Comes highly recommended by the Lagosians
March 27, 2016 8:07 AM   Subscribe

 
I thought I would hate this based on the introduction, with its pre-occupation with "authenticity," but it's less shallow than I first thought, and the interview with Seun Kuti makes it worth it.

Though I do wish there was more attention to how the music scene treats women. If you want to write about inequality, that's a huge blind spot to have.

We see a woman in a swimsuit, a woman's legs wrapped around a man's, and we have an anecdote about a woman being used as bait for a trap--but we never hear anything from a woman. Whose distant dream world are you writing about? Be clear.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:25 AM on March 27, 2016 [19 favorites]


To sum up this long Playboy article, there are a lot of rich Nigerians who drink a lot of champagne in Afropop clubs. Most Lagosians live in dire poverty. Nothing substantial is said about how dangerous the city is. And, as Kusuwamushi points out above, women are treated in this article about the same way they've always been treated in Playboy. As K_ also points out, Seun Kuti seems like a wonderful person.
posted by kozad at 8:29 AM on March 27, 2016 [10 favorites]


Thanks for the post!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:35 AM on March 27, 2016


I'm really interested in Afropop but knew nothing of the background. This article could have been helpful but wasn't actually that illuminating.
posted by k8t at 8:39 AM on March 27, 2016


This has go to be the first FPP from playboy.com
posted by leotrotsky at 8:52 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've wanted to learn more about Lagos but I'm not sure this Playboy view of it is the part I'm interested in. For a completely different view, the BBC three hour documentary Welcome to Lagos is worth watching. There was some criticism when it came out that it was colonialist and too negative, which I think is fair, but it also portrayed more of daily life in Lagos than I've seen anywhere else.
posted by Nelson at 8:52 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


Fela Kuti's kids seem to understand. The author of this article? Not so much.
posted by Doleful Creature at 8:56 AM on March 27, 2016


In my first impressions, as an onlooker, of course, I saw William Gibson sitting unnoticed in a booth in the back of the club, taking notes for his next novel. Imade myself wade through the writer's auto-sketch, himself, the international partier.

The Playboy script from 1965 still bears fruit. Good music, good wine, beautiful women, all set in fashionable clubs or at the appropriately opulent poolside. I was surprised that nobody seemed to have a motor yacht. It's good to celebrate the small victories, though. Next year the Rolling Stone could take a look at the culture over which these playboys and their toys so easily glide. I'd like to see what the muggers think about all this.

The story I saw, though, was a return of young people to their homeland. I didn't understand what happens after the party. Or before it. I try to forgive the writer's ellipses in the last scene, where we were left with the unresolved image of the woman on her knees in the road: was she a trap?--was she a victim? Never mind. Drive on.

Back to William Gibson. His imagery is not less disturbing, but I can at least suspend my ability to believe for a while, and just go with it. Unlike the woman in the street, his characters evaporate into the ether when I close the book.
posted by mule98J at 8:57 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]


Afropop Blog (more focused on acts with a more traditional pop/roots focus, but still great)

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 - Black Woman (released around International Woman's Day, IIRC)

There is a lot of Francophone Afropop that's not really mentioned in this article, but maybe that's the language barrier. I've been trying to find a streaming or archived selection from Trace Africa, a channel that was often playing in bars/restos when I was over there and had stuff from all over (but with a bias toward French-language). Sadly, it might not exist, but if you search Youtube with the channel name you get a lot of third-party uploads of recent videos ripped from the channel.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:58 AM on March 27, 2016 [5 favorites]


This has go to be the first FPP from playboy.com

Not even the first one this year.
posted by Spathe Cadet at 9:02 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm really interested in Afropop but knew nothing of the background. This article could have been helpful but wasn't actually that illuminating.

Yes but the writer lamented that because of proliferation of global culture everything is the same now. Nothing new to learn etc.
posted by My Dad at 9:12 AM on March 27, 2016


What on earth has French to do with Lagos culture?
posted by infini at 9:32 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


What on earth has French to do with Lagos culture?

Maybe I wasn't clear about what that comment was about.

This is an article about Lagos culture, but it also talks about Afropop more generally--and there is a lot of Afropop that isn't from Lagos. I actually thought it was a little weird that the article didn't really mention it; it seems to overstate Lagos's centrality to the movement.

