Concerning Chaos: Notes on Brymo’s Genius

Notes on the work of an artiste I have regarded very highly.

As you can imagine, I am tired of writing the introduction to my own pieces. But this culture is funny. I sent this piece to a journal: they said it was not “timely” and regarded a piece of cultural criticism as “a profile” (claiming that, next time, I should include interviews with the artiste). I tried one other place, but Brymo has his troubles, and people like to stay clear.

The essay should speak for itself. All I can say is: Brymo saved my life on many days—or, God saved my life through his music. I introduced him to my brother, who is now a die-hard Brymo fan. I think Brymo is an example of going your way, making solid stuff, and at the same time resonating with people across various domains of intelligence and taste.

I have stopped playing Brymo’s music—my faith has made that demand of me. A few years ago, I sang “Patience and Goodluck” or “Heya” every day. I just found myself humming it, randomly. I sang it in class, parks: it was a huge consolation. But until some months ago when I decided to write this, I had not listened to him in well over a year. Nevertheless, this is not a love letter. It is a critical evaluation of a concept that appears in the work of serious poets. I consider Brymo a poet in a secondary sense, as I say in the essay.

Lastly, this is a practice piece.

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In recent years, the Nigerian singer-songwriter, author, and actor Brymo (Olawale Oloforo) has thrown himself—shirtless, fist thumping chest—at the wheel of controversy. Not so much for the crushing; more for the spectacle. His statements have been both incredible and pathetic. What he said about the Igbos during the last presidential election (for which he apologized) do not need reiterating. For no apparent reason, he shared a distasteful remark about Simi Kosoko (popularly known as ‘Simi’). In an interview with Chude Jideonwo, he said—with no hint of sarcasm, his fury was barely contained, he was like a lidded explosive, fanning himself with his hat—‘There is no Nigerian artiste alive (or dead) that people can sit down and listen to for two straight hours that’s not Brymo.’

Those should suffice, but one last bit. Once, he came to his own show late and, feeling no remorse, playing cheap Caesar (he has a song called ‘Ozymandias,’ the key word is ‘us’), said to the devotees who bought his tickets and stood waiting for him: ‘Fuck you. No apologies.’ No doubt the man was high, he was high on a luxurious view of his own powers.

What people find shocking is not what Brymo says, it is the fact that it is Brymo who says it. They find it difficult to sync his tweets with his ideals, with what they believe to be his ideals as ‘communicated’ in his songs. This was the impression I got from a conversation with Emmanuel Esomnofu two years ago. It was late evening, at a beach in Badagry. Brymo came up. What I remember, though not exact, is (I think) a telling paraphrase: ‘How person wey dey sing these kind songs go dey behave like this?’ The music journalist had given up on the man. Today, more than a few people have given up on the man and his music.

Brymo himself has maintained that anyone who has listened closely enough to the songs would find no disparity between ‘the art and the artist.’ In the interview with Jideonwo, he said he considers it a ‘malady’ to separate one from the other. Obviously, ‘malady’ is a blunder, like much else that he says in that conversation. It is dangerous to take Brymo at his word anyhow, because there are no actual ‘ideals’ in much of Brymo’s music. The ideals, if they are there, show up in the songs in Oso, his fifth studio album, where he doles out wisdom (‘Olanrewaju,’ the end of ‘Heya’). From earlier, there is pragmatic wisdom in ‘Banuso.’ But for the most part, Brymo’s genius has not cared much about definite ideals. The ideals we find in the music are tentative: his genius liked to test values against the madness, picking, discarding, and picking up again. It could be argued, too, that the ideals are exactly that: Ideals (what the OED refers to as ‘perfect types,’ things as they should be, not things as they are). Ideals are not principles. Principles presuppose ideals, but a conception of the Ideal does not presuppose a principled life. Another point to note is that the ideals in the music are not necessarily his ideals. They are things his genius found worthy of engagement. And while his genius has at various points in his career contemplated the Ideal, the ought is not, and does not need to be, a principal thing for the man himself. It is enough that it constitutes a principal thing for his genius to brood over.

“Chaos in Brymo is keenest in desire and the impossibility of realizing desire or keeping it realized.”

Thwart

Brymo’s genius has brooded on the ideal because it has brooded endlessly over chaos. It is at some points explicit in his work: he had a show titled ‘Organized Chaos,’ a song titled ‘Entropy,’ preceded on the album by a song containing the following lines: ‘We are gas particles / It’s on its own part / And we all collide . . .’ But this is not the same as saying that chaos is the theme or subject of his music. Chaos is a state, a situation: I am suggesting that Brymo’s music has the sort of energy it has partly because chaos worries his genius.

