From the periphery

Nabay was born in 1964 in the village of Sedu in Eastern Sierra Leone, the son of a Temne mother and a diamond-mining father of both Temne and Mandingo heritage. After moving to Freetown as a teenager, he attended a Catholic missionary high school and found work as a porter for a local luxury hotel. At 16, he managed to find his way to a talent contest run by a newly established record label, Super Sound. As Nabay recounts, at this competition an initial round of contestants all sang in the transnational genre of reggae. When Nabay performed, he tried a different strategy, and impressed the judges by singing a vocal rendition of a traditional Sierra Leonean genre of ‘bubu music’ that he had known since childhood.

Traditional bubu music is performed during processionals in which a dozen or more players intone hypnotic, hocketed, rhythms on bamboo horns (these are played with a buzzed embouchure like a trumpet in a way that produces a single sustained pitch).Footnote ¹⁶ Such processionals are part of a key musical form in traditional West African music: a collectively performed polyrhythm based on interlocking repetitive motifs, often performed by a horn ensemble. Ruth Stone, a specialist in music from neighbouring Liberia, characterizes this style of traditional West African music as ‘faceting’.Footnote ¹⁷ These horn bands that play in hocketed polyphony have existed in a wide variety of regions of sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ¹⁸ Over many decades, the Temne ethnic group (who, like much of West Africa, became increasingly Muslim since the nineteenth century) adopted bubu music to mark harvest festivals, local celebrations, and the Islamic holy days of Ramadan. More recently, they have adopted it for a retrofitted carnival festival, a development recently promoted by current Sierra Leonean president Ernst Bai Koroma after its trans-Atlantic neighbours in the Caribbean in order to boost tourism with culturally unique performances.

According to musician and Sierra Leonean government minister Mustafa Bai Atila, the hocketed polyphony of bubu music unfolds according to a collectively sustained script. As he put it: ‘They blow them [the horns] in order, instrumentally arranged.’Footnote ¹⁹ Nabay, for his part, contended that the mysterious patterns of this collective arrangement had magical origins. In a 2014 radio documentary for Afropop Worldwide, he described it as entailing secret registers of meaning: ‘Africans, they do this witchcraft. Wizard thing. When they go to this witchcraft thing, on the ground. This is like the bell, like the bell ringing. Like when you want to go to school, boys, girls, come to school – [sings: bing bing, etc.] – the witches, in West Africa, they play bubu music. It is a secret; nobody who is not a member should know this bell’Footnote ²⁰ (Sound Examples 1, 2, and 3).Footnote ²¹

Witchcraft is a loaded and difficult term for Western readers, having long been associated with racist prejudices about sub-Saharan Africa. Though, in our conversations, Nabay said little about the precise social meaning of bubu witchcraft in Sierra Leone, there is no reason to dismiss Nabay's claim as pre-modern or archaic. Scholars of sub-Saharan Africa have developed a rich literature that studies the ways witchcraft is integral to complex, modern, and locally varied instances of misfortune.Footnote ²²

In the 1990s, Nabay had learned many bubu melodies by ear, and began composing a few of his own. With the help of producers such as Sam Jones and Pop Tunie, who worked as recording engineers at Island Studios in Freetown, Nabay began modernizing bubu music by imitating the hocketed polyphony of bubu horns over looped beats that were centred by a powerful electronic kick drum.Footnote ²³ Even then, his compositional process was collaborative. By programming a drum machine with the help of two engineers, Nabay could dial in sounds and record the rhythm tracks digitally to a computer. Once the ‘skeleton system’ was established – a term he used to denote the basic structural elements of a song – Nabay would then dictate a bass line before beginning to teach two backup singers a series of countermelodies. He used keyboard sounds that emulated the hocketing sounds of the horns. Nabay's Freetown tapes gave an electrical intensity to the traditional bubu rhythm and transfigured this indigenous tradition into a style of modern dance music that became enormously popular among Sierra Leoneans during the 1990s.

Nabay's bubu songs of this era were about a range of topics, and some were pointedly critical of modernity. One hit entitled ‘Lek U Culture’ enjoined Sierra Leoneans to proudly recognize and celebrate their indigenous rituals, against the backdrop of a pervasive fashion for trans-Atlantic black genres such as hip-hop, R&B, and reggae. Others were written on commission from NGOs who sought to spread messages about democratic values (‘Good Governance’) and birth control (‘Eh Mane Ah’). At the time, he performed live with an acoustic bubu gang of as many as eleven collaborators. But the transfixing intensity of Nabay's modern beats coupled with its traditional indigenous meaning, its power for social cohesion, and the occasionally politicized lyrics he sang over the top also made Nabay's bubu music very popular among RUF (Revolutionary United Front) combatants in the civil war. In a series of particularly cruel episodes, rebels allegedly used Nabay's bubu singles to capture and in some cases recruit people by luring them from hiding. As Cornelia Nuxoll has detailed, in another traumatic episode rebels altered the lyrics to one of Nabay's songs to suit their political aims.Footnote ²⁴ When the singer responded by recording the patriotic song, ‘Sabanoh’ (‘We Own This Land’) – also funded by an NGO – the rebels sought to retaliate, forcing Nabay to flee.

Between 2000 and 2002, a dizzying and complicated trip had delivered Nabay from the horrors of the civil war, through the back roads of Guinea and Senegal, and eventually to Mali where he immigrated to the United States with a P-3 Artist/Entertainer visa. In legal terms set out by USCIS, he was admitted to the United States not as a war refugee, but rather for the purpose of work as an expert performer in a unique cultural tradition.Footnote ²⁵ Nabay was, unfortunately, also deceived by those who helped him leave. Structural poverty begets desperation, and in this case deceit. His P-3 visa was issued to him and his eleven-piece band, but the friend who arranged for the visa ultimately sold off the remaining eleven visas to others for his own profit, leaving Nabay immigrating to the United States without musical collaborators. And the United States, initially, was not a promising place to live. For nearly a decade, without a band, his dreams of being a cosmopolitan superstar of bubu music remained unfulfilled. Among his fellow Sierra Leonean immigrants in the United States, Nabay found little in the way of help or collaborators. Between 2002 and 2009, he worked largely in fast food jobs. He was living a nomadic existence in exile and poverty.

