At the risk of being labeled thanatophobic – a preoccupation with death or its anxiety – the grim reality is that, last Tuesday, Nigeria’s music world would have lost veteran Yoruba Fuji musician, Wasiu Ayinde. Being Muslim, it is in order to say the man popularly known as KWAM 1 would have been buried same Tuesday or early Wednesday. He would have been killed over a mere tiff with an airline official over allegation of carrying liquour on board an aircraft. There is no grimmer way of putting the potential calamity than this. It is a signpost of the paper-thin divide between life and death.
A footage of the musician hurriedly ducking the wing blade of a taxing ValueJet aircraft on the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, with a potentially disastrous consequence, left everyone gasping for breath. KWAM 1, in his usual haughty display, had engaged the airline’s personnel in a needless altercation over his obvious breach of airline protocol. So, how do you label what the musician demonstrated that Tuesday; eccentricity, Big Manism, suicidal inclination or substance intoxication?
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Looking for a musician or artist who is not eccentric may be akin to searching for the teeth of a hen. Name them: Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Oscar Wilde, David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Captain Beefheart and in Nigeria, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Wole Soyinka, Davido, Wizkid, Portable and many others. They all have one thing in common: they are eccentric. They are weird, unconventional, against-method and display rare traits, mostly for attention and in support of their trade. For them, acting unconventionally is a private code, a badge of identity. Lady Gaga’s is in her flamboyant fashion and performances. The truth is that, eccentricity, what Americans call ‘wacky’, is the lifeblood of music, musicians and the art in entirety. For most of them, it is intentional eccentricity, a bold effort to wow the audience through appearance or presentation. The media also feeds off their wacky lifestyles, raking millions from their unconventional public images.
Michael Jackson is an example. Michael lived a bizarre life with a unique public persona, unusual lifestyle choices, as well as weird dressing and dancing styles. He deliberately cultivated a mysterious and flamboyant image with rumours and speculation enveloping his entire life. He took eccentricity to a new high as one who was not only eccentric but who was gloriously audacious. He decorated himself with clothes that charmed his vanity and was just like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the character in his The Picture of Dorian Gray, who didn’t want to lose the purity of his youth to age, who then admonished that, “when your youth goes, your beaty will go with it…time is jealous of you and wars against your lilies and your roses”.
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Michael Jackson abhorred decaying flesh and wanted longevity. To achieve this, he lived in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, conducting extensive plastic surgeries on himself which included cosmetic procedures of rhinoplasty (nose jobs), cheekbone, forehead lifts and lip-thinning. After this, he was afflicted by vitiligo, a skin condition whose feature is pigment loss, prompting his fans to accuse him of skin bleaching. He also lived like a recluse in his Neverland Ranch home designed with amusement park rides. In the zoo, he collected exotic animals. Michael’s invitation to children to stay with him in the Ranch fueled speculations and accusation of his being a pedophile. This landed him multiple accusations of child sexual abuse, leading to prolonged legal battles which significantly impacted his mental health and public image.
In the odd life they live, odd ways they dress, queer acts they display and their unusual performative actions on stage, artists and musicians demonstrate how eccentricity can be used as a powerful tool to shape musical identity.
Musicians’ lyrics also bring out the eccentricity in them. In 1986, New Jersey-born American singer-songwriter and pianist, Gwen Guthrey, burst the bubble of a prude world when she sang her very controversial and materialistic track, “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ on But the Rent”. It was raw talent combined with artistic bravura. For a world that was not used to such realistic outburst from the female to the male gender, that track, especially its matter-of-factly pronouncement, “You’ve got to have a j-o-b if you want to be with me/No romance without finance” shocked the world. Guthrie was to die of uterine cancer on February 3, 1999, thirteen years after the song. Same audaciousness went for reggae musician, Winston Hubert MclnTosh, one of the now deceased trio of Jamaican reggae group, the Wailers. Popularly known as Peter Tosh, against the grain of global public morality, Tosh’s first major hit after the separation of the band was an iconoclastic album he called Legalize It, released in 1976 with CBS Records. In it, Tosh uncompromisingly beatified the banned narcotic drug, Indian hemp, lauding its health benefits and the widespreadness of its abuse. The album sleeve had him smoking the marijuana chalice pipe in a countryside hemp plantation.
It is same for Marvin Gaye. Described as shy, fearful and ambitious, yet also capable of great passion and charisma, his eccentricity is in a complex interplay and conflict between his artistic vision, personal struggles and unconventional approach to music and life. He was a non-conformist who pushed boundaries, both musically and personally, and which sometimes manifested in his erratic behaviour of a troubled personal life, childhood abuse and his struggle with insecurity. He struggled to balance social commentary with eroticism in his songs, especially in his world classic track, ‘Sexual Healing.’ This unwittingly revealed his multifaceted personality. He also struggled to balance his feeling for his father, a strict and reputedly abusive religious figure and his love for his mother. He was eventually shot twice by his father after he intervened in an argument between his parents. He was pronounced dead upon being rushed to the California Hospital Medical Center on 1 April, 1984. His father later pleaded no-contest to a charge of voluntary manslaughter in an Arlington Heights, Los Angeles, California, USA court.
