Hey, it's Jad. So the series is technically over, but I was inspired to put out this bonus essay. Let's call it a bonus essay because, well, Fela's been in the news a lot recently. You may have heard that he got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys, long overdue. I don't know. Maybe the series had something to do with that. Certainly didn't hurt. But likely what's going to happen is that that award is going to get talked about in a certain way that here is a quote African musician finally getting his due and that is of course true but there's something about those storylines that a lot gets lost right a lot of the interestingness of the music gets missed and Fela was doing some pretty revolutionary stuff with his music so what I'd love to do in this essay is just reconstruct for you one of the many musicological wormholes that we fell into while making the series. This one's kind of for the music nerds, although I don't know if that's really fair. I mean, it's really for anybody who believes that music can contain everything about us. Okay, so just to frame things, this particular journey juxtaposes Fairla against the entire history of Western classical music. It's going to take us to a crowded marketplace in Lagos, one of the most crowded places in the world, and into a beautiful conversation with two people that you may know. It absolutely blew my mind. Brian Eno. This is really an amazing new form of music. And David Byrne. When I heard Fela, I realized, oh, they're doing stuff that I'd never heard before. And I thought, this is really liberating. I have to respond to this music in a very different way than the stuff I was doing before. That conversation, I think it's really special, and I'm glad we can put it here. To start, we have to go back to the very beginning, the very first interview that we did for this project. This is July 6, 2022. Are you recording this now? Yeah, well, I am, but I haven't actually started. This is tape of us in Inwood, New York, in the apartment of Michael Veal, professor of ethnomusicology at Yale. Just, just, just. I speak strongly, so you can... Can I come around to your side? Yeah, let me get it cute. Okay. Michael is a musician himself, in addition to being a scholar, and when we first arrived, we spent... I've never seen so many records and books in one apartment. A good ten minutes trying to figure out where to do the interview, because in his living room, he had instruments everywhere and stacks of records where one would expect to find a couch or an armchair. At this point, we didn't know what the series was going to be at all. We just knew that Michael had written the book on Fela, and so he was going to be our first stop. And he told us that he discovered Fela in his early 20s when he was living in Boston and playing in a band. What was your music at that point? Was it jazz? It was like a kind of funk, experimental funk thing. Okay. And one day he'd gone out to meet this guy who worked at an indie record label to try and get the guy to buy his record. And he didn't really, he wasn't really feeling it. And he said, but, um, now if it was something like, fella, I might be interested. So I said, well, what is that? I don't even know what you're talking about. So he took out this stack of records. Put it on the sound system. And it blew my mind. He was like, this song is 25 minutes long. Straight groove. So that was the first thing that got me. The endless groove of it. Well, because the guy was a genius at composing grooves. That was his grooves, choral lines, chants, horn lines. He was a genius at what I call African counterpoint, how you take these parts and you put them together. Okay, so that phrase he just said? What I call African counterpoint, you know? That's where I fell in. You're getting me really excited right now because I... Michael was making a connection I just did not expect. 16th century counterpoint. You know, Bach, preludes and fugues, the way that all the melodies interweave and braid together. I went to music school. This is taught as if it is the absolute pinnacle of all music. What Michael seemed to be saying is that Fela's music is just as complicated. You study Western classical music, Johann Sebastian Bach and all those people, in that lineage, you know, they're masters of counterpoint. But there's an Africanist approach to counterpoint also. I'm just wondering what you're thinking of when you say counterpoint in phallus music. Building music in layers. And every layer has a different density level of activity. So if you hear something that goes... It's a repeating line. And it could be boring if it just repeats verbatim, you know, forever. But then you take another line and you put that on top of it. Make that line interlock with the fundamental line. And then you put another line on top of that. And then you bring in a drum set. So you've got all these lines. That's Vela's song upside down, by the way. So there you've got already three principles that comprise the practice of African counterpoint. as Michael described it in western counterpoint like in Bach you will have different melodies sort of chasing each other one melody happens and then another comes along and starts chasing it that's what a fugue is so it's a horizontal counterpoint like the melodies are separated in time in Fela's music the counterpoint is vertical because you have all of these somewhat static layers stacked on top of each other but you can hear this intricate conversation between layers. One says something, another responds. One is fast, another is slow. There are different layers of rhythm. You take a number of small repeating parts and you network them together into a composite, which is very complex. That first conversation with Michael, we talked about this idea for hours. First, it was just about music, but then it spun out into all kinds of things. These grooves, these rhythm patterns, these beats, as they