigeria, the first big case involving a major pirate (an Alaba marketer) came up at the Federal High Court on the first day of this month! We routinely sweep hideouts of small-time Chinese and Hong-Kong CD multipliers masquerading as music and movie pirates. We treat copyright infringement and rights collection with childish naiveté in this climate. In such situation, only death will “do them part”.

Pirated CDs are sold on the street. Photo Credit: Medindia

But of even deadlier dimension is the mentality of young Nigerian artistes: his understanding of his role, and the appreciation of his artistic contribution to social realities. Many years ago, I wrote a series of articles that won the first entertainment reporting award at the Nigerian Media Merit Awards. It was entitled “Creative Rogues”. In the articles, I tried to juxtapose the musical arrangements of the leading lights of the 80’s and 90’s in Nigeria, alongside their foreign counterparts from whose works they literally lifted several lines and riffs without any attribution whatsoever. We basically called them what they were: creative ‘pirates’ of others’ creative nous. That was more than 15 years ago.

Today, the artistes are more brazen; more impatient and couldn’t care if an entire chorus line was lifted verbatim from “reigning” songs of their local or foreign counterparts. They just don’t care. And the fans, as it is now clear, appear not to be bothered. But therein lays the trap. You don’t need a seer to tell you that barefaced robbery, as it being churned out by starry-eyed characters that populate our studios and airwaves, will sooner or later collapse the music business into an economical cul-de-sac.

Apart from music beats sounding alike, and with fast disappearing wholesomeness in syncopation and timbre, the lyrical depth is thinning out rapidly. Now, we seem like a nation of unthinking jingoists and flippant abusers of our traditional mores on the flimsy excuse that our socio-economic realities have condemned us to this state. We fool ourselves that we reflect what is happening on the streets. We have become repeaters, and not creators. We sing complete nonsense, gibberish, and lazy repetitions that leave neutrals wondering how we got to this place.

It is such complete absence of care or self-restraint that gives light to a St. Janet. Why are we scandalized at her cheap, lust-filled “business model”, when we amusingly condoned and back-patted her forerunner, Abbas Akande Obesere (Omo Rapala) who strutted drunkenly and, I can assure you, profitably across the nation casting spells on devotees of his brand of minstrelsy? So, who can wager that St. Jezebel does not have a coterie of lewd-lappers savouring every rotten limerick trolling from her plucky bosom?

Yet, more dangerous is the professional attitude and work ethics of our latter day music magicians. More on that next week.

fajswhatnots@yahoo.com or faj-alive.blogspot.com

(First published in Guardian on Sunday, February 14, 2010)

Nollywood Noisemakers and the Rest of Us

Nollywood Noisemakers and the Rest of Us

~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima

It was in the book Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria written by Monsieur Pierre Barrot that he called one of the top players in the contemporary Nigerian film industry a Nollywood Noisemaker. Of course M. Barrot knew what he was talking about when he made that derogatory jest, because he was the French Audio-visual Attaché in Nigeria where he was involved in the development of the local film industry and he could separate the sheep from the goats in Idumota and Onitsha.


Nollywood noisemakers are legion and they are well known for their street brawls over bragging rights for the titular positions in their various guilds and making home videos. Then they went over the moon when UNESCO reported that Nigeria has overtaken Hollywood as the second largest film producer in the world after India’s Bollywood. But the last French Audio-visual Attaché in Nigeria, Monsieur Robert Minangoy laughed at the report and waved it off in dismissal.

How can you compare 485 major films produced by the United States to Nollywood’s 872 home videos? Moreover, the figures were based on a survey done by UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in 2006. Bollywood made 1,091 feature-length films in 2006 and if you know the stuff and the format of these Indian films, you would be an ignorant fool to compare them to the cheap home videos in Nollywood.

99% of Nollywood videos cannot be screened at any major film festival, cinema and on TV in America or Europe, because the quality is amateurish and Nollywood movie makers have pirated American and European songs and music in their home videos. In fact, it is common to hear complete tracks of Céline Dion or Beyoncé Knowles in many Nollywood movies and they violated these copyrights with impunity.




Nollywood has crashed since the UNESCO report was published and the current statistics will send that report into the waste bin, because majority of the prolific Nollywood producers are broke and in fact, many of them complained of hunger on TV when they were protesting against piracy on the streets of Lagos. They were pointing accusing fingers at the famous Alaba International Market in Lagos where traders are duplicating copies of both Nigerian and foreign movies and hawking them on the streets like cheap peanuts..
Only the well-fed producers are still active and in fact, they are not making up to half of the 872 home videos recorded in 2006.

Nollywood noisemakers can even claim that Nigeria is the largest producer of home video movies in the world, but they must tackle the problem of the poor quality of their productions. If Nigerians want to celebrate a UNESCO Report on being the second largest producer of B movies in the world, they can do so shamelessly, but they are only celebrating their mediocrity and continue to be the laughing stock of Hollywood and Bollywood. It is ridiculous for Nigeria to boast of making over 872 movies annually, but not a single one has even qualified for screening at the Cannes Film Festival and most of them cannot make the box office in America!
How many Nollywood movies have been shown in cinemas?

What we should be proud of is quality and not quantity.

You must improve and perfect your craft and art, no matter the format of the Media you are using.

Quality has no substitute.


HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON NOLLYWOOD:

Nollywood
Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution






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