211: New Fuji Garbage, by Barrister & Africa’s International Music Ambassadors

Barrister & Africa’s International Music Ambassadors (Nigeria)
New Fuji Garbage (1991)
2 tracks, 57 minutes
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Now there’s a title that grabs the attention. If you had no other information to go off, what would you expect from an album called New Fuji Garbage? Well, it’s not Japanese, I can tell you that much.

What it is is the invention of that regal-looking fella on the front of the cover, here known as Barrister but whose full (and possibly exaggerated) title was Chief Dr Alhaji Sikiru Ololade Ayinde Balogun. The best way for me to describe fuji is not to bother, it will only sound lame in comparison to listening to the music itself, so you may as well just go and do that. The second best way for me to describe it is layers-on-layers of drums and percussion, each playing their own infectious rhythms over, on top of and in between all the others, with occasional snippets of ultra-catchy vocals, synth or pedal steel guitar. Barrister conjured this music from all sorts of different Nigerian styles from the guitar-based pop of jùjú (made most famous by King Sunny Adé) to Islamic percussion music played by Yoruba teenagers at Ramadan, and from them all distilled a sound that is at once stripped back to its bare essentials as well as being incredibly complex.

On this hour-long album, there’s only two tracks, and the title of the first ‘Refined Fuji Garbage’ perhaps gives you the clue that this is generous: it’s refined, because in its usual form, there’s no way that you could contain a fuji groove to just 30 minutes – these things could go on for hours on just one handful of riffs and rhythms. It all stretches out and out and out for as long as you could want, until you’re more sweat than person and your legs have danced into another dimension.

So that’s fuji. Why is it garbage? Who knows. Barrister was certainly enamoured with the phrase (this is his fourth album to be dedicated as such) and it does have a proper punk ring to it, which I really appreciate. But surely it’s sarcastic. This ain’t no rubbish – everything is perfectly in place and it’s all fresh as hell. But when that first track kicks off and he’s telling you “rise up to dance to my new fuji garbage, rise up to dance to my new fuji garbage,” you really better listen to him. You can believe that I’m gonna be rising up to dance to his new fuji garbage.