Nigerians happened to Nigeria, By Odi Ikpeazu
“Art is not a mirror to hold up to society
Leon Trotsky
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
My friend asked me last night what I thought of Big Brother Naija, which I thought was quite cynical of him since I didn’t know why my opinion about it mattered one way or the other. Knowing that particular fellow, he will next be asking me what I thought about a possible Animist-Animist Presidential ticket! Or a Buddhist-Shintoist one. Such rot doth preoccupy us.
Yet, he insisted the BBN stuff was just a light conversation he wanted to have and demanded that I tried to put my mind to it. He had his own take on it and merely wondered what mine would be. Just for the heck of it, no big deal. And so without much preparation, I tried to oblige him in a nutshell.
You see, public frivolity can be a most welcome diversion, particularly in societies where people are long accustomed to applying themselves seriously to the tedious and complex business of meaningful progress and development. Lengthy periods of honest application to duty and obligation certainly deserve passages of comic relief or even burlesque and farce. Conversely, it follows that in communities where laissez faire and license are omnipresent, if the inhabitants constantly seek artistic expression and recreation by means of tomfoolery and buffoonery, this should conceivably lead to the normalization of absurdity and aberration.
Down through the ages in human societies, art has invariably inspired life. Many times arguably, art has even immitated life and vice versa. Sometimes, the inspiration would be positive, other times quite ridiculous. The relationship between the two is very synergic. Europe’s Industrial Revolution ushered in modern life as we all know it today, during which the basis of virtually all modern technological advancements were laid for all time. From the spinning jenny, the steam locomotive, the power loom, all the way to the steam engine, the electric bulb, the telephone and the airplane etc, we would still not have been very far from cavemen and the state of Nature, were it not for the ingenuity and inventiveness of that incredible period of Mankind.
It must be noted however that the minds of most of those great inventors – men like Morse, Stephenson, Watt, Edison, Bell, Tesla etc – were largely fertilised, conditioned and inspired by the magna opera of avatars like Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, Chopin, Liszt etc. The sense of appreciation of these inventive genii was heightened and sharpened as well by the monumental artistic movements of the era – Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism – established for eternity by the great master painters of the time, among whom were the likes of Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and many more.
Whenever you board a flight on a jet plane today and you are sky high on Cloud Nine riding the turbulence, remember that you owe an eternal debt of gratitude to those subliminal artists who inspired the minds of people like the Wright Brothers. On the flip side, please also pause and ponder that your nights today would probably have still been as pitch black as that first night in Eden if those inventors of the light bulb like Humphry Davy, Thomas Edison and their ilk had been subjected to ‘dope’ beats dropped by the likes of Li’l Wayne and Naira Marley (meaning no disrespect hopefully)!
Where was I exactly? I’m furiously trying to recall. The bone in my mind has been quite dislocated by this particular dope beat coming from the local television station for some minutes now. I do not know its title nor the artiste but its familiarity is unmistakable because of its striking similarity to scores of others that constantly dominate the airwaves. I wonder most frequently if they are mostly composed by one person or sung by the same singer, that’s how close to each other they sound. Surely that can’t be the case, could it?
Yes, so I meant to infer in response to my friend’s inquiry that the state of the nation is an exact reflection of the state of the art. If my friend dont gerrit, he can forgerrabourrit, as they say.
-Ikpeazu, a Lawyer is a public affairs commentator