In 2007, while doing freelance work for Afropop Worldwide, journalist Wills Glasspiegel encountered Nabay's Freetown releases in a stack of promotional CDs sent to the radio programme by the BBC.Footnote ²⁶ Struck by the music's formal intricacy, and convinced of Nabay's exceptional talent, two years later he decided to track Nabay down, and begin working on a plan to re-launch his musical career in the mould of World Music 2.0: a re-release of his old music for an international market. By way of the experimental and international music scene at Zebulon in Brooklyn, Glasspiegel connected with Dean Bein, steward of indie music label True Panther Sounds, who agreed to release a four-song EP from Nabay's Freetown tapes. A swell of critical attention followed from popular indie media outlets such as Pitchfork and Fader, and Glasspiegel began work as Nabay's manager.Footnote ²⁷ He arranged for Nabay's first Karaoke-style gigs at Zebulon and the ultra-hip boutique Opening Ceremony in SoHo. As opportunities became more significant – a slot opening for Tony Allen at (Le) Poisson Rouge, for example – it became increasingly necessary for Nabay to have an actual band to back up his singing. These events unfolded during a heyday of independent and DIY music making in Brooklyn. It was through the scene surrounding Zebulon that Nabay would find four of his long-standing collaborators: Syrian singer Boshra AlSaadi, British guitarist Douglas Shaw, and drummer Jonathan Leland, who in turn asked me to join the band on keyboards.Footnote ²⁸ From my perspective as a total outsider to Nabay's bubu music, entering this collaboration was exciting, albeit a bit overwhelming.

I had little vocabulary to understand what I was supposed to play at our earliest rehearsals; indeed it would be a couple of years before I developed a more organic feel for Nabay's music. When rehearsing in our practice space, Glasspiegel would play a track of Nabay's music over the PA while we listened to the thick forest of bubu beats, struggling to pick out lines that we could play. To help, Nabay sang bits and pieces of parts into our ears. Nabay's English is inflected with his native Sierra Leonean Krio and when we first began work together, the way he described music was often challenging for me to understand. He summoned terms I recognized, but their meanings were different. ‘Interval’ meant the time lapsed between the playing of different lines, not pitch relations. ‘Flow’ meant connected, legato lines. ‘Too fast’ often meant too loud or too dense. ‘Too slow’ could indicate a tempo problem, or a direction about mood and intensity.

Two years later, a critic for MTV Iggy described our eventual collaboration as ‘Graceland In Reverse’, in which Nabay, the African musician, taught Westerners the ins-and-outs of his modernized bubu patterns.Footnote ²⁹ In playing the role of teacher, Nabay was fond of certain kinds of aspirational labelling. He described these first rehearsals as ‘bubu university’, labelling himself, the teacher, as ‘professor bubu’, and occasionally donning his reading glasses. But the language one uses to describe compositional problems in rehearsal (‘this isn't good – it's not working’) could feel slippery, oblique, or too technical in a way that does not reliably communicate. In our earliest rehearsals, Nabay's way around this problem was pragmatic: he wielded the proper name as a badge of approval, reporting to us ‘This is bubu’ or ‘That's not bubu’. Indeed, the polyphony of bubu is like an elaborately interdependent web, a delicate ecosystem. Nabay's positive and negative judgements in the context of our rehearsal worked in a peculiar way; they forced us to spend more time listening attentively, but loosely, to what was working and what was not.

That summer I played as a member of what was fast becoming Nabay's ad hoc karaoke ensemble, and performed live versions of his original Freetown releases at parties, rooftops, clubs, and basement shows. On stage, we had quickly come to understand that Nabay was a loose performer, and that we would have to remain on our toes. We had to follow him through the form of the song – counting bars were of no help. He heard and felt rhythm and metre in a modular fashion, which meant his ‘3’ would occasionally be our ‘1’ and vice versa.Footnote ³⁰ Harmonically we eventually learned that helping Nabay sing in tune depended on the audibility of specific melodic and percussive lines, not bass lines or chords. The chemistry of the group seemed to work with audiences, even if the result was unpredictable. Some of the first shows we played – at MoMA's P.S.1, two shows at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a few at Zebulon, and a couple on Brooklyn rooftops were electrifying but uneven, alternating between musical experiences that felt like the most exciting I ever experienced and many others that were punctuated by broken gear, backstage meltdowns, and conflicts over payments. These difficulties were fuelled by a recurring sense of anxiety about whether or not the band was sustainable; many shows were the cause for at least one band member's panic (often Nabay's) that the project would fall apart.

The indigenous metaphysics of bubu music had, by this point, drifted away to a mere trace of its spiritual life. But locality re-emerged in unexpected ways. Knowing that many of his lyrics in Krio and Temne were lost to American audiences, at his early shows in Brooklyn, Nabay often used stage banter to convey arresting and even disturbing explanations of the context of Sierra Leonean civil war in between the infectious and participatory flux of individual songs. The effect was often alienating to audiences – not in Brechtian fashion by emphasizing artifice but rather by disarming our audience's Dionysian pleasures. The impact of the songs would remain consumable as entertainment, but the spoken translations awkwardly silenced rooms with didactic lessons.

A little over a year into the life of Nabay's American bubu gang, Nabay and Glasspiegel had parted ways, and by the fall of 2011 I had assumed the responsibility of manager. Musically, the band's sound was gradually solidifying, and our confidence was up. But it was a challenging moment; Nabay needed a more substantial record deal to support a future career. And to be signed, he needed a compelling demo of the new band. So after recording four demos of Nabay performing with his new bubu gang, I reached out to indie labels associated with networks proximate to ours: True Panther, Sub Pop, 4AD, Crammed, and David Byrne's label Luaka Bop. Ultimately, the unique combination of these elements managed to excite Luaka Bop above the rest to sign the band to release three collaborative albums.

Luaka Bop would release the recordings we finished that winter in spring 2012 as En Yay Sah. In the studio, we largely tracked what the band had been playing live, though at least one tune – the title track – was entirely new, and many of the others involved collaborative elements in the studio (Leland refined drum parts, Shaw and I added guitar and keyboard parts and solos based on Nabay's suggestions, and so on). For many of the songs, the band recorded a single take, and then edited the form around Nabay and AlSaadi's overdubbed vocals. That is, in line with our approach to live performances, we would use patterns established by Nabay's vocals (alternating verses with chorus-like refrains) and then edit arrangements around what he had done. These arrangements were in turn used to guide what we would play live. In the end, we were all quite thrilled with the result. Yet, strangely enough, I remember feeling paradoxically depressed at moments during these sessions. I was so happy about how the recording sounded, that it felt almost sad not to be able to stay there with the music, to live with it. Or to repeat this experience of creating it. It was an almost melancholy feeling.

Life with the bubu gang was always a bit of a party – sharing weed had something of a metaphysical significance – but, during mixing, Nabay took the unusual step of drinking a tall boy of Budweiser at midday. In retrospect, I could see the stress and anxiety. After months of negotiations with Luaka Bop, actually signing the deal during our last recording session in December was harrowing. In order to get our small advance from the label and pay our recording engineers, we needed the deal signed before the holidays. The engineers, unpaid, were getting understandably frustrated. I became anxious myself. At the eleventh hour, Nabay responded to the idea of the contract to me with dismay and scepticism. I was being careful not to be pushy. Then, later in the day, he got off the phone with a relative who had told him ‘not to sign any papers’.

