Asa: The Subtle Message of a Rejected Voice

If you get rejected in your church choir, you almost certainly (operating word being almost) wouldn’t make it as a singer.

But Asa, the soulful songbird from Nigeria, broke that rule to our collective delight and to the dismay of the church. Don’t get me wrong, I strongly believe that the church is the best place for voices, session musicians and music careers to be nurtured. It is still the best place to discover musicians (singers, songwriters and instrumentalists) in a country where our music ‘stars’ are at best mimes.

According to Asa “People didn’t understand my low-pitched deep voice, the choirs didn’t want anything to do with me. I had to get to church first (early) if I was to have any chance of getting near the mike!”

I understand very well Asa’s frustrations, if we may call it that, having been in and directed the choir myself for a while. In the church, your voice had to ‘ring’; it had to be able to make the worst sinner work down the aisle to the front of the pulpit to accept Jesus. Plus you had to cut the image of a ‘sister’; the bible-clutching one with an air piety. Unfortunately, our Asa spots dreads, is a tomboy and worst still, has a voice texture that does not sound like her gender.

So she was rejected. But the rejected voice has become a precious gem, again to our collective delight.

We all waited with baited breath when they told us that Asa had gone to France, her birth place, to start mixing her musical broth. I, in particular, wanted to know what she will sound like – home girl or western. Luckily the French didn’t quite tamper with her – her voice, her nuances, her language and her message.

I was not expecting her voice to give me the chills like Yinka Davies’ (don’t even attempt a comparison). But it did in a ‘be careful’ kind of way; not one to hit the high note, she flirts with it, dancing around it then moves past it intelligently and keeps your ears on her message, which to me may well be the defining factor of her music and career.

Where are the messengers?

With her self titled debut, Asa seems to answer that question “we are coming out from the trenches and you better sit up and take notice”.
Oh how she speaks to all of us – the government, the rebel soldier, the father, the media like the voice of one crying in the wilderness singing “there is fire on the mountain and nobody seems to be on the run…” she speaks to the soldier “fighting for another man’s course” and doesn’t even know it.

The subject of war is so apt and relevant in the political clime of Africa. It is one that African writers have devoted their pen to recently from Biyi Bamidele’s Burna Boy to Allah is not obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma and Helon Habila’s Measuring Time. Hollywood also has its own offerings on the theme with movies like Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April. Asa lends her voice to this subject in such a sing-along way, that even when we decide not to read or when the make-believe effect of the big screen fades from our memories, we can still sing the song to ourselves in our cars, our homes, our offices and everywhere in the city.

Time was when the African safari was the jungle of grass cutters, antelopes, elephants and lions; when men wore their medals of elephant tusk and lion’s mane proudly for their bravery. Today, the African field is replete with fratricidal killings; brothers killing brothers for diamond, oil, indeed, for what should be a commonwealth and even sometimes for no reason at all.

“What did he say to make you so blind to you conscience and reason? Could it be love for your country or for the gun you use in killing”?

She also speaks of how the whole world has become morbid:

"I wake up in the morning
Tell you what I see on my TV screen
I see the blood of an innocent child and everyone is watching…"

… then we blame the children for not reading. But “whose responsible for what we teach our children, is it the internet or the stars on television”.

In Jailer she has a message for you:

“If you walk in a market place don’t throw stones
Even if you do, you just might hit one of your own
Life is not about your policies all the time
So you better rearrange your philosophies and be good to your fellow man…”

Although she might not stand a chance on the church’s stage, but she has her own stage now. She also has her own message, which is not very different from the original message of the church; “love thy neighbour as thyself” and she packages the message with such soul and candor that you think she took direct lessons from Bob Marley.

Asa is a refreshing departure from the dance hall, party anthem, almost pedestrian and commercialism that is currently associated with Nigerian music. She may currently be an opening act for the likes of Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Manu Dibango and Co; she is however, subtly but surely carving a niche for herself in the mould of Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, Oliver Mtukuzi and Lucky Dube.

I hope her next album proves us right.