So... Alright - Fantastic Man

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Geoff gushes over the music of William Onyeabor. Sponsored by Caldera + Lab http://calderalab.com Code ALRIGHT , Katos Coffee http://katoskoffee.com Code SOALRIGHT10 , Shady Rays http://shadyrays.com Code ALRIGHT Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So today I want to talk about someone that I have become quietly obsessed with over the last month or so. As you may or may not know, probably don't care. I don't even know why I framed it that way. I'm a big fan of music and I love to find and discover new music, probably more than just about anything. I was thinking about this the other day. I was going to pose this question on another podcast, but if you had to eliminate all but one and you could only choose as a form of entertainment for the rest of your life between music, video games, and screens like TV or movies or books, what would you pick? And I realized I would pick music easily because I get the most enjoyment out of music. Books, they're all great. I love entertainment, but I

think books might be a kind of close second. But I really don't think that there's anything that can compare to how much joy I get out of music and discovering new music and falling in love with musicians and going down rabbit holes. And that's why today I want to talk about William Onyebor. If you've never heard of William Onyebor, you're probably not in the minority. He was a musician in the 70s and the 80s in Nigeria who is very reclusive, shunned publicity, even though he was incredibly talented, and kind of disappeared from popular culture, at least in America. Actually, I don't know that he

ever found a lot of success in America. He was huge in Nigeria for a period of probably 10 or 15 years, and then he stopped making music, and then wasn't discovered or discovered again, I guess, in America until the early 2000s. So my friend Antonio turned me on to a William O'Neill Borsong a couple of weeks ago. We were listening to music together, and I instantly fell in love with his voice and the rhythm, and I dove in, and I wanted to find everything there is to know about William. And that's when I discovered there's not a hell of a lot to learn about William because he was so private and so shrouded in secrecy that almost nothing is known about him or his life. I had to do a lot of reading. I watched and listened to

every piece of journalism and information I could find about him. And there still isn't a hell of a lot. But I'll tell you what I do know, in the hopes that it'll entice you to go listen to him yourself. So William was born in 1946, just outside of Inugu, Nigeria, which I think is in southern Nigeria, a town of about I don't know how big it was then. But there's about 700,000 people living there now. It's a big, big town. And by the way, if you ever make your way there, or I guess a city, I think there's actually a road or a street named after him.

So go ahead and try to find it. I'd love to see a picture of it, actually. I Googled, I couldn't find any. In one of the only interviews he ever did, it was with the BBC, he mentioned that he was born to a poor and humble family and that he was fighting every day to survive. Then that's kind of all we know about him.

Then we know he left Africa to study abroad. There are rumors that he studied law in Oxford. There are rumors that he studied filmmaking in Russia, which I think there might be some validity to that. Russia, which I think there might be some validity to that. And by his own admission, he moved to Stockholm to study record manufacturing techniques. At this point, he's got to be pretty young, right? Like late teens, early 20s. He's at that go abroad and study age. So we know based on a radio interview I heard with him, he definitely went to Stockholm and studied record manufacturing techniques. There are, like I said, a lot of other rumors about where he went and what he did, but nobody really knows because of how private he was. Apparently, what he does after that is he comes back to Enugu, and he brings with him a ton

of musical equipment. There is a picture I'll put up on the So Alright Pod Instagram if you don't follow it. I always try to add relevant imagery to it. So to kind of round out the picture, there's a picture. Anyway, there's a picture of him in his studio that he made surrounded by it looks like he tried to cram as much recording equipment as humanly possible into one photo, almost as like a brag, I want to say, which I think fits in with his persona. He's a really interesting guy. Anyway, he comes back to Enugu, and he brings with him a ton of recording equipment. As a matter of fact, I think he might have been

the first person to have a Moog synthesizer in all of Nigeria. Apparently, this little studio that he builds for himself in Enugu is more technologically advanced than just about any other studio in that part of Africa at that time. This is around, this is in the mid-1970s. Now, the story, as best as people can put it together, is that at that point, he wants to get into filmmaking. He apparently tries to make a film called Crashes in Love.