But my main reason is just wanting to share some ideas for people (like the commenter above) who might want to look into more Afropop more generally.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:41 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


The parts about the music were interesting, the author lamenting the lack of "authenticity" in the world and using "party" as verb were less so.

(One of my dreams in life is to start a journal of travel writing where the words "authentic" and "exotic" are banned, as are articles about how sad it is that people who used to work in the fields for 10 hours a day now have mobile phones and watch Friends.)
posted by betweenthebars at 9:44 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]


We all learned French or Spanish in school, didn't we? If you know one or the other it's pretty straightforward for any non-French or non-Spanish speaker to read a newspaper in either language, and if you can do that as a freelance writer for Playboy you ought to be able to do some basic French-language research into Afropop.
posted by My Dad at 9:47 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


We all learned French or Spanish in school, didn't we?

Well, not really. I can't speculate about the author's background, but I never had any foreign language instruction worth talking about until college, and then it wasn't in French or Spanish.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:50 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


I remember a very long ago DC comics meeting I got to overhear where they wanted to set Batman in Africa. The writer who suggested Batman be the son of an oil rich Nigerian oil baron who wanted to clean up Laos was laughed out of the room, obviously all Africans are refugees or child soliders.
posted by The Whelk at 9:51 AM on March 27, 2016 [14 favorites]


The Whelk, you're looking for Wale, who emerges as EXO
posted by infini at 9:55 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


Well, not really. I can't speculate about the author's background, but I never had any foreign language instruction worth talking about until college, and then it wasn't in French or Spanish.

Really? Weird. In Canada it's common to learn French in school. I can't speak it but as mentioned I can read the newspaper and technical writing. Same as Spanish. And a little Italian.
posted by My Dad at 9:55 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


French is an official language of Canada and one of your biggest provinces is predominantly French-speaking. The situation's a little different in the US.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:57 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]


.... I've been trying to find a streaming or archived selection from Trace Africa, a channel that was often playing in bars/restos when I was over there and had stuff from all over (but with a bias toward French-language). ....

The article does reference and discuss afropop several times,and since many African countries do have French as an official language, it makes sense that someone would look for this connection....Or maybe it is the connection that I look for and want, and was probably what I was looking for and desired when I clicked on the article.

I can't find Trace Africa, but...if anyone wants to find music streamed from Gabon, Africa Numero 1 streams music and talk radio. I sometimes go here when I need a fix of French afropop.
posted by Wolfster at 10:04 AM on March 27, 2016


The Whelk,

Was Grant Morrison there? He introduced an "African Batman", Batwing, who was a Congolese policeman inducted into Batman Incorporated, in 2011.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:04 AM on March 27, 2016


This would've been 2008 soooo
posted by The Whelk at 10:09 AM on March 27, 2016


French is an official language of Canada and one of your biggest provinces is predominantly French-speaking. The situation's a little different in the US.

My point is that there is no excuse for a writer who has traveled to 45 different countries to not speak another language. I guess I found this article more about the exoticism and otherness of travel. After all, the writer laments that "everything is the same," right?

The irony of course is that if one speaks another language, it's possible to truly begin to understand differences in culture; the monoculture disappears.

Everything is *not* the same, except for places that can only be experienced through the global lingua franca, English.

So what was the point of this Playboy article?
posted by My Dad at 10:15 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


We all learned French or Spanish in school, didn't we?

Ha ha.

The writer who suggested Batman be the son of an oil rich Nigerian oil baron who wanted to clean up Laos was laughed out of the room, obviously all Africans are refugees or child soliders.

I like the idea of this being greenlighted all the way to publication before anyone notices the difference between Lagos and Laos.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:19 AM on March 27, 2016 [8 favorites]


My Dad, I haven't been to anything like 45 countries, but as a USA-ian I had only a small amount of education in Cajun French and two years of indifferent high school Spanish. I'm struggling to learn a little bit of Brazilian Portuguese since I travel frequently to Brazil. The lack of decent foreign language instruction in our schools definitely makes it harder for us to understand other cultures since most of us have to work with English-language materials.
posted by wintermind at 10:27 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


As someone who has had to learn French in an environment where it had to be completely self-directed and motivated: Learning a foreign language is hard work, and it easily slips away once you're no longer practicing it. It requires constant effort and maintenance. Not everyone has that luxury. I even find it hard to study/maintain the foreign languages I know, and I'm a linguist. I've forgotten so much, despite putting years of effort in.