I had a sinking feeling this was coming; generations of exploitative record deals with musicians from sub-Saharan Africa have understandably led to a climate of suspicion towards labels. At the same time, Nabay's protest was not knee-jerk or instinctive; it was reasoned. This kind of threat can be a bargaining tool. Though early on the band insisted on being paid as professional musicians, in other projects we had become familiar with the social norms of sacrificial labour – labour that could go uncompensated because it is reliant on one form of privilege or another (white privilege, trust funds, elite cultural circles, and other forms of long-term social and psychological security).Footnote ³¹ Though patience was thin with this method among members of the band – many of whom were in their thirties and anxious about the prospects of longer-term careers as musicians – the very existence of the norm of sacrificial labour still meant being paid could be something up for discussion, rather than assumed. Nabay's perspective was, of course, very different. Aside from charm, talent, the patronage of an occasional friend, and his own masculinity (he was often dependent on the generosity of women for food and housing), Nabay had very few privileges. Thus, he protested our complacency with outsized expectations: ‘I want one million dollars!’ or ‘I will be the next Michael Jackson!’ If he was bargaining here, it was not to extract concessions from the label, so much as it was an opportunity to make – very strongly – the point that I, as manager, could not remain complacent within the norms of sacrificial labour. I needed to be working hard for him financially.

Opportunities for making money for Nabay remained challenging to find. Before parting ways with the project, Glasspiegel secured a publishing deal for Nabay, but it yielded little in the way of royalties. We could tour the states, but without legal status for Nabay, we could not leave the states to tour internationally. Late in autumn 2011, we had found our first booking agent, which in turn led to a second agent who had connections with the world music scenes. So while touring markets for Nabay's music were limited, small profits were now at least accessible. The label and the agent had become gateways to a network of media connections and bookings. After something of a fiasco in a first effort to travel to Austin's South By Southwest Festival in 2011, we had returned on firmer footing in 2012.

Ephemeral life

Janka Nabay: a Sierra Leonean émigré routed into the promotional pathways of the indie music industry. On the face of it, this is a cosmopolitan situation, a place of international collaboration, of shared ethical and aesthetic values. Consider two intertwined aesthetic questions: How does a composition come into existence when no one common idiom or musical vocabulary is in play, and particularly vast cultural differences are at stake? And when the ephemerality and fragility of real time is key to a songwriting process, how are the circumstances of any actual productivity replicable?

I often found myself astonished that, despite formidable cultural barriers and inequalities, our collaborations consistently required grasping at what philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes as ‘points of entry’. For Appiah:

Appiah's pragmatic theory is in some ways consonant with the ethical metaphysics proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas, who described an encounter with the infinity of the other that ruptures our capacity for self-recognition, forcing a sense of disorientation, a kind of philosophical substitution of oneself.Footnote ³³ But the theory of cosmopolitanism, of course, testifies to the fact that communication carries on. To continue with communication entails that one maintain an ethics, improvise moments of finding what ‘we do not yet share’, and then try to find ways to share them, even as unbridgeable gaps and difficulties interpose themselves.

It is here that creative labour came to life. Around 2:09 p.m. EST, Nabay groans in resignation, ‘Oh God’. And sings: ‘Ah Nabay, oh may-ay’. Over the next minute and a half, an unexpected fragment of music took shape, and a group of people remained committed to the inconsistency of a certain musical experience for about four and a half minutes. I use the passive voice because this story is not one where agency cannot be easily ascribed to individual people or their technologies; rather, the material networks of causality are linked infinitesimally, to the point where it was not possible to say why one thing happened and not another. Nabay is a composer, singer, and a bandleader of sorts, but he plays keyboard only very minimally, has little in the way of skills with recording equipment, and little ability on guitar or percussion; as a result, he cannot physically control the totality of a recorded composition, nor in many cases does he really desire to. Instead he makes use of a networked constellation of social actors linked and distanced by the capacity to listen.

For what are likely to have been accidental reasons, at this moment, at 2:09 p.m. I pressed record in Voice Memos. I cannot be sure just what was happening beforehand, but without being able to remember clearly, I am convinced something caught my attention. The soundscape that is about to unfold is one that went nearly unrecorded, unwritten, unobserved. Again, after ‘Oh, God’, one can hear how I repositioned the iphone just before Nabay sings. It is a hushed and delicately sung Temne prayer infused with bits of Arabic, a humble address to God. And according to Nabay's syncretic mix of Islam, Christianity, and traditional African theology, God – before any of us collaborators in the van – effectively determines the outcome of all things in advance. Sound Example 4 provides the basic melody of the prayer: a few pentatonic phrases that sink mournfully downward.

Sound Example 4

These prayers were not rare; in fact, the intensity and pervasiveness of Nabay's religious belief was a palpable force on tour. In these moments, it often seemed as if Nabay's interior world was in many ways inaccessible to our Western mindsets. The determination of beings by the will of God leads (in Nabay's explanation) to an overwhelming sense of fear when confronted with what Westerners took as sublime natural beauty. The geological and climatological wonders of the American west put him under a spell of negativity. The serenity and rocky cliffs of Grand Junction, Colorado, the redwoods north of Eureka, California, or Big Sur's immense panoramas that overlooked the Pacific – for Nabay, all three were disquieting. Such natural ‘beauty’ led to divergent cognitions – for us what was a privileged experience of the limits of human reason was for him a despairing abyss.Footnote ³⁴ Often Nabay nervously smoked a cigarette and stayed in the van as we ventured out. Elsewhere, prayer, an address to the infinite, was the only way out. In confronting the ineffability of aesthetic judgement, our conflicting a prioris never felt so stark.

Again, the situation: the Deep South, the interstate. In Sound Example 5 you will hear, most loudly, my own voice passing the time in the driver's seat with my band mate Boshra AlSaadi, as I am very loosely rambling to her about a course on sound that I am teaching that upcoming spring (my ‘Yeah, a little bit’). My phone lay somewhere on the centre console between me and AlSaadi, picking up the two of us who are closer; but in the background, if one listens closely, one will first hear Nabay adding phrases to the original prayer, the first of which involves the English phrase ‘game over’. As Nabay's prayer comes to a close, one can hear a conversation take place between Nabay and Shaw about a song that has not quite taken shape.

Sound Example 5

At 2:09 p.m. EST, Nabay's prayer was a trace of a song about remembering the dead, addressed to no one in particular. At 2:10 p.m., you can hear Nabay offer the translation and explanation of the Temne prayer to Shaw: ‘You know what I mean?’ [Shaw: ‘No’.] ‘Ah Nabay Oh May-ay – That's Oh God! Help me! Prophet Mohammed Help me!’ During Nabay's explanation, Shaw had been tinkering with a guitar line in the van in the minutes prior. At 2:11 p.m., he responds to Nabay's last ‘Game over’! with an injunction: ‘Start singing that’ (Sound Example 6).

Sound Example 6

In the next thirty seconds, Nabay (and the rest of us) listen to Shaw's guitar line. We join in with some simple percussion (mostly hand claps, hitting objects around us). Finally, after about 25 seconds, Nabay ventures a short, highly elastic, vocal line punctuated by the aforementioned exclamation – ‘Game over!’ (Sound Example 7).