Like Wasiu Ayinde, Tosh, the 6.4-footer dreadlocked singer was arrogant and self assertive. For instance, immediately his colleague, Bob Marley died, Tosh shocked the world in an interview where he made the allegorical claim that Bob peaked in his musical career while he (Peter) was decorating the stage. The truth is, Tosh was too assertive, too hot to handle and never hid his disdain for what he called “Babylonian” lifestyle of hedonism. Tosh also believed in marrying words with action. Towards the latter part of his life, he cut a queer image of a revolutionary ready to carry arms. With his imposing height as he adorned a black beret, with a guitar that had the shape of an M16 assault rifle, Tosh didn’t mince words in projecting the narrative that he was a musical militant. He told those who underrated him that he was “like you are steppin’ razor” and asked, “don’t you watch my size” as “I am dangerous!” In comparison to others, Tosh said “I’m the Toughest,” an apparent reference to the trained karate belt holder that he was. He was once asked by an interviewer why he never smiled. His reply was, since he sang revolutionary songs, not love song, nor a tea party, there was no reason to smile.
While putting up eccentric shows, however, many of the musicians and artists have met their waterloo. One of KWAM 1’s Yoruba musical ancestors, Ayinla Omowura, was not as lucky as he was on the Nnamdi Azikiwe airport tarmac. As KWAM 1 woke up that Tuesday morning in Abuja, on 6 May, 1980, the Apala songster also rose at cockcrow in his Itoko, Abeokuta, Ogun State home. By midday, he was history. For the Egba-born musician, a trivia, a needless beefing over possession of a motorcycle in a barroom brawl, extinguished his hugely billowing musical career fire.
Eccentricism comes in various forms. To some, it is in a violent lifestyle. For some others, it is acting like a child, what is called infantilisation. Its victims deny their maturity and treat themselves as helpless and dependent. Many of them express their bohemianism through consumption of drugs. Apala music Lord, Omowura, Awurebe’s Dauda Epo Akara and Fuji’s Ayinde Barrister – the latter, up until a point when he left the craze before his death, consumed marijuana heavily. Omowura once walked into an Abeokuta High Court smoking the banned substance. For yet some others, it is arousing sexual desire or excitement in others through their looks, while to some others, it is blasphemy.
Take for example, The Beatles, a famous American Rock music band, widely regarded as the most influential Western popular music ever. It was formed in Liverpool in 1960 with a core lineup of artists like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Lennon had sparked controversy in a 1966 interview with British reporter, Maureen Cleave, when he said The Beatles were even “more popular than Jesus”. He further said, “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right … Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
The Lennon comment resulted in a huge backlash and created an uproar which led to wide protests against the band. US religious and social conservatives were outraged. Even the Ku Klux Klan joined the fray. The controversy it sparked was such that The Vatican issued a protest letter. The Beatles’ records were also banned by Spanish and Dutch radio stations and on South Africa’s National Broadcasting Service. When the backlash became too severe, a press conference was organized for Lennon to make a clarification and he said, “If I’d said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it.,” but at further promptings from reporters, he grudgingly said, “If you want me to apologize, if that will make you happy, then okay, I’m sorry.”
The bohemian nature of The Beatles was to come out more later. They provoked a great furore in June 1966 with the cover of their Capitol LP with the title ‘Yesterday and Today.’ The album sleeve had them dressed in a butcher’s overall with raw meat and mutilated plastic baby dolls splattered on it. They grinned from ear to ear. On a tour of the Philippines the month after this furore, they unintentionally snubbed Imelda Marcos, the nation’s First Lady, who had arranged a breakfast reception for them at the Presidential Palace. Angered, the Marcos organized a nationwide riots against them. Seeing that their lives were hanging precariously in a balance, the Beatles fled the Philippines. In 1970, a legal row ensued in the band leading to its dissolution on December 29, 1974. In 1980, Lennon was murdered and in 2001, George Harrison died of cancer.
The eccentricity of Oscar Wilde, Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright, poet and critic came in a different form. He was, to date, one of Ireland’s most dramatic and eccentric writers. As brilliant and ecumenical-minded as Wilde was, he was a homosexual, a heinous crime of the world of the 19th century. Extremely talented, having been educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde, son of a successful surgeon father and writer, literary hostess mother, wrote a popular string of comedies like The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and Salome (1896). His real life was marred by drama and tragedy as well. While married to Constance Lloyd and with two sons, in 1891, his gay affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed ‘Bosie’, was revealed by Bosie’s father, the Marquis of Queensberry.