would say today, it's not just music. They represent structures of consciousness, cultural consciousness, political consciousness. You know what I mean? This for me was one of the first moments where I got really excited about doing this series, that we were going to be able to use music to explore so many other things. But then an interesting thing happened. At a certain point in the conversation, our lead producer, Ruby Walsh, stepped in and asked a very sensible question, which is what the fuck are you both talking about? My question is a music novice. I don't speak. Aren't you a music lover though? I'm a music lover, but I don't speak fluent music the way that Chad does. Am I getting too technical? No, not at all. It's great. Ruby jumped in and was basically like, can we just slow down for a second and define the terms? What actually is counterpoint? Like, what do we usually mean when we say it? Even after the interview, we were talking and, I mean, am I right? Like you were saying things just weren't clicking. Yeah, I think that when we were talking about it, you know, Bach was coming up, Fugues were coming up, and I couldn't really hear the relationship between those composers and Fela. I felt like I was missing a step. Yeah. And that led me to reach out to Randy. I'm just going to test your level. So we're recording now. Or Randall Wolfe is his professional name. What did you have for breakfast today? This is a little testing. I had huevos rancheros. He's this composer who works for the Brooklyn Philharmonic and many other places, but he lives in my neighborhood. And yeah, I just emailed him and thought, you know, could I understand this better? I actually only recorded it for my own notes. Never intended to play this for anyone, but here we are. Well, I sort of asked that we play it because I think this is a really interesting conversation. It doesn't really begin being about feyla. It's more about Western classical music because you were just trying to sort of get background on what these terms mean. But it put this idea into the room that I never thought of. Okay, so I'm here to talk about counterpoint. And we said that we were going to agree that I'm an idiot. You said that. I said that. We're agreeing that I don't know anything. And we can proceed with that understanding. So how do you explain it to your students? Well, at its simplest, counterpoint means having more than one melody at the same time. Or more than one stream of activity at the same time. When I sat down with Randy, he pulled up a YouTube video for me. The Western tradition started out with Gregorian chant. Which I assume you familiar with I can say that I was super familiar with Gregorian chant but I had the gist you know I pictured a monastery semi of men in hoods Sometimes I picture them all looking up. Randy explained to me that this is what homophony sounds like, this very unified, clear sound. All these people singing the same thing at the same time, bowing to the same god in unison. So, counterpoint started when they had more than one Gregorian chant at the same time. This is a piece from the Notre Dame school. This is from the Middle Ages. Roughly 1198. And they took the notes of a chant and stretched them out very long. And then on top of it, they put faster notes that are made from little bits of the chant. So when I said there's relationships between things in counterpoint, you have the difference is you have super long notes and then very fast little notes. Also, the little notes are made out of the long, slow notes. So anyways, this is the music of Terrotin from the Middle Ages. Thank you. Now listen. I had to get to at least one change of note. It was very beautiful. It really had. It's a wonderful kind of religious contemplation music. All right, so this was a little more complex. I was still picturing the church, but this time it's almost like I was overhearing the private prayers of two people, both engaged in worship, but they've got their own relationship to God. And I think that's what Randy told me, is that this is what happened as Western music progressed from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, is that things got more and more complex. And the number of distinct voices or melodies that you could hear grew from two to four to eight. And the high point of this Renaissance style is Palestrina's Pope Marcellus Mass. It's in every college music history class. They say it's one of those apocryphal kind of stories that the Pope was going to get rid of complicated counterpoint because it was too distracting in the service. And Palestrina said, I can write a music that won't be distracting from the lyrics. It's almost certainly not true, but it's a nice story. So the Pope Marcellus Mass. Satsang with an election In this case, I could really hear how Bach came out of this tradition. I can hear that complexity that Michael was talking about and how the music builds in layers. It's almost like there's a musical idea at the center. That's how Randy explained it. There's this musical idea at the center, and each line or stream of activity is tossing that idea back and forth. But if I'm being honest, I think that in the case of the Gregorian chants and these compositions by Palestrina, and even those of Bach, I almost forget about the intricacy of all of them. Because each layer builds so seamlessly that you don't even notice how complicated they are. It's so harmonious. But then Randy jumped forward in time, and things started to sound just completely different. So enough old music. What else do I have? This is a very famous modern piece, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Yeah, I think I know this one, actually. It starts out, it's supposed to be pagan Russian's Spring, and the pipers come out, each little village has their own piper, and they're each playing their little tune. So that's how Stravinsky described this. So this begins with the melody on the