Growing up in an environment where it's supported by the government, by the wider culture--it is really easy to look down on people who are monolingual, without recognizing just how much a role environment plays.

And we shouldn't equate proficiency in Romance languages with proficiency in a foreign language either. We don't know what languages the author speaks. I suspect that a well-traveled author from the USA would actually know some Spanish, maybe some French too, but given that you can find a lot of basic information on Francophone African pop in English I suspect it's not really the author's language barrier and more of a general cultural language barrier.

(And of course, you're more likely to be proficient in a language if your travel takes you to a place where that language is spoken for a long time, rather than going to many different countries. I'm going to know Spanish a lot better if my travel's concentrated in the Americas than if I'm going to Mexico, Cambodia, Japan, China, India, Senegal, etc. You don't learn a language by going someplace for two weeks.)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:52 AM on March 27, 2016 [8 favorites]


That's what I thought when I saw this: why isn't this more Canadian?
posted by destro at 11:02 AM on March 27, 2016 [5 favorites]


I mean Africa is sooooo foreign so why don't we just talk about America. Again.
Maybe the reason they don't mention French is that this is about Lagos where the main language apart from English is Yoruba.
And this is Playboy for fucks sake not some academic journal. It is not an uninformative article.
I'd never heard of any of the people mentioned apart from the corrupt generals.
Fela as rich as any oilman in the city. He would carry around trash bags of money and buy multiple cars at a time. A marijuana enthusiast of the highest order and an early dab king, he made his own hash oil and carried a jar of it around with him. He built his own concert hall, the Shrine, and played inexpensive shows to audiences filled with the disenfranchised.
That's pretty hardcore.
So thanks for the FPP I learnt a fair bit about a part of the world I know little or nothing about.
posted by adamvasco at 11:26 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]


At first I thought, Lagos, Maryland was a definite party city when I was younger. But dangerous? Not really. I stand corrected.
posted by Splunge at 12:09 PM on March 27, 2016


Nice find: I enjoyed reading that article, which is about a part of my country I have no experience of whatsoever, young super-rich contemporary party people. I thought it had lots of insight in amongst a bunch of received opinions. Nelson, above, is right about those Welcome to Lagos documentaries, imo some of the best commentary on the country from outside it that I've seen.

Contradictions. There's always contradictions. The writer seems to be concentrating on Whizkid and his ilk and ends up entranced by the Kuti's. He's got this irritating hipster search for realness going on while exploring a place where the realness is either going jump out at you and hit you nastily on the head or a few weeks later you realize your attitude's had a complete readjustment and you didn't notice until you got home and tried to carry on as normal. Funny old place. My own relationship with Nigeria is a conflict that keeps me long-term puzzled. Life certainly is a lot more precarious there and unless you're being well looked after, as the author is here, you'd do well to stay extremely alert and aware of your surroundings.

Bit of a derail there about language learning in the West but there's been some interesting points made in the comments as well.
posted by glasseyes at 12:41 PM on March 27, 2016 [9 favorites]


I think if the article guided anyone to youtube to look up some of the names mentioned and then carry on following links, it will have been quite informative.
posted by glasseyes at 12:43 PM on March 27, 2016


And this is Playboy for fucks sake not some academic journal.

I don't think that anyone is expecting an academic journal article, but I would definitely like to see authors take a less blinkered view. Treating Lagos culture as "the" center of Afropop is a minor oversight in the scheme of things. The complete lack of awareness of women as potential subjects in the story is a major oversight, especially when the central organizing theme is the contrast between the dream and the reality.

I don't think it's wrong to be disappointed by that and to point it out. The fact that this kind of oversight is so dreadfully expected, especially in media aimed at men, only makes pointing it out more worthwhile, in my view.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:58 PM on March 27, 2016


If you haven't heard of Fela Kuti you should definitely look up Fela Kuti.
posted by atoxyl at 1:14 PM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]


Treating Lagos culture as "the" center of Afropop is a minor oversight in the scheme of things.
Well, we are talking about the largest city in the largest country in Africa. I have to admit I have more Francophone country music in my collection than otherwise though.
posted by Bee'sWing at 2:03 PM on March 27, 2016


glasseyes, what I found fascinating was that this article was being passed around by the Lagosians accompanied by high praise, compared to the disparaging comments being made by those from outside the continent, both on twitter.

