Somali Music isn’t Shit Now, it’s Just Different
It was difficult for Somali musicians to make a living before the two national radios were on the air. Radio Hargeisa and Radio Mogadishu. From the 40’s onwards you got more and more musicians making a name for themselves. People like Magool, Qarshe, and Xasan Sugule made a name for themselves during this era. But the arts were yet to be professionalized. And anyhow, not enough people had radios. Until the mid-60s, I’m told, it was normal for a village of 20K residents to have a single radio. These radios would live in the central Café and the men would listen to BBC Somali on it. When the news wasn’t on, the radios would regularly play songs and radio plays like this. Pay close attention the form the poems being performed are in.
Political Themes, Resistance and Anti-Colonialism (1950–1970)
The era following Somali independence saw a lot of political mobilization. There was a lot of excitement in the air. This is a song written and performed by Abdullahi Qarshe.
The album is aptly entitled “The Freedom Songs of the Somali Republic”. I won’t tell you about the song itself, I’ll let the man tell you himself, in an interview with/on Bildhaan in 1994 (if you haven’t seen Bildhaan already, please do. It’s wonderful for Somali culture and history). Read the full interview here.
Interviewer: During the 1960s, two of your songs stood out. One was “Lumumba Mana Noola Mana Dhiman” (Lumumba is neither Alive nor Dead). The second was “Dugsiyada Ogaada u Aada” (Be Alert to Education and Go to School!). Could you remind us of some of the lines of the first song?
Abdullahi Qarshe: Oh, yes: “Lumumba mana noola mana dhiman, Labada midna ha umalaynina, Inu maqanyahay ha u moodina, Laba midna ha a malaynina” (Lumumba is neither alive nor dead, don’t think that he is either, for his spirit is with us, don’t think he has disappeared. Don’t think that he is either, for his spirit is with us).
Interviewer: How did this song come to you?
Abdullahi Qarshe: One day, I came out from my house and saw a crowd listening to the radio in front of a tea shop. The news was about the crisis in Congo in 1962. The U.N. forces had just intervened in the civil war, ostensibly to save the Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was arrested and later assassinated by his opponents. “Lumumba mana noolamana dhiman” had a kind of Pan-African sentiment because of Lumumba’s nationalist vision and courage.
When I read an interview like this, my first reaction is to reflect on how great Somali music was. It was easy to listen to, it brought out the best in what the Somali language was capable of. Then, there’s the question of politics. It feels as though Somali music from that era fits Sartre’s description of committed art. In his What is Literature, he notes that this is when “the writer has chosen to reveal the world and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility”.
Hopeless romantics like me love to lament the end of the era of committed art. But this would be failing to take note of one tiny thing. the fact that not every song from that generation was as political as the Lumumba song referenced above. Because a lot of us grew up with political Somali songs, we suffer from what is sometimes called a representativeness heuristic (read: bias). You estimate the likelihood of a thing happening based on how similar it is to a perceived notion in your head of that category of things as opposed to some objective probability of it actually happening.
Let me illustrate with an example:
Imagine this for a minute: Tim is 6 years old. He is neat. He likes order. He’s great at reading. He loves learning. He can’t get enough of it. In 25 years time, is Tim more likely to be a bricklayer or a librarian? I know you want to say, librarian. But no. He’s more likely to be a bricklayer. It’s not to do with how similar his description fits a librarian. The probability of him being a librarian is actually to do with the percentage of men who work as librarians and bricklayers. 25% to 95% respectively.
So, here, when we think of Somali music from back in the day, we think political songs, and so when you think of how likely it was that a song written in that era was political we think in terms of songs that share all characteristics with the songs we know, as opposed to thinking “how likely was it for a song to be political at the time”. Qarshe’s work is deeply political. He’s most famous for performing the national anthem and writing a series of political songs. So political in fact that we can probably play a drinking game right now where one drinks a cup of caano iyo shaah every time Qarshe says Dalkayga (my land) in his album. Promise we won’t make it past track 3.
But the truth is though that not all songs in the 60s were political. Some were about love. Some, like my favorite song, was about a man who tells his wife that he’s on his way home and that he’s bearing gifts.
The Musician as a Civil Servant (1970–1990)
You can’t separate art from who pays for it. Has it ever struck you as weird that almost all of the art produced during the Italian Renaissance had religious themes, were about religious figures, altarpieces, etc. Don’t get me wrong, they also drew a lot of classical figures, gods, famous scenes from antiquity and portraits of rich individuals. But the Church, during the counter-reformation, had a lot of money to spend. In Council of Trent, it decided on a bunch of strict guidelines for how to produce Christian art.
If you look at any era of human history…generally speaking at least, art goes where the person paying for it goes.
It’s understandable then that Somali music under a socialist government would have socialist themes. There were a lot of work songs like this, there were pan-African songs like this, there were nationalist songs like this. The large section of these songs were funded by the state through various troupes, theater groups, etc. To be a musician in this era was to be a civil servant.
The main koox (group) was called Waaberi. They were the national theater group and you could only join if you were extremely talented and were picked at an audition. I’m told they held auditions fairly frequently. Here’s a video of some of the Waaberi group from 1987.
