Obviously not pleased with the trends in the Nigerian entertainment industry especially the Yoruba genre, living legend and Fuji Icon, King Wasiu Ayinde Marshall has called for concerted effort to save Yoruba Music from going into extinction.
According to K1 De Ultimate, 61-year old, who is known for introducing Fuji genre to the sounds of keyboards, saxophones and guitars with special vocal talent warned that if genuine and deliberate hand-down training are not structured in the industry, the present state of the Yoruba music may get worse.
Living in Nigeria in the 70s and 80s, most radio and television stations played indigenous African/Yoruba music such as Apala, Highlife, Juju and Fuji. Names like Bobby Benson, King Sunny Ade, Salawa Abeni, Kollington Ayinla, Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, Prince Adekunle, Haruna Isola, Wasiu Ayinde Marshall,
Sir Shina Peters and more set the media agog. They produced the hits songs of the period and defined the cultural landscape with their variants of the popular music genres.
While other music genres are largely influenced by foreign music, Fuji and Juju were the two prominent and indigenous music genres that were popular at social gatherings in Nigeria. They were parallels, with their musicians divided by fan-based rivalry. In recent times, pop, hip-hip and dancehall have added colour to the Nigerian music scene in the way the older generation of artists did not envisage.
Speaking at the 2018 Ariya Repete Roundtable Discourse at Park Inn by Radisson in Abeokuta, said it high time to give Fuji and Juju genres of Yoruba music a direction in the bid to save heritage and the rich culture of the language in music.
.He said, “I am not happy. How can I be happy when the very language is being threatened? Most Nigerian parents nowadays do not allow their children to speak the Yoruba language. Of course it will affect the music and that’s what we’re seeing now. Present day musicians are not making effective use of the language in their music. Nigerians often call their own mother tongue ‘vernacular’. It’s a worrying development, not something to be proud of.”
As if to buttress his point, the keynote speaker at the event Dr. Kola Adesina of the Department of Mass Communication, Crescent University Abeokuta, made it known that according to UNESCO; Yoruba is one of the five thousand languages that are facing the danger of being extinct in less than fifty years.
He said “A method used to check if this is correct is by attempting to speak the language continuously for ten minutes, without interjecting with foreign words like ‘but, when, because’ and so on. How many people can do this?”
Upon discovering this revelation by Dr. Kola Adesina, the audience made up of music lovers, media practitioners and other musicians such as Wale Thompson and Taiye Currency – attempted to communicate only in Yoruba language for the rest of the event.
The Ariya Repete Roundtable Discourse is a precursor to the annual Ariya Repete talent hunt that seeks to find out young talents in the Fuji and Juju genres. Auditions has started on March 13 in Ado-Ekiti, Sango-Ota and across eight cities in Nigeria.