Sound Example 7

After getting some sense of what Nabay was singing, Shaw's guitar comes to life, and the song begins to take on a minimal consistency – a refrain, a loop. After a few passes, our drummer adds handclaps in a clave pattern. AlSaadi and myself sketch contrapuntal melodies with our voices. With the beat and the guitar line suddenly skipping along, Nabay fuses his new ‘game over’ melody with the opening Temne prayer, which he sings in alternating phrases. The identity of the song morphs, almost imperceptibly, from a solemn Temne prayer into a dark image from modernity, and back again. The exclamation ‘game over’ – one of Nabay's signature phrases – was an artefact of 1980s and 1990s video game culture. It was his favourite gesture of negativity: the song says ‘no’ you have nothing. It was also, however, a playful affirmation, mixed with a prayer to the infinite. Over five minutes, a song grew from nearly nothing into a strange mash-up of spiritual property and despair over the modern condition; a private enclosure of prayer became a rough consensus in sound (Sound Example 8).

Sound Example 8

Minutes after the onset of Nabay's ephemeral prayer, at 2:14 p.m., Nabay makes a judgement call; he likes what is happening, and as you just heard, asks if we are recording the fragile, but still individuated, groove. Year by year, portable recorders get cheaper, better, and easier to use. Creativity conditioned by the ease of a digital recorder captures collective musical sketchbooks that were, until recently, typically subject to the decay of time. Signalling to the band that he would like this to be preserved for future rehearsal and workshopping, this loop gets its first sense of closure, a fragile digital identity torn from the fabric of the real, just a set of interlocking patterns and a loose but charming sonic mood.

Nabay as philosopher

Playing back the field recording inevitably opens this moment to reflection and interpretation. Those inclined to the field of phenomenology might describe the above as an episode of co-presence.Footnote ³⁵ The recording has a fragile sense of metaphysical resonance, a concrete duration in which Appiah's ‘points of entry’ were extended into socially engaged rhythms and intervals. But, any sense of being there together was far from a simple instance of social harmony; it was exceedingly complicated. What boundaries and economies remained behind, after collective participation had taken shape and drawn together a consistent groove from the threads of ephemeral life? The rhythms and intervals on the recording were not synchronicities or communions; they were frictions, mobile and ephemeral sequences of common negotiation. In this way, the fragile groove is particularly unstable as an object, haunted by a mournful prayer, caught in a strange place with a complex multiplicity of intentions congealed within. Its ineffability – or emptiness of signification – appears to shimmer unstably between the fragile harmony of a group figuring something out and the opacity, inconsistency, and emptiness of not connecting or agreeing about its metaphysical significance. It is still a prayer that we do not feel when Nabay sings, yet its grooves enjoin us to synchronize with a precise sense of timing.

Little about the subsequent compositional process mirrored the apparently miraculous feel of the ephemeral moment in the van. Early rehearsals began with Leland, the drummer, transcribing and playing a rough equivalent of the groove on the recording. From there, Nabay would act as composer, singing lines to us that the band would then transpose to our instruments. He began with the bass and the backup vocals, followed by the guitar and the organ; precisely the same build up that he used in the studio in Sierra Leone. From here, the band would alter and develop individual lines and gradually figure out how the pieces might work together. A clip from a session gives some sense of this process (Sound Example 9).Footnote ³⁶ This rehearsal took place late in 2012. We are jamming in a groove, and Nabay dictates to me where to play a keyboard line that he had crafted on the fly and sung in my ear just an hour earlier.

Sound Example 9

Nabay was perennially insightful about the compositional process; he and I both enjoyed discussing the philosophical significance of his own music. Months earlier, during the sessions for En Yay Sah, Nabay brought up the astonishing speed and frustrating ephemerality of creative inspiration. At one point, Nabay, Daniel Schlett (our producer), and I had taken a break from mixing ‘Tay-Su-Tan-Tan’ – the song playing quietly in the background of this recording (Sound Example 10).

Sound Example 10

Here, Nabay vividly describes a jam where everybody is trying to ‘fill’ the music with a good part, and not necessarily finding creative fluidity. Suddenly, he is hit by inspiration ‘in seconds’ and rushes over to me. At this point, Nabay said ‘way-bay-bay, way-bee-bee’ to describe the whole impact of the impulse through a series of mediators – his brain, out through his mouth, into my ears, out into my hands, mid-jam. It has a metaphysical feel to it: the ineffability of a creative process as it registers physiologically, philosophically, and socially. Schlett calls it a ‘spark’. Nabay says ‘it snaps’.

This is an ambiguous statement, and very surprising – ‘You don't have to avoid it’. Why would one avoid the ‘snap’ of creative inspiration? For Nabay, this is significant: the feeling of creative inspiration can be somewhat intimidating, even dangerous. It is not a normal habit to accept a weird and unexpected creative idea. And as hard as it is to let in, it is equally hard to adequately externalize it – to capture it in musical form. In this regard, Nabay's aforementioned lack of skill on instruments was a perennial problem. He had to rely upon the skills and the trust of other people, as carriers of his own creativity and his own indigenous musical property.

Nabay settles on the Casio as the proper instrument, and mediator of bubu music's creative flux. It provides a line of continuity across various media – between bubu myth, his brain, his voice, my body, an instrument, and the world of his potential listeners. The right instruments – Casios, a Korg Electribe drum machine – as well as certain precise syncopations and polyrhythms – became bubu signatures in the collaborative process, and ensured that musical ideas – motifs, or other melodies and rhythms sung to us in rehearsal – would retain a measure of ‘bubu’ authenticity as they were adopted and transfigured into live versions. They were trusted objects – ontological guiderails for an ephemeral art form.

It took almost three years for this song to gradually take shape. Eventually titled ‘Game Ova’, it came together with the help of minimal personnel: largely our engineer, AlSaadi, and myself. And it was ironically written almost entirely from memory in the studio, without close reference to any rehearsal recordings. Keyboard and bass parts were added in the studio on weekends when AlSaadi and I would convene with Nabay in New York. In a mixing session September 2015 in Bushwick, Nabay, AlSaadi, and I took a moment to reflect on the song's meaning. Unprompted by me, he referred to ‘Game Ova’ as a ‘mixed-up, boxed-up song.’ Puzzled by the expression, I asked him what he meant (Sound Example 11).

Sound Example 11

For Nabay it is significant that the sound of ‘Game Ova’ could contain something that was both a lament, a sorrow, and a call to power, and the conglomeration of the two – uniquely melded together in a single song – was unique to the ontology of music. The song could – somewhat magically – contain both tendencies.