Chaos is disorder and disorderliness, but it is also the abyss over which that Genius brooded in Genesis I, the void that great poets (like John Milton) have had to power into. It is also, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, ‘Something consisting of unrelated or disordered parts or elements; a confused mass or mixture.’ In mathematics (known as ‘chaos theory’), again the OED, it is ‘the property of a complex system whose behavior is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.’ But, as the Stanford Encyclopedia for Philosophy puts it, the ‘seemingly random and unpredictable behavior [of that system] . . . nevertheless follows precise rules.’

In Brymo’s music, the state of disorder is engendered or caused by certain diverse forces (the OED’s ‘disordered parts or elements’). What those forces are precisely is partly what his genius, up until Yellow (2020, the last album I heard), grappled with. God is one of those forces (‘No Be Me’). Money is a force (‘Money,’ ‘Eko,’ and ‘1 Pound’); it makes the world go round. In his socially-conscious songs (‘Dem Dey Go,’ ‘Jungle Fever,’ ‘Heya’ and ‘Market Square’: all are allegories, but the last two conceive of human relations in more primitive terms), the forces are political. Ultimately, though, the forces, as his genius perceives them, are aboriginal (or what Paul the apostle called ‘elemental’). It is a key thing that differentiates him from Fela Kuti: Brymo has a more robust view of what drives chaos. While Fela Kuti took the social elements as the presiding force driving not just society but individuals, Brymo knows the social forces to be elements in a thicker braid; even if they happen to be the presiding factors, then they are merely new iterations of a primeval drive.

Chaos in Brymo is keenest in desire and the impossibility of realizing desire or keeping it realized. It consists in the tension between the Ideal and the Actual: the Ideal constantly being defeated by (never becoming) the Actual. The Ideal may sprout from the earth, may be very close to touch, may even be touched, but the Ideal stays briefly (as in ‘Money Launderers’: ‘Everything is so temporary / They love you now, and they judge you later.’). There is something that thwarts. Brymo’s genius is obsessed with that ‘something.’

In terms of genius, much does not happen in The Son of a Kapenta (his genius rarely came to work, took a nap when it came, too bored with the plasticky parties and talk of girls and of buying love with money: Brymo was learning to write songs). But—even on songs as early as ‘Ara’ and ‘Rendezvous’—his genius was aware of the fact of ‘thwarting,’ the possibility of ambition or desire (what he calls ‘destiny’ in that album) being thwarted.

It’s in the chorus of ‘Ara’ (one of a few songs that many know him by)—

‘Ara n be, ti mo fe da;

Karaye ma pa kadara da,

O n be O n be’

‘There is wonder I want to wrought,’ he sings, ‘may the powers-that-be not change destiny. / There is [wonder] There is [wonder].’ There is some weakness to my translation, it is unable to effect the nuance in the words in the Yoruba. The verb ‘dá’ (which I render as ‘wrought’) sounds differently, though spelt the same, from ‘dà.’ The latter ‘dà’ is usually suffixed to words that describe ‘change,’ ‘transformation,’ or ‘redemption’: as in ìyípadà, ìsípòpadà, and ìràpadà, among others. As you may have noticed, it works with another morpheme—‘pa.’ To ‘pa kadara da’ is more aptly to ‘turn destiny over,’ ‘to transform it.’

Implied in that line is the sense of a diabolic force. And, though the genius recognizes but does not apprehend it, there is serious significance in the small sound-shift that occurs in that chorus, in those two words that look alike but sound differently, in the tiny variation—a change (a transformation) takes place in the body of two letters (‘da’), just as a change might take place in destiny. It is secondary poetry but this is the way primary poetry (in a solider sense), too, works (consider the word ‘state’ in Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet, compare its appearance in line two to the way it is employed in the last line of the poem).

Likewise, the fact of a possible thwarting is there in ‘Rendezvous,’ though confidently pushed aside: ‘I am on a rendezvous with destiny / I’m looking for some pedigree / I’m hoping you don’t mind. / There ain’t nobody stopping me.’ Destiny is at the mercy of.

“Brymo himself has maintained that anyone who has listened closely enough to the songs would find no disparity between ‘the art and the artist.’”

