If Wake Up You!, Now-Againโs excellent two-volume selection of Nigerian rock moves from the โ70s, is haunted by anything, itโs the spectre of the Nigerian civil war of the late โ60s. With three million dead from the civil war, and the Biafran secession effectively quashed, the government encouraged Nigerians โto return to whatever they were doing before July 1967โ, according to the setโs liner notes โ the kind of wholesale process of forced denial/repression that always bubbles up, somehow, through cultureโs various avenues of expression. For Nigerian musicians, many of whom were from the East of Nigeria and were called back there during the secession, the after-effects of the civil war ricocheted through their new songs, singing out a febrile, scorched Nigerian rock that gets more furious the deeper you dig into these compilations.
Indeed, the general rule with Wake Up You! is, the wilder things get, the better. There are plenty of good-to-great tracks here that balance the various threads feeding into Nigerian rock at the time โ early experiments with Merseybeat, the nascent grind and sweep of Felaโs Afrobeat, the sensual cathexis of soul โ but itโs the turn towards psychedelia and acid rock that gives certain cuts here an almost indefinable โx factorโ. The whiplash sting of the guitar in Aktionโs โGroove The Funkโ, the heat-warping wah of Wrinkar Experienceโs โBallad Of A Sad Young Womanโ, and the blasted, almost metallic contours of War-Head Constrictionโs โGraceful Birdโ and โShower Of Stoneโ all speak to an everyday experimentalism that has the players turning the amps to 11 and figuring out exactly what can happen when distortion, feedback and the huffing energy of high volume carve the air.
Being slugged in the gut by slow-moving acid gems like Jay U Experienceโs โBaby Rockโ is reason enough to spend some time with the two volumes of Wake Up You!, but the way compilers Uchenna Ikonne and Eothen Alapatt (the head of Now-Again) contrast this with more โstandard-orderโ fare โ songs whose instigative groove and tangled six-string riffs point more clearly toward the playersโ grounding in soul and pop moves, fed through aesthetic parameters borrowed from highlife โ serves the dual purpose of great overview compilations: education and edification. While Nigerian music is hardly an untapped field, Wake Up You! offers several new and surprising entry points to the music, and quietly, but smartly, writes another narrative, one where significant figures such as Fela Kuti are at one remove from the storyโs centre. In many ways, itโs the players documented here that were the beating heart of Nigerian rock, and itโs welcome indeed for them to finally have their moment.
EXTRAS 8/10: Both volumes are presented in hardback book form, with excellent, in-depth text from Ikonne.
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