I could never fully assume Nabay and I were talking about the same thing; this is one reason I learned so much from him. Meanings in his use of the term ‘game over’ were multilayered. One register of meaning is an ordinary, self-evident one that refers to a video game. At another level, it is effectively Nabay's signature, an identifier. Another register of meaning is performative – an exclamation, a rhythmic punctuation, that stops things (or at least marks them off) as if we were on the video game level and had run out of lives in a specific situation or conversation. We might wonder – does this third register have a positive or negative value? Is ‘game over’ a gesture of nihilism or a more ambiguous form of affirmation? Within the most economical language lie complex philosophical questions, built up in layers of irony and word play that are often unspoken or half-conscious. The negativity and ambiguity of the term and its governing power over Nabay's work can feel like a profound moment of oral philosophy. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that placing this kind of emphasis on the philosophical richness of Nabay's language would have provoked from him at best an ambivalent response. Nabay was all too aware that prioritizing the philosophy and art of bubu music would mean succumbing to assumptions of social privilege that would leave him worse off than his collaborators.

For two years, Nabay knew about the recording of the ‘Game Ova’ jam in the van, but did not have a way to play it back (he would not get a smart phone for another year or so). So for our early work on the song, we programmed a ‘Game Ova’ beat into a Korg Electribe drum machine. A year later, when I had been planning to move to Minnesota, I was looking for ways to help Nabay continue working on the song. We bought him a second Electribe, and I put the data for the ‘Game Ova’ beat on to an SD card. But, in the coming months, this electronic beat was lost. So while Nabay's first American bubu gang was on hiatus and living in separate places in 2013, he rebuilt a new ‘Game Ova’ Electribe beat from memory in order to teach the song to a new band he had assembled in DC, where was living with his second American wife. Disappearing with the song meant disappearing with the memory of the ‘skeleton system’ and rebuilding it on another instrument.

In debates about the new organology, music scholars frequently discuss the concept of distributed cognition, where musical thinking is deposited in complex webs of technological devices, instruments, and affordances.Footnote ⁴¹ For many, instruments themselves should be thought of as carrying agency.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, the ontologies of bubu music – what counts as a place where the music is inscribed – were linked to a series of oddball and ephemeral technologies, which would in turn seem to acquire almost metaphysical power.Footnote ⁴³ The Casio we used for overdubs in the studio had become an approved carrier of bubu music. And when writing ‘Game Ova’, Nabay held on to a drum machine I had purchased because the bubu beats were programmed on an SD card contained by the machine. In another instance, speaking hypothetically, Nabay once proposed to use band funds to keep a shiny and new group of instruments available for the exclusive use of bubu music. In curious and sometimes unpredictable ways, various networks of machines and people variously supported and threatened the transmission of his cultural property.Footnote ⁴⁴ One might speculate that these objects were more reliable keepers of bubu music than his living collaborators. Whatever Nabay's intentions, it was palpable to all that the fluid boundaries of musical material unfolded through a multitude of devices and resisted harmonious conclusions.

Dehumanized in exile

Alongside the complex drama of the creative process, many of Nabay's struggles were legal and thus political. Did he count as a human being? Where and how? Who was he, as a Sierra Leonean living in exile? As a ‘resident alien’ in the states, he was excluded from the democratic process of political representation. Political theorists have mulled over the injustices of Nabay's position. Seyla Benhabib critiques John Rawls's conception of a democratic society as based in the ideal of a ‘complete and closed social system’.Footnote ⁴⁵ By contrast, her theory contends: ‘the unity of the demos ought to be understood not as if it were a harmonious given, but rather as a process of self-constitutions, through more or less conscious struggles of inclusion and exclusion’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Benhabib advocates for generous hospitality towards refugees and migrants. She bases her argument on Kant's conception of ‘universal hospitality’ as well as the principles of ‘cosmopolitan federalism’ such that our increasingly internationalized world might develop a conception of citizenship that is disaggregated from individually sovereign nation-states.

The inclusive hospitality of this kind of cosmopolitanism hardly reflected what Nabay experienced in the United States. When I met him in 2010, he was on his second American marriage. In 2011, he had applied for a second green card based in this marriage. The active application meant that Nabay could not leave the United States, which severely limited his ability to support himself artistically and financially. Following the Luaka Bop debut in 2012, the band was fielding interest from European booking agents, promoters, and festivals, but was advised by Nabay's immigration attorney that the risks of being denied re-entry at the border were too great. So we toured in the United States, and hoped for good news from USCIS.

In a legally precarious situation, Nabay was living in constant and dehumanizing fear of deportation and illegitimacy. What else could we do to ensure he would not be deported? At one juncture, we thought it might help to assemble the dozens of high-profile press clippings we had accumulated following the release of En Yay Sah, in the hope that this documentation might have a sense for how we could build a more holistic case that Nabay deserved a path to citizenship. Yes – if he were still applying for an artist visa. But Nabay's attorney quickly reminded us that he was applying for a green card based in a marriage. To the letter of the law, the green card all hinged on the marriage; it had to look entirely legitimate on its own terms. It was an irony, and a perfect encapsulation of being dehumanized before the law. When he applied for the P-3 visa, Nabay's bubu music was a cultural practice that would give him a path forward to get to the United States and work for a few years. In poverty, after no opportunities emerged, his American marriage had become the sole criterion for his path towards citizenship.Footnote ⁴⁷

Finally, in November 2016, USCIS denied Nabay's green card. The denial was based on the fact that, while still in Sierra Leone in 2000, he reported that he was married when he applied for his P-3 visa. In the eyes of USCIS, without evidence of a divorce, Nabay's American marriage was considered invalid. To refile the green card application, Nabay would have to show that he was never legally married to his Sierra Leonean wife. And the legality of the first marriage was complicated; he had married the mother of his children in a religious ceremony under customary law. As another immigration attorney explained to me, without a legal certificate, we would have needed a lawyer to find some legal basis or authority showing that the law in Sierra Leone requires a certificate in compliance with statutory law for a marriage to be valid; this would allow him to claim that he never officially married in Sierra Leone.Footnote ⁴⁸ A final option was a retroactive divorce arranged by a lawyer in Sierra Leone.

Neither option was attractive by spring 2017. Both would have been expensive – thousands of dollars. Moreover, his American marriage had weakened by this point, and he was again basically homeless and dispirited, longing to go home. And by then, Build Music had been released to critical praise, and a profitable European tour had been already booked. In order to complete the European tour and still have Nabay return to the United States, we would have had to have time to re-file the green card application and apply for emergency advance parole. That too would have been very hard to get. USCIS does not give out emergency advanced parole for employment and the timing of musical tours; they typically only approve an application when an immediate family member is dying. And we were already knee deep in applications for Nabay's UK and Schengen visas for our European tour (another expensive headache that disenfranchises people from nations that lack reciprocity agreements). The calendar was too tight, the chances too slim, the amount of money invested in the tour too high, the marriage too fragile.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nabay resolved to return permanently to Sierra Leone at the end of August 2017.