The Maturation of Style

The amount of growth that took place in Brymo’s style between his second and third album, within the span of a year, is astounding; and what his genius had accomplished by his fourth is even more remarkable. We see tactful songwriting, with risky puns that are briskly sung. Take this line from ‘Purple Jar’: ‘I dey ja like sey I steal condom.’ The word ‘ja’ means two things, and Brymo has used both; it means ‘to cut’ / ‘snap’ and ‘to run.’ The only Yoruba word in the line, it is precisely placed and very significant: the verb snaps on the simile.

In Merchants, Dealers, and Slaves, his allegoric, folk-tale kind of storytelling method is denser and more focused. We also get the paradoxical sort of speech that becomes Brymo’s style. Then there’s the development of his imagistic sense and his way of writing from an angle or toward an angle, so that what is said is understood but not stated directly.

Take ‘Purple Jar’ again (one of his finest and most moving songs). I don’t know what the purple jar is, but it is resonant. It comes at the end of an interesting sequence: ‘I’ll take the memories, the car, and the purple jar.’ The way the lovers’ voices intersect in this song (it is hard for me to tell who—the lady or the guy—says ‘You are all I need precisely’; Brymo sings that line and ‘We almost had it all’ and the chorus like it belongs to the woman) is brilliant. But Brymo’s genius for speaking in part comes through here: ‘I’ll keep my shoes on.’ In that line you have Cain who slew his brother, doomed to be a wanderer because he ruined affection.

The genius has freedom to brood as it would love to now (believe it if you would, it is his genius that talks on ‘Truthfully’: ‘I am feeling free’)—freedom to apprehend chaos or the negation of desire. It has breathing space in the style and in the voice. To say Brymo’s voice is original is to say nothing: it is a voice capable of selling sorrow with love; it offers grief in a wrap of gratitude; it is beatific, whatever it sings about it beatifies. I imagine a harbor craft sailing the skies when I imagine his voice. Or—to re-course an Ifa verse—his voice is the sort of sky-face that grows roots and trees. In MDS, it matured enough to be able to express in one breath a longing towards better things and a history of frustrated aspirations.

The first comprehensive expression of disorder in Brymo is in ‘Down’; but the first actual apprehension of what his genius recognized in the ‘Ara’ chorus is in ‘Cheap Wine.’

The apprehension on this song happens inside a gasp: ‘Aaah.’ It comes after ‘My teacher say the story long.’ Brymo writes very simply, his stories are quite simple, but it would be a cheat to simply say ‘The story long’ and leave it at that. He has to somehow get at the anguish one feels at not being able to get to end of that ‘story.’ How does he manage that anguish? He does it in that ‘Aaah.’ It is the most anguished word (or sound) that I have heard in a Nigerian song: it is like holding a scorching word in the throat.

In an essay (‘Dividing Legacies’) on the Clark Lectures that T. S. Eliot gave at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1926, the late English poet Geoffrey Hill makes reference to a critical detail in Eliot’s estimation of Shakespeare. Eliot had noted that two words in Antony and Cleopatra, which were added to the history Shakespeare got out of Plutarch, are sufficient to give a just estimate of Shakespeare’s greatness.

It is well done, and fitting for a princess

Descended of so many royal kings.

Ah, soldier!

Eliot made the following statement on the last line: ‘I could not myself put into words the difference I feel between the passage if these two words ah, soldier were omitted and with them. But I know there is a difference, and that only Shakespeare could have made it.’

Brymo is not Shakespeare—I consider him a poet only in a secondary sense—but that ‘Aaah’—the way he releases it (he does not quite ‘sing’ it), though it is a very brief moment—is evidence enough of his greatness. To use Hill’s phrase, in that one exhale, that one release, almost like a sexual exhalation but one that comes with a realization of the very abyss that one plumbs in stoking hunger, that ‘Aaah’ ‘cuts to the quick of the matter.’

There is a second thing to note. In the chorus, the words ‘Yoo daa’ (‘It will be well’) are sung three times. One could take the words as a statement of hope, but Brymo’s tone and the entire narrative of the song (of a certain aimlessness, of dreams and the dashing of dreams: ‘You see the good times they never come’) refute our easy summations. The ‘Yoo daa’ contains more than one sense. It is an euphemistic way of stating futility (‘It will be well, it will be well, it will be well!’) and it is also a grasping for—a refusal to let go of—hope.