It's some sort of a love story that he conceives. At least I believe he, there's really, there's that little known about it. All we know is that he tried to make a film or participate in a film called Crashes in Love, and that film, for whatever reason, never saw the light of day. Nobody seems to be able to confirm that they saw it. There's no record of it anywhere.

But in addition to the film that he was supposedly participating in or making, he made a soundtrack for it called Crashes in Love. The soundtrack did come out, however. He self-published it and released it on his own label called Will Films Music. I guess it was going to originally be a production company for his film, but he transitioned into music. He puts this soundtrack for this movie that has disappeared off the face of the earth or maybe never existed. I don't know that anyone will ever know definitively. And it hits hard in Nigeria. It's this like Afrobeat funk music, but he is using synthesizers and he's using metronomic timing and he's creating these like infectious looping songs that just stick in your head like earworms and you can't get rid of them. And he kind of blows up in Nigeria. So then, from 1977 to 1985, I guess he pivots away from this idea of filmmaking altogether, and he releases nine albums in that eight-year period, all to huge success, all self-published, all self-funded, all self-produced. He plays almost every instrument on every record,

if not every instrument on every record. He does all of the mixing, all of the production, everything himself. There are some background singers on some of the songs, but aside from that, I think it's all him. He does the artwork, he presses the records, he prints the album covers, he does it all out of his studio, and I think very quietly makes a lot of money and acquires a lot of success. However, nobody really knows because he doesn't do interviews. He doesn't talk about his performance. Actually, he doesn't perform. He's never played. He admits on a BBC radio interview I heard that he has never played live in his life, has no interest in it. He loves producing music in a

studio, and that's what he wanted to do. I think that's part of why there are so many rumors and stories about him, is he was so reclusive that people had to, you know, make up their own stories for and about him, his motivations, where he came from, where he's going, how he got the money. There's like rumors that like the Russian mafia helped him fund all of his musical equipment because he came back to Africa with all this really technologically advanced for the time and expensive musical equipment that nobody could quite figure out. No idea if any of that's true. I honestly don't really care one way or the other. At the end of the day, the guy made brilliant music. And there's actually a documentary about him, where they discuss that a little bit. And they say that it's probably all

bullshit. And it's just, if you don't expound on the story and you let people make their own conclusions, they tend to come up with wild ones. That's how people become mythic, right? He was actually interviewed, I want to say in 1980, by an African journalist who asked him about his persona and why he was reclusive and wanted to talk to him about his music. And he shut the guy down and said, listen, there's a difference between the musician and the music. And that's it. He didn't want to talk about it. So in 1985, he releases his final album. It's called Anything You Sew. And then upon releasing that album, stops making music altogether. As a matter of fact, the Nigerian television authority

asked him to make a music video for one of the songs on that final album, and he didn't refuse, but he only agreed to make cameos in his own music video. That's how reclusive this guy was. He didn't want to be in his own music videos. So this is an ad. Season's greetings, more like season's compliments, because compliments are guaranteed after making the leap to skincare with Caldera Lab. And I'm talking about how you look today and 20 years from now. The results are incredible in just a little time. Men's skincare and Caldera Lab are the perfect pair for you to look and feel your best. Super easy to add to your mornings and nightly routine,

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with it. He wants to devote himself to God. He actually, he's clearly pretty religious. Religion plays a big theme in a lot of the songs already, but I guess he decides in 85, that's enough. I want to devote myself to God. He stops making music altogether like cold turkey, becomes a businessman, I think becomes a priest, actually. I think he might be a chief. They call him the chief. That becomes his nickname, and I think he might be involved in local government in some way, but really just devotes the rest of his life to God and to becoming an industrialist. He apparently has many successful businesses from this point on.

He has a flour mill, a construction company. He rents properties out. I believe he owns a gas station, even an internet cafe, all in and around Enugu. And he's almost immediately successful. As a matter of fact, just two years later, in 1987, he gets named West Africa's Industrialist of the Year. runs many successful businesses, continues to live a very reclusive private life, and is largely forgotten about by the rest of the world, and I think becomes kind of a footnote in Nigerian music, a big footnote, but a footnote in Nigerian musical history. And so his music is, like I said, kind of largely forgotten about until this compilation comes out in 2001 called Nigeria 70, the definitive story of 1970s funky Lagos. This creates an increase in interest among musicians and disc jockeys because they hear the song of his Better Change Your Mind.