bassoon, and then more and more melodies pile up. But unlike all the music we've been listening to, it doesn't make regular chords or really any kind of predictable harmony. It sounds kind of like a mess. But this is also one of the great achievements of Counterpoint. Simon Radlund, London Symphony. Again, love and love so as as as it ¶¶ So I meant mess in the best possible sense. And no one had done anything like this before in so many layers of tunes that really don't fit together in any kind of conventional way. So what was interesting to me about this is while I was listening, I wasn't picturing the church anymore. That underlying social order, that sense of harmony, was totally gone. It felt more like a conversation between lots of people. Lots of people that share nothing really other than they happen to be in the same place at the same time. When I listen to this, I completely see that image of all these different groups coming together. And you can see like a village emerge in the composition. It's almost like I could see the peddler and the baker and the bird. Every instrument section brings in a new image or feeling for me. Such a diverse ecosystem, so many different elements working. and some working against, some working with each other. It was really beautiful. Stravinsky, Fela, those are not names that I imagined putting next to each other. But it was only when I listened to Stravinsky that I felt like I really got it, that I could hear how Counterpoint, this idea that Michael had put us onto, how it related to Fela. You know, it's not necessarily about how their music sounds. Stravinsky's not weaving grooves or anything like that. It's that with both of them, they weren't using Counterpoint to construct a more perfect whole. It's more like they were using it as this tool, a tool to play with contradiction. You know, that idea of taking all these voices and putting them in the same place, not necessarily even making them speak to each other, but hearing them all at once. The music itself becomes a container for contradiction. Oh, Ruby, that was so good. Great. And this was a real light bulb moment for me when I heard the tape that you gathered. and I ended up taking that idea back to Michael Veal. When I hear some of the songs, I almost imagine a town, that the music is a kind of geography. It is. I hear the complexity that's in a town in a way. It is because it's really just the encoding of a social order into musical sound. Wow, that's interesting. It's a social paradigm. It's a model for how people interact and coded into a musical structure. That phrase stuck in my head for weeks, that idea that music is a way of listening to all the things that make up a society, like the relationships and the agreements and the norms and all that stuff that sort of below the level of awareness right That somehow music is a way to hear that stuff Now this was just an interesting thought for us that we didn really know what to do with Until we landed in Lagos. Then it got very concrete. Because it's one thing to listen to a fella in Brooklyn, but when you are in Lagos in a car and he's just playing on the radio, which happened constantly, it just hits so different. You're like, oh, now I get it. This is something we all kind of know, but if you think about it, why? Why would it sound so different? Anyhow, I'll tell you the moment when it really hit me. Towards the end of the trip, we visited a neighborhood called Muxin, which is a neighborhood that Fela loved. He sang about it. He set up his club on the edge of it. This is a neighborhood that, you know, Lagos used to be a small town and then oil money flooded in in the 70s and all of these people from the countrysides who spoke hundreds of different languages, worshipped different gods. They all come to the city looking for a better life and neighborhoods like Muxin absolutely explode in size. Yeah, we're all set. Can we walk this way? So we visited this market, Mushin Market. It was one of the most intense kinetic places I've ever been in my life. Thousands of people in the streets, cars driving on the sidewalks. You had stalls everywhere, people selling everything. Like one woman had a bucket of crabs that she had just pulled out of the Ogun River. Next to her, someone was selling red peppers that were so red that they kind of buzzed your eyes. Then there was a guy with a tub full of Colgate toothpaste. There was a guy selling cell phones, onions. An older guy hacking a goat carcass, blood spilling out onto the sidewalk. And the density, I can't even explain the density. It's like if you took one New York City block and injected 5,000 people into it. Meanwhile, there are loudspeakers everywhere, people yelling, trying to get you to come into their shops. We passed one speaker that was blaring Christian hymns. At the same moment, across the street, you could hear the Muslim call to prayer. A few feet down, a third speaker was playing Beyonce. You could hear all three at once. I remember standing in the middle of an intersection just dizzy and at one point I remember looking down and there was this kid maybe 10 years old sitting on the curb with his head in his hands just kind of sitting there bored and that was my moment I was like oh if you are that kid and this is your everyday to the extent it's boring like when you grow up What music are you going to want to hear? What music is going to make sense to you? It's probably going to sound like Fela. You're going to want a sound that is aggressive. It's not small, like a little four-piece doing its thing, but 30 musicians on stage, all mixing different sounds and cultures, kind of like in the market. Tony Allen playing Yoruba rhythm on the drums. The horns doing modal jazz. Guitarists doing a version of James Brown funk. you're going to try and not only hold all of these things that have filled you up over your life, but you're going to try and give them a space where they can