In Tabula Rasa (his Songs of Innocence and of Experience), the layered apprehension of ‘futility’ in ‘Yoo da’ is not layered but appears naked and gaunt. In ‘Never Look Back,’ his genius says, ‘The world is cold and reckless / We are all defenseless.’ Once, that genius said, ‘There ain’t nobody stopping me.’ Now the view is essentially naturalistic. Think of Robert Frost’s ‘Storm Fear’: ‘And my heart owns a doubt / Whether tis in us to arise with day / And save ourselves unaided.’ Brymo apprehends the same thing, but he does not own the fact as ‘a doubt,’ he owns it as a fact (which makes him the weaker apprehender).

It could be devastating for any artist(e) to come to the fact of meaninglessness in the world so early in their creative life: What do you do with the fact that ‘the world is so senseless’? Even Solomon registered that fact at the end of his life; to register the fact is to be at the end of one’s life. Brymo’s genius had to find a way to make that brash fact fruitful.

Thankfully, his genius has what Stevens called ‘a mind of winter.’ As a result, he has been able to make the bleak fact give. In ‘Never Look Back,’ we have a pair of lines that are bewitchingly brilliant, his genius making darkness fruitful: ‘When time doesn’t seem to fly / Remember sorrow won’t last for a lifetime; / If it does it will be just the lifetime.’ (My italics.)

It is hard to stand close to the abyss—scores of Nigerian artistes and poets are entirely unaware of the fact that an abyss exists—but Brymo’s genius stands sure-footed on the brink of that abyss (he calls it ‘the brink of madness’ in ‘The Way the Cookie Crumbles’) and peers in, undespairingly looking despair sternly in the eye. When he says, early in that verse, ‘Lay down your fears and face it,’ it is his genius bidding him face the beast. Again, I have to go to T. S. Eliot (writing on the work of Andrew Marvell) for a fitting phrase: there is ‘a tough reasonableness’ in those two lines. His genius has refused a sentimental path.

“It could be devastating for any artist(e) to come to the fact of meaninglessness in the world so early in their creative life.”

Through Hell to the Good

Having a resolve to not let good sense down, Brymo’s genius went a reasonable way. This time, in Klitoris (2016), the job was to contemplate the ways we live through ‘futility.’ Despair has already been refused for us: after all, if sorrow lasts for a lifetime, ‘it will be just the lifetime.’ It puts one in mind of the statement in the Bible about enduring to the end and getting a crown of glory. In this case, there is no end after the end (‘There’s heaven and there’s hell / It’s hard to really tell’)—to endure to the end itself is the crown of glory.

Having refused despair, Brymo’s genius goes to hell in Klitoris. The title is revealing: the clitoris is a sensitive part of the female sexual organ. The title is hedonistic but not merely eccentric—the album is a treatise on hedonism. It is Brymo’s aspiration to outdo Ecclesiastes 2 (x). The void or abyss and disorder has moved from the abstract and from outside us or among us—it is now inside us. Pleasure, Brymo’s genius discovers, is one way we handle the fact of the void that we carry: ‘Wear a lovely smile / Do the dirty whine.’

Here, we get ‘Let’s Make Love’ (the most sensual title and song I know of in all of Brymo’s oeuvre: next to this one, the flat line ‘I will take possession of your body’ in ‘Fe Mi’ is celibate) and a real ode to drugs (not weed as in ‘Cheap Wine’ but more serious stuff) in ‘Mirage’—‘Let us get high and fall from the sky . . . / Take a break from reality, / Take a flight to mars.’ But the mirage, we are told, fades away. Here, then, we have a toughly handled hedonism. The grating hums at the end of the song are anguished in a despairing way, because his genius has to give us what despair feels like. His genius has taken him to a region of experience. It is not enough to accept the fact that the world is senseless, that senselessness has to be made known in its aspects: this is what Klitoris endeavors to do.

“The genius that recognizes then apprehends chaos and refuses despair, the same that went to hell to realize for us what happens there . . . is the same genius that decides to release unto us things worthy of being treasured.”

Brymo has always had a philosophical eye. Thankfully it has been immune to the color-blindness caused by a subscription to ideologies. His ideology (like J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s) has been reasonableness. His genius did its brooding working with that eye. Oso is an album of gains, of wisdom earned after the practical interrogation of futility. He had come a long way: the mother of ‘1986’ (who said, ‘If you want it, you can have it’) is now being told, in the shortest most beautiful song Brymo has yet written (next to this song, Burna Boy’s ‘If I’m Lying’ sounds very artificial): ‘Desire dey make e dey break man o.’ And the forces (bad belle people, the thief, the government) are listed; but now, in Brymo, there is ‘the good man.’ The world has not changed but his conception of it has. While Oso may not be his most sonically pleasing album, I consider it Brymo’s best.