Then there were other groups (kooxo). These were groups that grew out of workers’ unions and later opened up membership to all(with an audition). Some of the names of these groups were:
Onkod was the music troupe which grew out of the union for workers in the Prison Services. Halgan (for local police), Iftiin (for Educators), Horseed (for military) and Heegan (for police services). So, suppose I became a member of Iftiin, my salary would be drawn from the Ministry of Education. Just as if I got picked to be a part of Heegan, I would now be drawing my salary from the Ministry of the Interior.
Thus, if you were an artist at the time, you would draw a salary just like any other civil servant. You get orders just like any other civil servant. You get told, go there, do that, perform this, etc. Mustafa Sheekh below describes what an order might sound like. Go to so and so place and performer this and that.
This meant that government had a very strong hold on the arts. Studios, theaters, radios were all owned by the government. You go where you are told. If you wrote non-political stuff, you were largely left alone. But if you did something remotely political, you’d be dealt with as the late Saado Cali did when she performed Landcruiser.
These groups would have singers, poets, writers, and musicians all working under the same roof. The ease in which all these types of people met each other perhaps explains why music written in that era reflects Somali poetry so well. I mean the Somali hees (song) was long seen a type of poetry. The meter, the words, alliteration patterns of music from that period were true to Somali poetic style. There was no wavering. Singers developed relationships with poets and musicians.
Somali poetry for those of you that don’t know likes alliteration a lot. When lines are short in a poem, there needs to be at least one alliterative word. When it has long lines, each section of that line has to have an alliterative word. And finally, and this is the most important, there can only be one alteration pattern in all the lines. If you go with the [sh] sound…every line of your poem needs to have it. Take this performance from Hadraawi. He’s decided to go for the [g] sound.
On Your Own (1990–Present)
So, when people say Somali music is a bit shit now, I think that they’re being unfair. Since the collapse of the state, artists have had to fend for themselves. Of course, their connections with each other have remained. But the supportive structure of a government and its institutions have disappeared. Plays have gone out of vogue. And Lord knows Somalis don’t buy CDs. There was a time when you’d see Somali music stores and people used to go into them to buy CDs and cassettes. Unfortunately, they've all gone now.
So realistically to make a living from music, I’d need to go and find a lyricist (perhaps someone who isn’t even a poet), find a composer, find a video director and editor, upload a decent Youtube video that makes you look cool and relevant, market it sufficiently enough to attract invitations to perform at weddings and events.
As a Somali artist today, weddings and events are your bread and butter. You probably can’t afford to make a living from your music alone, and you've got a side hustle (maybe music is your side hustle) which means that on average the quality of the music you produce is less thought out than someone whose entire life is making music and gets paid handsomely for it. There’s another reason for this. The barriers to entry are much lower. Literally, anyone can produce music. Which means that if you wanted to make a song called “Let Go of My Balls Babes”, you can very much do that.
Here’s that video. Thank me later.
With the type of institutional support I mentioned earlier also came control. You had to write a specific type of music with a specific meter about specific topics. Now, you can do whatever you want to do. And in this regard, I have a lot of respect for Deeqa Afro. She’s reasonably new to the scene and in my opinion, she’s pushing Somali music in a new direction. She’s got a song called Social Media. It’s about what not to do on social media. Quality advice if you ask me.
OK, so maybe she’s not quite the pioneer I made her out to be. But in this song at least, she abandons alliteration altogether. She opts for rhyming. The [x] sound is repeated over and over again which feels like she’s holding to Somali versification rules with the slight swap of alliteration to rhyming. That said, the reason artists don’t pull shit like this is because purists hate it. They see it as Somali poetry being watered down and thousand of years of tradition being pissed down the drain. She’s got 1000 dislikes to 4000 likes on this video. But I consider this to be a change in the right direction. OK, just listened to one of her other songs. The auto-tune hurts.
Then, there are people like Ilkacase who are borrowing from the Hirwo and Dhaanto traditions of poetry and making interesting music with it. Ilkacase’s songs are about a range of subjects, love, his haters, going back home. Subject matters that are atypical of a dhaanto poem. Regarding alliteration, he abides by the rules. What’s interesting for me though is that even when artists push the boundaries of Somali music, they’re careful not to rock the boat.
I think the end of formal patronage spells the beginning of different genres. Audiences become patrons of the music. And it means that different types of music end up getting created. There are enough Qaraami songs on this earth. There are enough songs to fill the nostalgic pit in our collective calool. And to be honest, I am thankful. I am thankful that I am not listening to the same type of beat being rinsed over and over again. Glad to see that people like Lil Baliil and DoniB exist.
I am thankful Galad wrote the breakup song of the century for Fiska and that it bangs.
I am somewhat confused that Waayaha Cusub made a track with Desiigner. But you know what I am? I am thankful for that too! I’m thankful for Aar Maanta. The man has been out here writing his own songs using traditional Somali poems despite growing up in the West, performing and touring with his band for the past decade or so. He continues to make unique music that reflects his interests as opposed to so passing vogue.
And finally, I’m glad that Dhaanto is the sensation that it is. I need to hit up one of these parties for real. Look at these people turning up please. Sensational stuff.
