Teni Entertainer offers fresh Fuji twist on Fargin

Before releasing ‘Fargin’, Teni had gained some popularity online as a YouTuber. Starting 2012, she made humorous videos of herself dancing, eating and singing. One of those videos, from five years ago, has her singing for her sister Niniola, of ‘Maradona’ fame. Filmed in black and white, her face close to the camera, she starts with a high-pitched R&B ballad and switches towards the end to an Ekiti folk rendition.

If that video—and many like it on her YouTube and Instagram accounts where she covers artists from all over the world—were like adding stew to rice, on ‘Fargin’, she has made jollof.

‘Fargin’ is made of words sampled from Adewale Ayuba’s ‘Omoge Cinderella’ delivered in the vocal style of King Wasiu Ayinde over a sample of Osita Osadebe’s ‘Osondi Owendi’. That is one song made up of Fuji and Igbo highlife delivered in the happy-go-lucky style of the best juju musicians. It is a musical mosaic that also contains ad-libs taken from other songs and sounds.

Fuji, highlife and juju are close-knit. These were the pop sounds of the 1980s, 1970s and 1960s that gradually lost their lustre in the artistic drought that visited Nigeria in the 1990s. From the late 1990s/early 2000s, music that borrows from other cultures became the major way to capture the attention of young Nigerians.

But recently, there has been a growing number of young artists whose main inspirations are entirely local. Terry Apala mixes Fuji and apala, Adekunle Gold has made juju his own, Flavour has long been the prince of highlife, and Nigerians are still coming to terms with the enigma that is Small Doctor.

All the names above are male. Female singers who choose local styles often stay with folk music, because Fuji is, notoriously, a boys’ club. Like many male-dominated fields, the genre is filled with machismo and misogyny. Adewale Ayuba, who Teni Entertainer samples, is one of a few Fuji artists who sang with some self-awareness. In the midst of that testosterone-driven culture, he seemed to foreshadow the impact of feminism. His ‘Omoge Cinderella’ features a male and female character in conversation. Man approaches woman, singing about her physical endowments as he invites her to have sex. Woman sings back…

The woman sings back! She challenges and calls him wicked for wanting sex without considering the implication of the act: pregnancy even when she doesn’t have an education. He cuts her mid-song and asks, “Ki la gbe ki le ju?” expressing shock at the force of her reply to his supposedly benign query.

Teni takes the spirit of this conversation and switches the characters. Man becomes the an old lech who roams parties making passes at young girls. Girl becomes an ingénue. Teni sings both parts. Man: the descriptions of her curves, the request for copulation, self-curse to drown if he’s lying. In Ayuba’s song, man calls lady Cinderella. Here, Teni calls the man Maradona—echoing Niniola’s song. Woman responds with astonishment: “Uncle, I’m still a virgin o.” This is the source of the title.

A boisterous self-described “free spirit”, Teni Entertainer is woman and middle class, traits you couldn’t ascribe to Fuji stars of old. She’s also singing of a young virgin, the kind of subject typical Fuji musicians wouldn’t touch except to render as part of their conquests. Yet, her music doesn’t feel out of place.

Teniola Apata’s authenticity doesn’t stem from being part of a street culture in a Fuji-mecca like Mushin. Instead, her Fuji sound is forged from years spent immersed in the work of artists like King Wasiu Ayinde. One brief song does not a movement make, but the embrace of Fuji by young artists who are eager to mix, match and gentrify the sound, in a way that still feels authentic, might just save one of Nigeria’s indigenous genres from festering in the underground.

Artist: Teni Entertainer
Song: Fargin
Label, Year: Independent, 2017