Several of the greatest songs that Brymo has written are on this album: in fact, nearly every song is great. It is easy to underestimate the album because it is quieter, its songwriting more direct, its style understated. But it is difficult to be interesting (and profoundly moving) when your subject is not how we live, but how to live. Oso is about how we ought to live and, seven years later, its subdued shine has not worn off; will not. The songs have an import beyond their state; the album gives good weight.

The genius that recognizes then apprehends chaos and refuses despair, the same that went to hell to realize for us what happens there, who shifts from brooding over chaos as it exists in society to the abyss that exists inside a human being (the abyss that we attempt to satiate but can never), is the same genius that decides to release unto us things worthy of being treasured, things that it makes sense to hold on to and treasure in spite of the madness.

Surely the madness has gone nowhere. But the idea of chaos has shifted into that other key: it is ‘the property of a complex system whose behavior is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions.’ The key word is ‘appear.’ Brymo’s genius sees it now—that ‘precise rules’ govern this ‘seemingly random system.’

What those rules are is still largely unknown, but the artiste’s genius is able to approximate them by drawing from the practical and cultural stock of the artiste’s consciousness. That is exactly what it does—in ‘Olanrewaju,’ ‘Patience and Goodluck,’ and ‘God Is in Your Mind.’ The last song has a peculiar power. The domain of desire and its negation has changed and the pitch of the fact is different: ‘I love to be all that you want me to be / But I’m not the same man that I used to be.’ A cry (it seems) for an irretrievable innocence; the forces now reside in the man and they preside in him, they have become him. It’s a different kind of agony that comes through in those lines and it is unsurprising that Brymo lets the guitars do the rest of the talking afterwards. What more, one might ask, is there to say?

‘I intend to clear, to clarify, I intend to procure a domain for sanity.’

And Yet—

Much remains to be said. One could critically pursue what Brymo’s genius pursued (or endeavored to) on and after Yellow (which I have left out of this discussion). One could consider the profound dynamic that the love songs (the sexual innuendoes, i.e., the grotesque image of a dick that cannot go to the gym: ‘Prick [Wey] No Get Shoulder’) add to (or detract from) the discussion of chaos in his work. One might ask where to place the high-spirited songs in celebration of life (i.e., ‘Something Good Is Happening’ and ‘Alajo Somolu’: which sit uniquely as well-measured odes to the enduring power of common Nigerian life: Wizkid’s ‘Ojuelegba’ may be equal to them, but I am not sure much in Burna is, his ‘Common Person’ is patronizing at best). But I am at the mercy of space.

I would like, however, to touch on the video of ‘Heya.’ The Nigerian critic, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, wrote a piece on the video (‘Heya: Why Is Brymo Naked?’), seeing it as a ‘stunt’ and mere ‘gimmickry’ and a matter of publicity. Aigbokhaevbolo, though he notes that in the song Brymo has stripped things to the bare essentials, coming to it hot he misses the idea that to travel light does not diminish the significance of the journey. But the main issue is that Aigbokhaevbolo, as with several other critics, have mistaken the eccentricity of Brymo’s genius as that of the man himself. Baited: they have taken Brymo at his word.

In Genesis and in Greek mythology, chaos is the state that precedes the birth of life on the planet; it is the state from which life and Man emerged. If, as I have been arguing, Brymo’s genius has been obsessed with chaos, that video gives us the quintessential image of the whole affair. We see his legs stepping out of water (not primordial slime but it is something), and then a naked man. It is plain enough. This man, a thin shroud covering his privates, walks to a piano in the middle of a city that does not care. I have said somewhere in this essay that for Brymo the presiding forces are elemental. That man striking at a piano is Man striking at something, wanting to earn something. Once it was a flute, now it is a piano; but we bring the same nakedness to the tools we have fashioned.

But why do it in the middle of a city, in broad daylight? In the video, we see shots of busy Lagos life (modern life) going on; that itself is a kind of chaos. And, in the midst of that, a man plays music. ‘Through voice and the work of fingers done at the very heart of chaos,’ he seems to be saying, ‘I intend to clear, to clarify, I intend to procure a domain for sanity.’ 🔷