It kind of blows everybody away and reminds the world of how talented he was. The vinyl copies that are still surviving on the world become highly collectible at this point. You can look them up on Discogs. They go for over $1,000. If you've got yourself an original William Onyabor album, hold on to it. Maybe you'll send your kids to college on it someday. Anyway, so his music becomes popular again for a few years. And then David Bearns' label, Luwakabop, I think is how you say it, they discover his music. They want to create a best of of him. They want to call it This Is William Onyabor. But they realize they don't know anything of him. They want to call it This Is William Onyabore. But they realize they don't know anything about him. They don't even know how to write the biography of him.

They begin trying to license the music. I think it takes many years. It's very difficult. They then take 18 months to try to contact him, to go to Africa, to try to meet people to talk about him, to try to fill out this biography of this man so that they can put it in the album. And they get nowhere. They have no progress. Nobody wants to talk about him. So they end up releasing the album as Who Is William Onyebor? because they don't know. So then like a year later in 2014, the music website Noisy, who's like a Vice affiliate, they go to Africa as well, conduct a bunch of interviews. They release a half-hour documentary called Fantastic Man, which is named after one of

his songs, and have very limited luck trying to track him down. They actually do track him down. They go to his house. He won't participate in the interview. He does allow them to film a scene in his, I guess, a stairwell that shows some of his recording equipment and some pictures of him and his devotion to Jesus. And that's pretty much it. He doesn't want anything else to do with them other than allowing them briefly into his home to film that stuff. They go and they talk to record store owners. They talk to people who know him. Everybody kind of agrees that he's this larger than life, like charming, charismatic, but really intimidating and scary guy that doesn't like to be around people. There's all these stories about people that have done business deals with him that pissed him off,

and he threatened them or scared them, but those never go anywhere. But he was described as unapproachable, unreachable. They mentioned that he stayed away from parties. He stayed away from mass gatherings. He doesn't want to be around people. He really, really just wanted to be alone and isolated from the rest of the world, which I think is why so many stories were made up about him, clearly. But at this point, the album comes out, the documentary comes out, BBC Radio actually gets him to do an interview with them, but it's very brief and the audio

quality is terrible. There's only like three or four questions that make it into the interview. he's terrible. There's only like three or four questions that make it into the interview. So you still learn very little about him. They try to get him to... Luwakabop releases the Who Is William Onyabur album. They try to get him to perform. They try to get him to promote it. He refuses. So David Byrne assembles this collection of incredibly talented, successful musicians, and they go on this tour around the world playing his music, trying to reintroduce people to him. I even saw a video of them performing Fantastic Man on Jimmy Fallon. And oh, by the way, there's gonna be a ton of pictures up on the So Alright Instagram. He always wears like a business suit and a cowboy hat. He actually kind

of looks like the Nigerian J.R. Ewing, if I'm being honest with you. And he's just got this like this larger than life smile. And you can just look at pictures of him and tell this dude is full of life and charisma and is just like, I'll be honest, I like to look at pictures of the guy. He just it makes me happy to see him. Anyway, he's got this this wacky cowboy hat on. Jimmy Fallon wears a cowboy hat. He looks like a fucking turd. It makes me hate him a little bit more. The song is actually, it's interesting to hear. I'm a big Talking Heads fan. I like David Bairn. I love what he's doing to promote little known music around the world

through his label. And I think he's done a lot for music. He had a really interesting album with St. Vincent a few years ago. He's just, David Brne's like a renaissance man. He's awesome. And I think he's immensely talented. But I was very excited to watch him play Onyabor's music. But I gotta be honest, nobody comes close to Onyabor. I was actually kind of disappointed. If you would just listen to William Onyabor, listen to Fantastic Man, listen to Atomic Bomb, listen to Heaven and Hell. It's so wild because he's got this voice and you just get sucked in and his lyrics are he just projects this kind of like cocky confidence that's so endearing in a way like his lyrics are so wild to me like he has a song called heaven

