In the 6 minutes of both works, Falz raises what it would take a journalist several opinion pieces to do same. It is the power of the musician to be able to do so much with so little time. Little wonder why Fela described music as the weapon of the future.
“Music is the weapon of the future”- Fela Anikulapo Kuti
Music has been one of the archives where humanity stores what is happening to her at a particular period. Going through songs that were recorded several years ago, one finds that particular songs refer to events that were ongoing at that particular time or even before the time of the composition. Ranging from Peter Tosh’s Equal Rights to Fela’s Beast of No Nations to Bob Marley’s Redemption Song to several other musicians who reigned in the past, one always finds that the musicians drew inspiration from their immediate environment and the conditions of that environment to make the music.
Folarin Falana aka Falz has shown just this sort of musical activism with several of his songs especially Child of the World which discusses sexual abuse and HIV/AIDS stigmatisation, This is Nigeria(which of course generated an invisible court action from Muslim Rights Concern agency MURIC) and the present rave of the moment- Talk.
Folarin lives up to his family tradition of activism by being a socially conscious activist whose songs discuss social ills and revoke memories of Fela’s daring. Talk seems like a follow-up to This is Nigeria. It is amazing how the combined length of both songs do not exceed 6 minutes and yet they have critically raised issues that have taken several pages of books from separate authors on the Nigerian topic.
In the 6 minutes of both works, Falz raises what it would take a journalist several opinion pieces to do same. It is the power of the musician to be able to do so much with so little time. Little wonder why Fela described music as the weapon of the future.
The song follows the talk-talk chorus style of Fela. “Anything I talk make you talk am again” is similar to how Fela used to request that the audience do a call-and-response repeating certain words to sing along to the song. This style strives towards participation and mass involvement in decrying the national condition.
At the start of the song, Falz continues from the controversy of religious pundits on his use of hijab to reflect the condition of ladies captured by Boko Haram. He throws the first ‘yab’ in the song at MURIC wondering why they did not make any court appearance despite so much threats and media noise.
He refers in the next line to the election and says “election don dey come dem go need your support“. The campaigns for the 2019 election are in full swing and one understands that this is a warning against electoral violence. Dem go need your support. (Would you offer it?) He introduces the electoral aspect of it very early because the rest of the complains in the song can be addressed by voting the right persons in elections.
Falz moves on to the issue of yahoo boys. Falz has been very vocal on the issue of internet fraud. He again refers to the recent arrest of suspected yahoo boys in a popular club in Lagos. “Since EFCC bust in, we no Dey see you for club/ And you get legit work Na