Compare this to his band mates, who all had Western, first-world passports. Not only did we all have considerable privileges of citizenship, racial identity, education, social connections, health care, and proximity to wealth, we could freely travel and work anywhere in the United States and Europe. Legally and thus economically, Nabay had his hands tied as a human being; he was stuck fighting for scraps from an increasingly demonetized music industry. In his article, ‘Reflections on Exile’, Edward Said begins by stating, ‘Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.’ He continues, describing it as: ‘It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.’Footnote ⁵⁰ We may be compelled to puzzle over the horror of Nabay's resistant subjectivity – which was also endless subjugation, and a silent assumption that he would somehow die relatively early and in poverty. To us, it was obvious that the pain of his exile was intolerable. He never had the luxury of being ‘cool’ about not being paid or sacrificing himself for his art. Nabay was often homeless in the United States, drifting from couch to couch in New Jersey. And he was resolute that he had had enough.

Falling through legal cracks covers just one aspect of his struggles to life as a human subject. Structural racism, in a multitude of manifestations, was a powerful axis of subjugation. Nabay most often spoke about race through the prism of his Africanness. As a dark skinned African, Nabay encountered endless prejudice and discrimination in the United States. If he was not with his American band members, he could expect to be hassled by security and police, particularly in the South, or in predominantly white and affluent neighbourhoods (a topic of the song ‘Santa Monica’). Much of this racism he found to be expressed silently – at the level of body language, or in a habitus built around implicit hierarchies and racial segregation. In Krakow, Poland, Nabay powerfully described to me what racism felt like – it was a ‘resistance’ towards him. But it was not physical – it was in some ways implicit or unspoken, unfolding at the level of gestures (Sound Example 12):

Sound Example 12

He went on to express some ironies. Nabay loved Polish food and agreed that our performance at the OFF Festival outside Katowice was one of our wildest and most successful shows. But these positive experiences did not result in a feeling of cross-cultural solidarity. Quite the opposite, for Nabay, describing the workings of this silent racism quickly triggered an imaginary scene of physical violence. He pictures a man from Krakow picking a fight with him, and mob justice ensuing against him, an African, who is totally overwhelmed. With nothing to lose, in the face of such a racist threat of violence, Nabay proposes his own resistance. And at the same time, he implicates us, his Western collaborators, as supportive but ultimately oblivious bystanders. It was a vivid depiction of racism: behind non-violent body language lies latent threats of physical violence. Picturing this also put into relief the fragility of life in Sierra Leone (Sound Example 13):

Sound Example 13

In the states, Nabay faced a different crop of challenges living in working-class African-American neighbourhoods. He struggled to gain respect and feel included in various communities, and often expressed antagonism towards African-American men.Footnote ⁵³ In some conversations, Nabay responded to what he took as condescension towards him as a dark skinned, native African, by in turn belittling common forms of public assistance among the black working class, such as food stamps. One solution he developed involved a deliberate attempt to pass as a Jamaican by growing out his dreadlocks, smoking weed in public, and making explicit to his friends and neighbours his ‘Rasta’ vibe as well as his elite status as a musician. This helped him garner respect among African Americans.

As an artist in the circles of the largely white Brooklyn elite, Nabay's Africanness and blackness was prized and tokenized by institutions and organizations (record labels, booking agencies, media outlets, museums, cultural centres) keen to feature content that garnished them with an image of globalized diversity. Once Nabay's ‘Rasta’ dreadlocks were fully grown out in 2016, he could count on a bit more leeway from strangers in certain cosmopolitan contexts such as airport security. But his Western collaborators often had to step in to produce context. When Nabay was once harassed by a group of police officers at the Santa Monica pier, I pulled out my phone to show the officers a picture of Nabay's promotional photo for our upcoming performance at the Getty Center. It is a sobering reminder to any sense that to resist with one's art is to be empowered. To be tokenized for one's race entails the context of a prestigious cosmopolitan whiteness, a governing construction for the social world of World Music 2.0 in which Nabay's resistance circulated and spoke.

Bubu as commodity

Poverty, legal dehumanization, anxiety, racism, trauma from a civil war – and absolute electricity on stage. Charisma in person, avalanches of philosophizing, amazing spells of creativity and excitement. Counterpoint between these spheres was Nabay's life with the bubu gang. When one pans out to the economics of the record business underpinning World Music 2.0, the complexity of the whole project of bubu music grows further. No easy postmodern dance of hybrids or pastiches shepherded the locality of bubu music to mass commercial markets. Nor do the usual markers of twenty-first-century life – globalization, circulation, and the brutal meritocracies of the neoliberal gig economy – effectively frame the dialectical form of his artistry. It is what the many alienations of Nabay's border-crossing life forced him to think – a civil war in an impoverished country in the same world as a private rooftop party in Manhattan for the global elite. Economic and cultural capital remained in profound dissonance.

I often heard this polyphony in his music. Songs such as ‘Game Ova’ mirror, in encapsulated forms, the contradictions of an ephemeral, fragmented world – a permanent amalgam of prosperity and violence, happiness and sorrow, ecstasy and pain. En Yay Sah similarly abounds with uncanny ‘mixed up, boxed up’ disjunctions between lyrics and musical sound. ‘Kill Me With Bongo’ is a searing critique of his fellow Sierra Leonians on the east coast who were of no help to him between 2000 and 2009 as they pursued their own financial gain. Yet undergirding these critical words are cartoonish, funky, even celebratory, synthesizer lines. His lyrics foreground alienation at the same time that the music draws its listeners in with an infectious beat: ‘There is no family, no true friend’ followed directly by ‘shu-buh-doop, shu-buh-doop’. Another, ‘Rotin’, is a dance tune at a blistering tempo that conveys a ‘letter’ to Sierra Leonean President Koroma, and features verses that are critical of the way white people ‘take this music, and when they finish, they bring me down the mountain … What kind of hard times am I seeing? They are looking at me like they don't even know me’.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Nabay sings a narrative of racialized alienation in a Krio unintelligible to his American audiences, his band was trying to stay loose within in an extremely fast groove to keep everyone dancing. It was a powerful contradiction: my work as a band member was being critiqued in language I could not understand while trying to keep the party together.

Critiques of modernity were reflexive, and central to this work: Nabay was affirmative about his music's thematic emphasis on self-consciousness, but resolutely negative in his emphasis on the alienation and horror of exile. This was the foundation of his materialism. While the music could become magnetic to whoever could listen and participate in its flux, the songs expressed recurring tensions that made contradictions explicit, and in doing so, fractured any utopian projection of universality. (Recall, again, that Nabay translated lyrics in between songs in order to create disruptive juxtapositions between the intoxicating experience of dance music and the challenges and traumas of Sierra Leonean social life.) Such were the recurring lessons of bubu music – exile and disharmony, a resistance against losing one's value and specificity in the flows of global capital. Even after returning home, little harmony ensued. A recent article by a Sierra Leonean journalist describes hostility towards Nabay from his fellow Sierra Leoneans for having left home for the United States in the first place.Footnote ⁵⁵ (His close friends and family, by contrast, wanted Nabay in the United States. Given the very small economy of Sierra Leone, anyone abroad could be financial lifeline.Footnote ⁵⁶) But, in either case, to leave home was to lose part of what home was.