and hell like i said he's clearly a very devout religious man eventually ends all of his music to become a priest but he has this song called Heaven and Hell, which is one of my favorite ones. And the lyrics are like, when I get to my God in heaven, I'm going to tell him how you treated me. You people of the world, I'm going to tell him how you treated me. And if you treat me with love and kindness, I'm going to tell him to send you up to heaven, the best place for comfort, heaven. And when you see a good thing in this world and you try to change it to bad, when you see a white thing in this world and you try to change it to bad when you see a white thing in this world and you try to say it's black. If you treat me the way you treated Jesus, I'll beg God to send you to hell and hell is where you'll suffer forever. That's a confidence to say like, someday I'm

going to go up to heaven and I'm going to tell God everything you did to me, even though God's omniscient, right? And I'm going to tell him to damn you to eternity if you were a jerk to me. Like that's a kind of hilarious confidence that I can really get behind. Probably his most famous song is Fantastic Man. And I think this is actually how my friend Antonio found out about him before he turned him on to me. Fantastic Man was licensed and used all over the world. I think it was in an Apple commercial at some point. It might have been in a Blue Jean commercial a couple years ago ago but even that song is like hey i compliment you women like like here's what since i came to know you baby i've been telling you how sweet you are

i've been telling you how good you are now it's time for you to tell me how good i am please tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me how i look tell me how i look and then the chorus is these women singing you you look so good, fantastic man. I just love that too. He's like, hey, I compliment all you people all day long. You compliment me for a little bit now. Like this is, you look at the pictures of him in the cowboy hat with this huge grin and smile.

You see him surrounded in the few images that there are of him by all of his recording equipment, almost as if it's like he can't wait to show the world what he has and what he's accumulated and what he's doing with it which i think is really endearing it just like just creates this persona of this guy that i'm just in kind of in love with and i don't think i or the rest of us are going to really get to learn anything about him because he died in january of 2017 unfortunately at the age of 70 and uh he's going to take all of his secrets and his motivations and

his stories to the grave he does have i think four kids one of them is actually a musician they don't seem to be up for talking about him i think they're respecting his wishes to be reclusive and private but this persona is created by this man's intense ability, this forward cocky charisma that he, that bleeds into his music and it becomes infectious and you just listen to it on repeat over and over again. And it's so catchy and you find yourself, like, it's pretty rare that you find yourself singing along to a song the first time you're listening to it, but you can do that with William Onyebor music. You'll be singing along to Atomic Bomb before the song is over. Somehow you'll already know the lyrics.

It's fucking awesome. And I really, really hope you guys will either search him out on your own or you guys will go to the So I'll Write playlist on Spotify where I will add three or four of his songs to it. I just, I would love for more people to learn about him.

It's kind of like a reverse searching for Sugar Man. If you don't know what that is, there's a documentary about a musician in America who had this huge career in Africa, right? He was this huge musician, huge star in Africa, but never knew. He never had any idea. Then many years later in the 2000s, a couple of people search him out and let him know, hey, do you know how popular you are? He had no clue. He goes to Africa. He plays like arena tours. It's a huge, big deal. It's awesome. This is kind of like the opposite of that. He was really big in Nigeria and really influential in that music scene, in that funk and Afrobeat music scene. And he helps usher in the era of electronic music into Africa and is really a pioneer and then is kind of forgotten by the rest of the world. And then suddenly now the Western world wakes up and discovers

how amazing and talented he is in the 2000s. And then there's a rush to find him to learn about him. That's why I'm doing this podcast. But of course, he has no interest in sharing his life or his story with anyone. And he takes it all to the grave with him. Anyway, this episode has just been my attempt at getting you to go and listen to some truly remarkable and historically important music from a wonderfully talented musician. I'll throw this out there. If you know anything about William Onyabor that I don't know, if you have access to more information about William, please let me know. I will be forever thankful to you, and I would love to mention it in a future episode. But at the end of the day, I really just

want you to listen to and hopefully enjoy the music of William on Yabor. Alright.