Will We Feel Alright?
Igbo Highlife According to The Cavemen.
1.
Mr Eazi’s paean to his multiple identities in Life is Eazi, Vol. 2 begins with its most earworming number: a short highlife chant called ‘Lagos Gyration’ that is filled with the kind of energy that sets the tone for the listening experience to come. It also feels imported from another universe, one filled with boisterous boys and the few women who don’t mind their company, semi-drunk on palm wine, raising christo-inspired songs in call and response, recalling joys and sadness, unrequited loves and indefatigable aspirations through the rhythm of palms slapping agbamole drums and sticks beating gongs or the plates usually deployed in their place. Anyone familiar with kegite groups continuing that raucous tradition in Nigerian campuses knows this gyration; but it also carries in it a genuine callback to earlier iterations of that musical tradition: highlife, of guitar men and big bands playing across the West African coast.
That song made me want an album filled with that spirit, a desire Mr Eazi wasn’t open to fulfilling. But the liner notes of ‘Lagos Gyration’ show that it was co-written by Kingsley Chukwudi Okorie. Kingsley Okorie and his brother Benjamin James are The Cavemen. and Roots, their debut album, was produced at home, with their regular collaborator Lady Donli, also featured in ‘Lagos Gyration.’
In Roots, my desire is fulfilled.
2.
The boys that make up The Cavemen. are calcified in my mind as wide-grinning, energetic, and possessing of a personal style — loose linen and plaid dresses in earthy colours — that projects an ease many stumble through life trying to find. This image was imprinted when I first saw them on stage at Lights Camera Africa film festival, where they played in the company of Jazz trumpeter Etuk Ubong. I say ‘boys’ intentionally, because I continue to be surprised by their youth. It is easy to forget that highlife, in spite of how it has aged into the music of old people, originated as a craft of young men. The Cavemen. embrace the juvenile masculinity of this form in its inherent enthusiasm, willingness to party, and unending — even problematic — pining after women.
Accompanying this ebullience is the other side of highlife: its ability to be poured into reflective forms, danceable ballads that travel beyond erotic playfulness and into sentimental world-weary emotions. This is the journey The Cavemen. travel in Roots. The tracks are mostly brief chants with simple verses accompanied by pared down percussion and the rhythm guitar, before crescendoing into call and response choruses and full band sound. The album has a delightful bounce, product of a consistently strong rhythm section that The Cavemen. rely upon —Okorie and James play the bass guitar and drum — over heavy guitar and brass sections that highlife fans will be familiar with. I’m a fan of the album’s latter tracks like ‘Beautiful Rain’ and ‘Osondu’, because some part of me latches on to their melancholy; yet, the rest of my body, ever reluctant to dance, answers the exuberant calls of The Cavemen. Listening to songs like ‘Akaraka’ and ‘Bolo Bolo’, I, too, grin and bound with energy from my bed to my desk, to the kitchen where I just made okro and eba, and back to my bed. The routine motions of my day are momentarily elevated by my outspread arms, my shimmying shoulders, and the attempt of my stiff waist to animate my upper body. It is impossible to resist the happiness of the Cave.
3.
My response to highlife is an involuntary reflex that I suspect was codified into my muscles in church, through years of dancing to singers deploying its rhythm in praise songs. But that is just my story. You don’t have to sweat through pentecostal services to be indoctrinated into the charm of this eminently danceable genre. Highlife demands dance from our bodies in ways that feel primal — like the guitar, drums and brass instruments are pulling us back into dance floors across time, to clubs where the genre flourished in the Nigerian South, before guns and bombs came to staunch its growth, all the way to sites along the West African coast where, as described by Ed Keazor, “Portuguese, Spanish and Caribbean sailors whose merchant ships docked at the ports of Freetown (Sierra Leone), Lagos (Nigeria), Monrovia (Liberia) and Accra or Tema (Ghana) lent their guitars and style to their African shipmates, who formulated a unique new style that fused native rhythms with the Latin styles bequeathed by their benefactors.”
4.
Consider an etymology of ‘highlife’, which, according to Yebuah Mensah, originates from the divide in Accra between those who could pay to go into clubs where big bands played for patrons to dance, and those who remained on the outside looking in. A hierarchy of class in sound. This sound itself, according to John Collins, is a fusion of local black rhythms and visiting white influences that “emerged as three distinct streams, each dependent on which particular western musical influence was assimilated and utilised by the African musicians who fused it with their own tradition.” The Cavemen. call their music highlife fusion, an unnecessary tautology, because the origin of highlife itself is fusion. Collins continues: “First there was the imported influences of foreign sailors that became ‘palm-wine’ highlife; second, that of the colonial military brass-bands that became adaha highlife; and third, that of the christianised black elite which became dance-band highlife.”
If we ditch that recorded history, potent as it is, and feel for what highlife means in Igbo, the language of The Cavemen., perhaps we can extract much more from its name than from the facts of its creation. High. Life. To listen to Roots as an Igbo album is to recognize that these are songs weighted by war, a yet unresolved trauma with losses unaccounted for in its wake. The story of Igbo highlife contains gaps, and the bodies that are supposed to fill these are buried in fossilizing rubble. “The goal is for people — our generation — to experience our highlife now, to show people what highlife would have been if it stayed,” says Okorie in an interview, a conscious reference to the war that is weaved into the album — most apparent in ‘Beautiful Rain’ and ‘Osondu’, where The Cavemen. stuff playfulness into solemnity — but also present in ‘Anita’, ‘Ifeoma Odoo’, and ‘Bena’, happy songs about lovers who stay, those about to leave, and those lost and are never to be seen again.
5.
I am loath to move beyond the known to the unknown, yet my body demands a clarification between the kind of dance Afropop wants — beautifully practiced and realised enactments that my body continues to rebel at — and that automatic response of muscles happening as I type these words and listen to Roots, which my brain only reckons with in retrospect. The only conclusion I can reach (here the reader is free to consider this a reach in all its connotative weakness) is that the former dance is only possible as a public display of momentary pleasure — either to invoke it, as is possible when we want to make ourselves happy by going out to dance with friends, or to confirm it, as in the wedding videos popular on the internet, where men and women move in choreographed steps — and the latter, the kind Roots evokes, connects to a different kind of ecstasy, a joy that isn’t only realised in the company of others, but comes from a deep need to affirm the presence of our bodies and the lives they contain, the kind of joyful reaction that is possible, even if yours is a body that has been through battles or is still at war.
If you recognise the difference between that dance you perform when you’re out with friends and want to participate in the communal camaraderie possible as you all hit the Zanku in unison, and the one you do in your room when your favourite music comes on and your body can’t help but move, then you’re familiar with the distinction I’m trying to make. It’s not just the difference in public displays and private expressions, but between learned pleasures and joys encoded into our bloods, which carry more (anti) bodies than the ones we own, more histories than we have cognitively absorbed. “Oso ndu,” The Cavemen. sing. Life. In this walk, this race, this thing called life, what can we do if we can no longer dance?