Wilde’s eccentricity is said to be a deliberate self-creation of his public persona. Famous for his flamboyant clothing, unmatchable wits, and unconventional lifestyle, he cultivated all these to carve an image of an aesthete and a dandy. Dandyism is characterized by the philosophy of placing great emphasis on appearance, fashion, and sophisticated style. This creation of an eccentric persona ultimately helped Oscar to express his artistic ideals, as well as becoming a tool to critique the rigid social norms and conventions of the Victorian society of the 19th century.
In April 1895, Oscar sued the Marquis for libel. During trial, however, evidence adduced revealed details of his private life as a homosexual. Imprisoned for two years at the Reading jail after being convicted for gross indecency, in prison, he wrote a long letter to his gay partner, Douglas which was posthumously entitled De Profundis or Letter to Sir Alfred Douglas. In the letter, he wrote, “I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to describe my anguish and shame… I disgraced (my parents’ name) eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into synonyms for folly…the two turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison.” Upon his release, Oscar lived the rest of his life in Europe, writing his last known work in 1892 with the title ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. He died in Paris on November 30, 1900.
Nigeria has its huge supply of such bohemian characters. Fela smoked marijuana everywhere with abandon, wore underwear in public and married 27 wives in a day. Davido, Wizkid and their clan frighteningly scarify their arms, necks; wear dreadlocks and hang on their necks dangling, hefty ornamented laces like prisoners’ chains. Burna Boy, a jailbird once held in a UK slammer for gang-related stabbing. wears violence on him like a necklace while Portable is brash, crude, violent and in love with disorder. But, in which of these atypical behaviour can we locate Wasiu Ayinde and his disorderly portrayal last Tuesday?
I once met KWAM 1 some two decades ago in a friend’s home. Like many of those bohemian musicians, he was brash, haughty, nutty, naughty and crude. From my examination of artists and musicians, society’s kitschy acceptance and love of their display of unnatural, artificial, even fake lifestyles fuels their eccentric behaviour. Consumer culture is in their favour. Marketing of contemporary popular music draws from this tradition that requires artists to be eccentric. It is a culture that began as Dandyism back in the 19th century. Its theme was to exalt bohemian artists, and in the words of Susan Lee Sontag, an American writer and critic, to lift up “glorified otherness/the queer, being distinguishable as an important part of artistic expression.”
On stage, wowed and giddy female audiences have reportedly removed their undies and flung them at musicians. Even when they engage in pure outlawry, musicians’ acceptance as daemon by the world is mind-boggling. Discussions on whether society should continue to abet artists’ display of eccentricity as acceptable mode of behaviour or not is rife. The question then is, is eccentricity a victory of aesthetics, artistic expression, extravagant gaining of attention to be different, or simply victory for artistic narcissism?
KWAM 1’s apparent unwitting suicide last Tuesday was fueled, more than eccentricity, but by the ubiquitous Nigerian Big Man syndrome. Broken to its smallest particles, the syndrome is impunity of the ruling class writ large. Its soundbite is, “do you know who I am?” It is euphemism for an informal but powerful influence of a select group of wealthy or well-connected individuals in Nigeria. Though they often operate outside of the formal structures of power and governance, the Nigerian Big Men deploy and leverage connections, through what Professor Richard Joseph once described as a prebendal, patron-client network, to control access to policy decisions and state resources. These are often strengthened by massive corruption, eventually breeding inequality, inequity and social shunting, leading to limited opportunities for the generality of the people.
The Fuji musician, a product of the street where drugs, survival-of-the-fittest, crude elbowing for position and might-is-right reigned, has been a long-time ally of the Nigerian president who is his street ally. He is also the official musician of the ruling party and was recently caught in a phone conversation with the president where the musician was accused of insolence to Nigeria’s No 1 citizen.
While the Minister of Aviation, Festus Keyamo, must be commended for handing a six-month no-fly ban to him, it still does not dud the fact that the Nigerian Big Manism was at play. The penalty given KWAM 1 by Keyamo is obviously a slap-on-the-wrist. S 459A of the Nigerian Criminal Code, which is on obstruction of aircraft, says “Any person who, by any unlawful act, obstructs, causes an alteration to be made in the course of, or in any way whatsoever hinders or impedes the movement of any aircraft, which is in motion on or in flight over any aerodrome, is guilty of a misdemeanour and is liable to imprisonment for two years.” But the Nigerian Big Manism cult will not allow one of its own to fall foul of this.
The question is, could KWAM 1 have done this at Heathrow Airport, or any other airport of any sane country of the world? In those places, the musician would have been subjected to a mental health evaluation and trial. Yes, Ayinde Wasiu has apologised but the law is no respecter of passion or persons. England could also have overlooked Oscar Wilde’s indecency charge, taking into consideration his impressionable artistry. It sent him to the HM Prison Reading, popularly known as Reading gaol, located in Berkshire, England, where he served his two-year term with hard labour. Wasiu Ayinde must similarly be used as lesson to the Nigerian Big Man.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