Of course, this was all ironic given that we were signed to what ostensibly was David Byrne's record label – a self-described ‘pop’ label that celebrated colourful, postmodern conceptions of universality and accessibility, and was willing to fabricate stories to provoke listeners.Footnote ⁵⁷ From a broad perspective of cultural politics, Luaka Bop could be seen as a master signifier in an array of white, Western frames of cultural capital that were both imposed and desired when it came to Nabay's music. Consider some key perspectives on marketing Nabay to Western audiences. Glasspiegel, who set in motion Nabay's narrative with the Western press, once described Nabay's music as anticipatory of recent electronic dance music, writing:

On another occasion, Glasspiegel described his struggles as aspiring to the traditional upward mobility and assimilation narrative of the so-called ‘American Dream’. Dean Bein of True Panther described Nabay as an ‘ethnomusicologist’. Bein's gesture was a strategic reversal – it bucks the stereotype of a white foreigner venturing into the Sierra Leonean provinces, and instead emphasizes Nabay's agency within the cultural economy of World Music 2.0. The band had our own Westernized frameworks. Being on stage in a dissenting, challenging, cool band – it, well, felt cool – and what Shaw affectionately called a ‘punk band’ in an interview on NPR. Leland, our drummer, described Nabay's music as ‘futuristic’. In the same piece, I talk about wanting to ‘be a band’ where we all collaborated with Nabay in learning bubu music.

And in this article, I riff on a term with Western origins in Ancient Greece – philosopher. Artist, ethnomusicologist, philosopher, cowboy, futurist, punk, hipster, a struggling carrier of the American dream. At different moments, I supported all the above thinking, knowing each designation and privileged context was linked to some kind of empowerment associated with cultural capital. On occasion Nabay encouraged these labels, variously referring to himself as a philosopher, cowboy, professor, historian, or scientist. In other instances, he would push us. When he really wanted to rile us up, he would describe himself as a republican. About this provocation he often seemed earnest – I knew he enjoyed seeing himself as empowered, as a resourceful immigrant, as self-made. Often polemical and dissenting, Nabay certainly sought self-respect in cosmopolitan terms and looked down on social welfare in the United States as tantamount to ‘retirement’. (Though, somewhat ironically, like many conservatives of limited means, he did accept charitable help – if reluctantly – and took advantage of his wife's Medicaid as well as her ability to pay rent.)

And beneath Shaw's word ‘punk’ or my desire to ‘be a band’ there was a terrific mess. As his collaborators, steering aesthetic decisions, or just loosely contributing to group chemistry, our desires and fantasies were inevitably in play. I could never really figure out how to play without just taking risks, trying things out and negotiating things in real time. This meant I found it impossible and undesirable to try to bracket off my lifelong cathexes tied to what would always appear irreducibly other in this project – attachments to the singularity of exotic Africanness or of Nabay's cosmopolitan approach to what Amiri Baraka once described as black cool.Footnote ⁵⁹ The fetishism that has remained foundational to the grammar of the cosmopolitan hipster since mid-nineteenth century – these fantasies were woven into the way I listened to Nabay, and affected our ideas about playing shows and putting out records.Footnote ⁶⁰ The cosmopolitan self-consciousness of a band – that mark of a whiteness both visible and invisible – saturated the project.

Western frameworks dominated by whiteness were in many ways a participatory analogue to what Novak described as the ‘experimental listening’ cultivated by labels such as Sublime Frequencies that never really connected with the musicians at the other end of the dial. At some level, with Nabay, we became friends, joked, played together, and gradually built a sense of trust, albeit fragile. As the aforementioned conversation in the studio demonstrates, there were many times when he was relatively accepting of the dynamics of collaboration. But we were not on the same page by any means, and Nabay often dissented and found ways to set himself apart from us. Some of this he would say to me directly; often I would hear grumbling second hand. As the only woman in the band, AlSaadi heard a disproportionate amount. In her words: ‘He sees his role [as bandleader] as having to undo a lot of the damage done … when someone chooses to put their stamp on it [the music], or tries to rework it, there's ultimately a dilution of his voice which he responds violently to. So that fantasy of collaborating – I don't think he's into it.’Footnote ⁶¹ The fantasy of it all working together was never really his; underlying this was too much anxiety. His powerlessness to control his trajectory in life was frustrating to him. We helped him strategize and manage much of his career, which he resented. These conflicts and contradictions were routine for the bubu gang; a moment of fusion or loose co-presence on stage, or in the studio, could become a moment of social friction and negation at another. We aimed for ethical outcomes – one can always be more or less responsible with expectations, desires, and budgets. But Nabay's underlying financial and creative dependency was inescapable; it was a source of persisting resentment and difficulty.

Amidst the turmoil and cultural dissonance, whiteness remained helpful, principally because social privilege paired to a contained, commoditized blackness can be a killer formula for the culture industry. As a Pitchfork-approved black African with a Brooklyn band, signed to Luaka Bop, Nabay could tap into the same corporate patronage model that supports the art world and the elite institutions of the performing arts. In the months following the band's release on Luaka Bop, Nabay played at the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Center, the Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and even private parties at a Mercedes-Benz office in Soho and another in upstate New York for George Soros's son, Robert Soros and his Wall Street friends (easily one of the most surreal performances of my life).Footnote ⁶² There was still plenty of racism in these institutions, but his largely white band are what made him ‘safe’ for those in elite cultural circles.

Working in high-culture institutions in a place slightly apart from the mainstream culture industry would seem to bolster Nabay's credentials as an artist. But, as I mention at the outset of this article, his material needs never squared with a Western conception of artistry. Though Nabay always wanted to be paid, he was deeply ambivalent about patronage. As a commercial artist, he aspired to be a chart-topper – ‘no. 1’. In retrospect, I have wondered if I could have done more to support Nabay's interest in openly commercial genres like reggae. But I am often reminded that selling out to win Nabay profits is not something that one can just do. And here is where our imperative to frame bubu music as art could be at odds with Nabay's values. Wary of compromises that would hurt the uniqueness of bubu – a uniqueness that did draw his audiences (and many critics) to his work – we discouraged him from singing reggae, fearing that it would be challenging for Nabay to stand out in such vast marketplace of established popular genres of the Black Atlantic.Footnote ⁶³

