‘Barrister is Fújì and Fújì is Barrister’: Fújì music, self-making and the politics of genre-making in Lagos, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article explores the nexus between self-making and genre-making in African popular music through the lens of Fújì music, an urban Yoruba popular music from Nigeria. The story of social agents in postcolonial African popular music is at the heart of this genre-making process. Drawing from interviews, archives, and participant observations, I explore the development of Fújì through the agency of Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, the acclaimed pioneer of the genre. Through his continuous search for ‘newness’, Ayinde Barrister launched Fújì as a prestige genre, a type of modernity from below, within the 1970s Lagos social and economic scenes. Ultimately, the interlocking story of Ayinde Barrister and Fújì provides insights into how genre-making in African popular music intertwines processes of self-making in postcolonial Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Sikiru Ayinde Barrister
• Fújì music
• Yoruba popular music
• postcolonial African agency
• African popular music
• genre-making
• self-making

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their comments and suggestions to the early draft of this article. I wrote an aspect of this article while an Argelander Fellow and Lecturer (2022) at the Department of Musicology/Sound Studies, University of Bonn, Germany. Thanks to Professor Tobias Janz and Professor Gerrit Papenburg and members of the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Musicology/Sound Studies at the University of Bonn for the enabling environment that contributed to the development of this article. Thanks to Prof. Russell West-Pavlov and members of the Global South Studies programme at the University of Tübingen, and David Kerr for their comments on the initial draft of this article. Thanks to all the Fújì musicians, journalists, managers, record store operators, and record label owners who contributed to this work. Lastly, thanks to Elder Dayo Odeyemi, Otunba Wale Ademowo, and the family of Sikiru Ayinde Barrister for their support and access to their archives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Baba Ruka means ‘Ruka's father’, and Ruka is the name of his first daughter. It is common to identify or address people this way in Lagos.

2 The term ‘Barrister’ was adopted from the Law profession. The culture of self-naming and adoption of titles from military, academia and other canonic professions have a longstanding history in Nigerian popular music. Bandleaders started renaming and identifying with tiltes like ‘Captain’, ‘Bishop’, ‘Commander’, ‘Barrister’ and ‘Professor’ since the 1940s. Self-naming is one of the longstanding economic strategies and how bandleaders renegotiate and validate themselves.

3 Before the late 1970s, Yoruba popular music albums/records were released in Volumes. Thus, a musician could release in a series of Vol. 1 to 10.

Additional information

Funding

This article emerged from a broad research project funded by the Andrew Mellon-THInK (Transforming Humanities through Interdisciplinary Knowledge) Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Department of Music in the Wits School of Arts, and Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Notes on contributors

Oladele Ayorinde

Oladele Ayorinde is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and a Research Fellow of the Africa Open Institute (AOI), Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa. Located primarily in South Africa and Nigeria, his research explores music and music-making as a window into contemporary Africa's complex social, political, and economic development processes. His research interests include urban ethnography, Africa/African diasporic music and cultures, popular music and music industries, economic ethnomusicology, cultural policy and management, sound studies, Western classical music, Global South, the political economy of everyday life, archiving and documentation, and issues of transformation and decolonisation in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Black diaspora.