The impression I came away with was this was more of a mood piece that seemed to have captured some particular slice of Lagos life, perhaps one that's generally hidden from external observers, perhaps? Else why the consistency of each side's responses?

Here are some of the comments, for your delectation, as I distract myself watching a sudden and extremely fascinating turn of events in this thread.
posted by infini at 2:41 PM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]


Mod note: Couple comments removed; let's try and bring down the temperature a little and maybe rerail a bit in the process.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:03 PM on March 27, 2016


Boko Haram? Bottle service with sparklers? Sorry, not my scene. I had a Bloody Mary for breakfast with a mini-quiche on top and drank session IPAs until my bowel bacteria cried uncle. I also won a keychain. But I could probably handle their music more than I can the Buck Cherry on TouchTunes.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:11 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Just Nthing Welcome to Lagos. I really enjoyed it, and thought it gave a a diverse range of people a voice that they otherwise wouldn't have. Most of the Nigerian criticism I saw of it came from, unfortunately, the most well-heeled Nigerian elites, and I personally felt the anger was tinged with an undercurrent of embarrassment, if not shame.
posted by smoke at 3:43 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Following atoxyl's excellent advise to find out more about Fela Kuti I read this while listening to this.
Quite the man

posted by adamvasco at 3:47 PM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


From adamvasco's link, this playlist link has some 10+ hours of Fela Kuti.
posted by Nelson at 4:16 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


From adamvasco's text link:

By now Fela was virtually composing his songs in public. Each week at the Afro-Spot new works were premiered, and Fela would talk the audience through the meaning of the lyrics and work the group through the arrangement on stage. In this way classics such as "Lady", "Go-Slow", "Water No Get Enemy", "Chop And Quench", "Palava" and "Shakara-Oloje" emerged to become part of the urban folklore of Lagos. Not only were the songs massive local hits, but for many Lagos citizens it became imperative to attend these sessions, where Fela's interactive style made the audience a part of the performance.
posted by infini at 4:54 AM on March 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


If you haven't heard of Fela Kuti you should definitely look up Fela Kuti.

Yeah, ffs: jay-z funded a musical about his life that was on billboards for the better part of a year around here.
posted by lkc at 7:08 PM on March 28, 2016


Ooh, sorry I'm late back to the thread, infini. Yeah, my sister had bought some of the smooth modern music and she was very into it, and also commented that young people at home are really proud of it, like it's proof we're part of global modernity through high production values, use of technology, related imagery, language, visual stylings etc. And I think Kutsuwamushi has a point about the use of woman as completely passive decorative indicators of status, which is very much informed by the visual language of male-centered African American pop, hip hop and rap. That and the often coarse sexual language. And it really jars me because Yoruba culture being as intensely patriarchal as it is, Yoruba women are the opposite of passive! So there is a paradox about the whole thing where these slick indicators of modernity and development are, depending on your point of view, actually quite retrogressive. But yeah, it would have been surprising if that particular writer had noticed.

I like a nifty video but I prefer music that's not over produced, and I love the old stuff, with its complexity and drive and quality of giving no fucks, even tho I hardly understand the language. In other words, young people of today, they don't know they're born, they should go and mess about on their own lawns etc. Harrumph.

Re Fela: there's a French documentary about Fela which has some of his performances and is good for context. The dvd has French and English versions, slightly different from each other. When I was young his music was played all over the place, and the popular word for anybody in a military-type uniform - police, army, security guard - was 'zombie' - they were hated - after this song. This is the song that precipitated the attack on the Kalakuta Republic.

- and when I was young for a woman of my class/status etc to have gone anywhere near the Kalakuta Republic, let alone listened to music there drinking alcohol and smoking ganja! would have been unthinkable. unless I'd been a runaway or hopeless degenerate /scare quotes. A British-born friend of mine who went to discover her Nigerian family in the 70's had the opportunity to go to The Shrine, which was amazing. But the older family members nearly locked her in the house to prevent it.

And I forgot to say my nieces, twenty years later, had no idea about Fela or his music.
posted by glasseyes at 2:11 PM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


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