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the status of guns as symbol of imperial domination: the same tools used on the plantation to check
slave uprising were later adopted by self-defense movements like the Black Panther Party.
crucial in this: a playful, sometimes flippant elegance that has found residence in New York City, but is
biographer, Mabinuori Idowu (ID), titled “African Who Sang and Saw Tomorrow”, written in the actually
from everywhere. An article away from Schoonmaker’s introduction is a piece by Fela’s biographer,
Mabinuori Idowu (ID), titled “African Who Sang and Saw Tomorrow”, written in the the whimsical but
inimitable style of his Fela: Why Blackman Carry Shit, published in 1986. The review of the exhibition
on CNN’s Inside Africa featured the writer Vivien Goldman and Fela’s photographer, mementoes of
the military brutality that destroyed the musician’s house in 1977.
Femi ‘Foto’ Osunla, the latter a speaking, political voice who pointed at his broken incisors as
mementoes of the military brutality that destroyed the musician’s house in 1977.
So we have here a presentation of Fela as an accessible figure of global importance, yet one so
specifically located in the counterculture of Nigeria that people like Idowu, Osunla and Ghariokwu are
able to display their own work, without untoward mediation. In order to carry this through, the curator
has to somehow fit Fela into the capacious but limited belly of the beast called New York. Jump n Funk
was a local monthly gathering on West Broadway in the wake of Fela’s death, but when it gave rise to
the Fela Project, it attracted museum prestige and attained the power of any phenomenon considered
capable of travel and commodification. And it did this through the munificence of the global capital
that Fela’s work set out to battle. Bringing all of this under a single sway requires an aptitude for
cultural brokerage. Is this an irony? Perhaps, but there’s something more inscrutable at work.
Schoonmaker’s book is titled From West Africa to West Broadway, collapsing the entire stretch of
landmass from Fernando Po to Nouakchott and streamlining it against a neighborhood in downtown
Manhattan, New York City. These are incommensurable geographies, but as title, they rhyme. Is this,
then, the status of the work of art in the age of relentless, impersonal commodification? That once
style, the individualization of culture, has its foot in the door, all particularity stands aside, waiting to
get a glimpse of the inside when the door swings again? We can speculate on how cleverly this ties
back to one of Fela’s ideas of his work, especially the way he treated words like Motown, a name
which came from Motor Town: Detroit, Michigan, one-time automobile capital of the United States, was
the seat of Berry Gordy’s recording company. The French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
have a point when they note that capitalism is illiterate. They must have written that after seeing a
Fela concert in Paris.
It is raining as I step out of the Museum. On a corner of Spring and Broadway, an Asian woman clad in
cellophane is hawking umbrellas. She is making quite a sale, as most pedestrians, of whom there are
legions, have no protection from the tropical-like cloudburst. Further down the street, two other men
are doing the same thing. How much like Lagos!
© 2003.
slave uprising were later adopted by self-defense movements like the Black Panther Party.
crucial in this: a playful, sometimes flippant elegance that has found residence in New York City, but is
biographer, Mabinuori Idowu (ID), titled “African Who Sang and Saw Tomorrow”, written in the actually
from everywhere. An article away from Schoonmaker’s introduction is a piece by Fela’s biographer,
Mabinuori Idowu (ID), titled “African Who Sang and Saw Tomorrow”, written in the the whimsical but
inimitable style of his Fela: Why Blackman Carry Shit, published in 1986. The review of the exhibition
on CNN’s Inside Africa featured the writer Vivien Goldman and Fela’s photographer, mementoes of
the military brutality that destroyed the musician’s house in 1977.
Femi ‘Foto’ Osunla, the latter a speaking, political voice who pointed at his broken incisors as
mementoes of the military brutality that destroyed the musician’s house in 1977.
So we have here a presentation of Fela as an accessible figure of global importance, yet one so
specifically located in the counterculture of Nigeria that people like Idowu, Osunla and Ghariokwu are
able to display their own work, without untoward mediation. In order to carry this through, the curator
has to somehow fit Fela into the capacious but limited belly of the beast called New York. Jump n Funk
was a local monthly gathering on West Broadway in the wake of Fela’s death, but when it gave rise to
the Fela Project, it attracted museum prestige and attained the power of any phenomenon considered
capable of travel and commodification. And it did this through the munificence of the global capital
that Fela’s work set out to battle. Bringing all of this under a single sway requires an aptitude for
cultural brokerage. Is this an irony? Perhaps, but there’s something more inscrutable at work.
Schoonmaker’s book is titled From West Africa to West Broadway, collapsing the entire stretch of
landmass from Fernando Po to Nouakchott and streamlining it against a neighborhood in downtown
Manhattan, New York City. These are incommensurable geographies, but as title, they rhyme. Is this,
then, the status of the work of art in the age of relentless, impersonal commodification? That once
style, the individualization of culture, has its foot in the door, all particularity stands aside, waiting to
get a glimpse of the inside when the door swings again? We can speculate on how cleverly this ties
back to one of Fela’s ideas of his work, especially the way he treated words like Motown, a name
which came from Motor Town: Detroit, Michigan, one-time automobile capital of the United States, was
the seat of Berry Gordy’s recording company. The French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
have a point when they note that capitalism is illiterate. They must have written that after seeing a
Fela concert in Paris.
It is raining as I step out of the Museum. On a corner of Spring and Broadway, an Asian woman clad in
cellophane is hawking umbrellas. She is making quite a sale, as most pedestrians, of whom there are
legions, have no protection from the tropical-like cloudburst. Further down the street, two other men
are doing the same thing. How much like Lagos!
© 2003.