coexist and have a kind of order. Like the market. I began to think of Fela's music as the encoding of a social order. The social order of Muxin Market into musical sound. Encoded into sound. That might explain why Michael Veal, when he first encountered Fela in that record shop in Boston, Why it felt to him like he'd suddenly stepped through a portal. One thing that was really a blessing is that going in through the Fela-Nuqalapu-Kuti portal, you're not going in romanticizing Africa. You're going in seeing all of the hardcore problems and contradictions, but it's a beautiful vehicle because underneath all of it, that beautiful groove is just chugging along. So you're getting that, but you're getting this education about all the complexities of contemporary Africa. I guess any time that you encounter music from another place, it can bring you into not just a new way of sounding, but an entirely new way of being. And this is all happening below the level of consciousness. It's not a thought that you think. Your body understands this information before your brain does. The music pulls you into movement, and while you are dancing, there's something in there that you're responding to, but you don't know what it is yet. And with that, let me make one more leap. So there's a little bit of noise in this room at the moment, but there won't be when we actually start. Okay, excellent. Can you hear me okay? I can hear you great. Can you hear us? London, late 70s, around the time when Fela was at the peak of his power. 4,000 miles from Lagos, rock stars David Byrne and Brian Eno step through a Fela-shaped portal that turns their musical lives upside down. Okay. Okay. Hi. Hi. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. We'll start with David Byrne. David and I have known each other, sort of, for a while. We actually are in a book club together. Hi, my name's David Byrne. I'm mostly known as a musician. I'm in my music room in my New York apartment and happy to be here. One of the things I found about David, and I think most people who know him would say this, is that he moves with a certain kind of beautifully buoyant sense of curiosity, as if he's just landed from some other place, and he's just happily trying to figure out, what do we have here? He brings a good vibe, is what I'm saying. But when I sat down with him, and we started talking about his younger self, he told me it hadn't always been that way. Yeah, when I was eventually moved to New York, it was a challenge. You can sort of hear it in his early work. Like if you listen to the lyrics of Psycho Killer The song that really put him and the talking heads on the map I can't seem to face up to the facts I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax You're saying I'm tense, I'm nervous, I can't relax There you go Literally lyrics There's a lot of other songs from those early records Yeah That are really about angst and kind of alienation and trying to figure out how to fit in. Yeah. I might not have been entirely aware of that at the time, but in retrospect, I can see that. He says that's just kind of where his head was at at the time. In interviews, he's talked about how he felt all this pressure to lead the band, to write the lyrics. On stage, you know, this is a man who would later become known for his dance moves, but at that time? I'd kind of stayed away from doing movement on stage, maybe a little twitching or something, but nothing, no real dancing. So in 1977, as the band was hitting it big, inside that success, David was miserable. But then he meets this guy. I'm Brian Eno. I'm calling in from London, and I'm a musician. Is that right? Am I a musician? I don't really know. I don't know. That feels too confining a label for you. Brian Eno is... It's just shocking, frankly, how much culture this one man has influenced. He invented ambient music as we know it, so he will always own a piece of my heart. He has produced seminal albums for U2, Laurie Anderson, and in our case, The Talking Heads. He'd met them in 1977. They had played in London, and I went to see the show, and I thought it was dazzling. Afterwards, I met them, and we talked a little bit about the possibility of me producing their next record. And I said, well, why don't you come over to my place tomorrow? Now, fortuitously, a few years before this meeting that was about to happen, Brian had wandered into this shop. There was a record shop off Tottenham Court Road in London called Sterns. And it specialized in importing records for African students. It's quite close to London University there. It was an odd place because I think it did have some hardware in it as well. Apparently it sold toasters, hair dryers, and also records from West Africa. So they had these racks of current African releases. You couldn't buy them anywhere else in London or probably in England, as far as I knew. And I think it was late 1973, I was in there and I saw an album called Aphrodisiac. And it had an amazing cover. Red-yellow background, half-naked women on the front. most interesting for me was that it had a list of musicians on the back and there were lots and lots of players and I thought I must hear what that sounds like you know if you have five rhythm guitar players three conga players and 27 singers I thought that's got to be worth hearing so I bought the record really on the basis of the cover took it home put it on And it absolutely blew my mind I thought, this is really an amazing new form of music. To my ears, anyway, this is kind of the future of music. Like, of all the things that you had been listening to, right up until that moment where you put on that Phila record, what was new about what you were hearing? What is the future, if we could get behind that word? The sense of duration. that you had this big group of people working together and just getting into a zone and staying there for a long time, moving away from the song form, really, the idea