To the public, we did what we could to keep the focus on Nabay's unique compositional prowess, his attendant story of exile, and the musical evangelism of ‘Graceland in reverse’. And in published form, white cultural elites controlled the narratives. They sought out a compelling narrative that would grab attention for just enough time to get them to hear the music, but had no incentive to investigate deeper causes. Thus, telling the story for them – making sure they have it straight – was imperative. Aware of the many causal pathways that spread backwards and forwards, in interviews, Nabay himself adeptly sculpted aspects of his narrative. But doing it quickly and effectively in written press releases was a challenge. In the months before the release of En Yay Sah, no fewer than seven hands took turns editing the bio. The album's press release came from a hired writer, and was then heavily rewritten by the band. When it came to Build Music, Luaka Bop did the same for the initial draft. AlSaadi and I substantially rewrote it, and I included some of the arguments presented here, with some consultation from Michael Azeraad. We tried to emphasize the twisting, endless, complexity and puzzle of Nabay's music. At least on a couple significant occasions, writers took us up.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Rolling Stone, Will Hermes took Nabay's dissent and wove it into a broader narrative about cross-cultural music in an era of xenophobia.Footnote ⁶⁵

Thanks to Nabay's own branding technique, the broad architecture of his story was easily identifiable. It was based in the simplicity of a proper name: bubu. His branding echoed what anthropologists Jean and John Camaroff have described as the commodification of ethnicity at the hands of twenty-first-century capitalism. The branding of ‘bubu’ had indeed become intimately intertwined with its ontology. In their words:

Ethically, the Camaroffs are by turns critical and ambivalent about such a process. But an academically familiar vision of anti-capitalism had little to offer Nabay's thinking. Nabay could be critical of capitalism and injustice, but his expression of it came to life as a materialist demand based in reflexive needs. When you are that peripheral and impoverished you need to be paid. And there was the dialectic in his critique. It was directed at us, and founded in his awareness that his collaborators, in helping him, were carriers of social and economic privileges structurally denied to him. In this context, our claims to principled ‘artistry’ could easily be read as a threat. At the same time, Nabay remained fundamentally ambivalent about the commodification of bubu, particularly with respect to Luaka Bop. His recorded masters – his congealed labour power as well as his cultural and intellectual property – had to be sold to a record label in exchange for promotion, distribution, and a share of the profits. Branding, connections, financial investment, and the advocacy of Luaka Bop – including association with the white star-power of David Byrne – helped Nabay's music to acquire value amidst the data-saturated sensorium of the twenty-first century.

As financial success eluded him, the feelings about the agreement turned sour. The apparent impossibility of commercial success soured his moods and snowballed into powerfully negative affects. Polemically, Nabay would invert Western fantasies of bubu music as art and profess that he did not actually care about music at all – he cared only about profit. To my ears, his absolutist statements about profit were effectively a way of critiquing his band's tendency to betray their social privileges by thinking of artistry as a sacrificial endeavour. After all, we knew his position was wilfully contradictory: Nabay in fact exemplified artistry in all sorts of ways, not least by this irrepressible compulsion to keep writing – and explaining – a genre of music that was unfamiliar to his audiences. This position of Nabay's has some affinities with what Gavin Steingo has heard in South African kwaito – an ‘alternative sensory reality’ or a ‘disconnection and detachment from function’ that lacks a specific social purpose.Footnote ⁶⁷ Though few academic aestheticians would recognize it, there was a certain pleasure in musical form expressed by the glittering refrain of Nabay's single ‘Build Music’ as he sang, somewhat astonished by his own skill with polyphony: ‘What a pattern, yeah!’

But such affirmations were incessantly crosscut with Nabay's dissenting imperatives of material struggle. As someone who was never short on words, he used language to maintain both aesthetic invention and material critique in perpetual tension: he persevered creatively while repeatedly negating our privileged fantasy of his life as an artist with reminders of his destitution. By outwardly refusing the terms of ‘art’, Nabay's materialism tied Western aesthetics to the luxuries and freedoms of social class, good health, financial security, and surplus energy – privileges that gave artists the psychological bandwidth to resist, dissent, or challenge an audience. If to privileged Westerners it is an ethical choice to be a ‘starving artist’ ennobled by an art without purpose, to a dehumanized immigrant like Nabay the unprofitable autonomy of art was enforced on him by the efficacy of cultural capital. And thus, whatever traces of hope, creativity, or ecstasy his music contained, he consistently drew back to racism, exile and non-citizenship, trauma and violence, physical and emotional pain. To paraphrase Fred Moten, Nabay's glittering and hypnotic bubu patterns were the backbone of a terrible, even violent, celebration.Footnote ⁶⁸

This was a philosophical lesson Nabay taught me, and it is one that has haunted me since. For Nabay to say plainly – as he did on several occasions – ‘I don't care about music. I only care about money!’ was to deliberately stop us in our tracks. But, again: it was not a statement to be taken at face value, as if he were simply looking to sell out. Minutes spent with Nabay made it abundantly clear that he was hardly consumed by the instrumentality of the profit-motive; he shared with his band the basic compulsion to create, to philosophize about it, to challenge his audiences to mull over instances of violence they would rather ignore. His meaning was otherwise: for Nabay to say ‘I don't care about music’ was to dissent from a privileged frame of aesthetic sacrifice, to reject Western conceptions of autonomy that perpetually deferred material support.

Put another way: unlike scholars and artists from intellectual spheres that have been formally overdeveloped or otherwise couched in social privilege, Nabay had no need to recover materiality after insulating himself in abstract worlds of aesthetic reflection. Being homeless, destitute, and without legal rights were his basic conditions; to him materiality was an intolerable struggle. It was thus unavoidable that critiques of capitalism, racism, social alienation, and material struggle would appear in his work alongside all the philosophical reflections on creativity, mediation, and singularity that we have come to expect from academic aestheticians. And yet, notwithstanding the critical power of his work, Nabay would not consent to call his music art. With an almost wicked irony, bubu music was framed as functionless, autonomous, and sacrificial by economic necessity – at least according to the cultural logic of World Music 2.0.

Well-versed in the hustle demanded by neoliberal precarity, in these ways Nabay understood far better than we did the alienating forces of capitalism at registers that were both local and global. In Bernhard Sievers's 1992 study of music in Sierra Leone, the thesis focuses on a narrative of loss as forces of cosmopolitan internationalism overtake the Sierra Leonean musical landscape.Footnote ⁶⁹ And indeed, as a result of the forces of global capitalism, in his recollections, Nabay would confirm a general sense of Identitätsverlust had overtaken Sierra Leone by the 1990s. From Nabay's point of view, traditional Sierra Leonean culture was an ephemeral practice, prematurely effaced by the homogenizing imprint of imported styles. But, in he context of debates about world music, he was not a revivalist. More so, he was an anxious, charismatic, and resourceful futurist at tension with himself, and in tension with his collaborators. He sought out cosmopolitan spheres, pushing his indigenous traditions to new heights of global recognition.Footnote ⁷⁰ His music was infused with critique, and anxieties over the question of authenticity. These glittering, ecstatic bubu patterns had extremely porous significance to audiences, meanings that were not all that intelligible, or profitable. What content they did have was built upon a sound that joined the ambiguous forms of ecstasy to a resistant practice of exiled thought.