that pop music was about making short, brilliant little diamonds, which is kind of neatly summed up after first chorus, first chorus, middle eight, first chorus, chorus, chorus, but instead could be do with weaving very big tapestries, a field of sound that sits there for a long time and you explore it sonically. You kind of enter it and live in it. The duration really is a signal to say, this isn't a song. It's a way of saying, this is a place. It's not a little story, it's a place. And when you start listening to it, you're entering into that place. Fast forward to 1977, Brian meets David Byrne and the Talking Heads. He invites them back to his place to talk about their next album. And they turned up at my flat the following day, and I said, I just want to play you something that I think is really the future of music. and I played them that aphrodisiac album. When I heard that, I realized, oh, they're doing stuff with the instruments that I'm familiar with, but they're playing them and arranging them in completely different ways that I'd never heard before. And I thought, oh, this is really liberating. This is not just feel-good music. There's something about this. This generates a completely different feeling in me. I think it was in a way a feeling of we're going to include more in what we do. we're going to sort of break the format that that we've quite successfully handled so far the result of that meeting of brianino playing david byrne fellah's aphrodisiac is that the next talking heads record sounded completely different rather than the usual rock thing where all the musicians are playing the same thing on the beat at the same time suddenly you had a much bigger sound where you have all of these layers upon layers interweaving and interlocking She is moving to describe the world. She has messages for the world. She is moving by remote control. If you listen to a song like The Great Curve, it sounds like there's 50 people playing. The magic of the recording studio. Yeah. I mean, we didn't try to get all that big sound with all the brass and everything else. But with a recording studio, you can record with the four-piece. Then you go in and kind of play along with yourself. We learned to not try and fill up all the space right away. The parts leave a lot of holes. If you leave a hole, somebody else can put something in that hole. And so nobody's trying to play everything or play all the time. That was kind of a revelatory idea. Say more about that. What was it revealing to you or liberating you from? Well, like when you play a regular pop song on a guitar or something, you're kind of strumming the guitar all the time, constantly, and you have the vocal melody going on top. But I realized with hearing music like Phala, you can make music in a different way where you don't play all the time. you're not strumming all the time you're leaving gaps in what you're doing you just play like and then that leaves a little space for somebody else to go and then you start to get this kind of thing where you sense you have this sense that there's a whole kind of community of musicians that it takes to make the music. That it's not something that one person can just sit and play guitar, can strum through the whole thing and do it. That's really interesting. Is there something in the communal nature of that polyrhythm that felt important to you personally at that moment? It felt very important to me, very personally. I realized that at some point I realized oh this is music where no one part is more important than the others the whole thing exists by all these cogs in the wheels working together and if you take out some parts then it stops working and I thought oh this is kind of a model an acoustic model for a sonic model for a kind of more perfect community where everybody's got their place and they do their part and when everybody does that then you get this wonderful thing that emerges and I also realized it actually feels good When you play that kind of music, it feels very transcendent. It kind of takes you to a very different place. It really kind of lifts up and kind of takes you to a different place. So that affected me personally. I was very kind of, you know, a little bit Asperger-y, introverted person. I thought, this is really different for me. This is a way of working with other people, but musically. Socially, it might come later, but musically, this is really working. And I'm feeling it. This generates a completely different feeling in me. I can't write about that. I can't write those kind of words and sing those kind of things anymore. I have to respond to this music in a very different way than the stuff I was doing before. I mean, it sounds like you were sort of exhausted by one way of being and then this opened up a new way of being. Yes. Yeah, it did. It really kind of opened up a whole new personal avenue as well as a musical avenue. In some ways, it's telling you this kind of cooperation amongst people can exist. It's possible. It doesn't mean you're going to get it. It doesn't mean you're going to get it in Lagos or in New York. But it means that as human beings, this is possible. David Byrne talks about the space in the music, how as a musician you leave these gaps, and the gaps are there for others to step into. And when you're all creating that groove together and moving to that groove together, that's when you rise to that new, more perfect vision that he was talking about. And for the 20 or 30 minutes that it's playing, you get to explore what it feels like to be there. This isn't a song. This is a place. we're just making a space some kind of a space you find your place in it we're not going to lead you through it it's there and you can look around inside it Thank you to everybody who contributed to this Michael, Ruby, Ben, Ian, Goffin, Oluwakemi, Feifei the whole team and thanks to you for listening if you made it this far. I'm Jad Abumrad, signing off.
