Breakout: Profiles in African Rhythm

by Gary Stewart

Based on exclusive interviews, Breakout tells the often riveting personal stories of fourteen popular musicians—some well known, others not—from Zaire, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The first book on African pop music to look closely at the lives of the musicians themselves, Breakout deals with four African musical soukous, highlife, afro-beat, and palm wine.

Amid Africa's deepening economic and political crises of the last two decades, African musicians who developed these genres faced the need to cross cultural boundaries, or "break out," and achieve a hit in the international marketplace. Challenging conventional assumptions, Gary Stewart demonstrates for the first time the true dimensions of this struggle to create music that will qualify as both an authentic cultural expression and an export commodity. From accounts of the outrageous Fela, who snipes at African leaders and recounts his days with Isis in ancient Egypt, to S. E. Rogie, who lurches from the pinnacle of stardom in West Africa to delivering pizzas in California, to Olatunji, who finds new life with the Grateful Dead, these are the stories of Africans straddling traditional life and an encroaching modernity—and also the stories of third world musicians surmounting political and economic chaos at home and carrying their music to a world dominated by Western cultural and economic power.

Genres: Music, Africa

168 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1992

About the author

Gary L. Stewart (1937-2018) was born in Salt Lake City and raised as a Mormon. He held a doctorate in theater criticism from the University of Iowa and spent 36 years in academia. He taught theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMASS), and then at Indiana State University (ISU). He wrote two “Gabriel Utley” crime novels, several plays and Avenging Angel, an unpublished western that became a feature film starring Tom Berenger, Charlton Heston, and James Coburn.

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book on African pop music stars fails to shine

Ever since the early 1960s, when I had a Ghanaian roommate and attended some enormous Nigerian student parties in which the old wooden buildings fairly shook to the beat of highlife records, I have loved African pop music. Whether West African highlife, the Congolese music later known as soukous, Nigerian juju music with "King" Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey, the township jive and mbaqanga of South Africa, or the exciting rhythms and griot style singing of Senegal and Mali, I've been listening all these years. Listening. Not reading. Come to think of it, I really did not know much about the people who made all this music.

I picked up BREAKOUT as an antidote to my lack of knowledge, hoping to learn more about the whole African music scene as well. Gary Stewart obviously likes African pop music and has a wide familiarity with all the records, tapes, and styles that exist, at least in his chosen areas----Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, and Tanzania. His 1992 book is a collection of 14 sketches of individual musicians, compiled by interview or general media sources. Some interviews, for example, those with Olatunji and Fela, are far more interesting and colorful than others which remain very bland and general. Several patterns emerge--the difficulty of getting started in countries where average income is low and instruments are expensive; the difficulty of breaking into the Euro-American markets and music scene. The author's own comments on African pop music or the musicians are missing, as is an organized, overall picture of pop music in West and Central Africa. (The above-mentioned trials and tribulations of being a pop musician in Africa do emerge from the text, albeit in haphazard fashion.)

I suppose we must wait for Stewart's second book or turn somewhere else. BREAKOUT remains impenetrable for the average reader who does not already know quite a bit about African music. Stewart snows you under with a huge deluge of names---bands, musicians, studio owners, impresarios, etc.-as well as song and album titles, so much so that at times, the book resembles a catalogue. I discovered that I had a treasure here---when I go shopping for African CDs or tapes, or seek tracks to listen to on YouTube, I can use BREAKOUT as a guide. In this way, I would say the book is extremely useful, but to sit down and read from cover to cover, well, maybe 3 stars are enough.

[Anne Lutomia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gary Steward provides about four pages of interviews with 14 musicians from all over Africa such as Kanda Bongo Man, Franco, Fela Kuti, Nana Ambpadu to name a few. In so doing he provides a quick background to African genres of music such as Soukous, highlife, Afrobeat, and palmwine music and the efforts of these musicians to produce African music on an international platform. The book was written in the 90s so some of his claim are outdated but it can be a nice introduction to African popular music.

[Anders · Rating 5 out of 5]

great introduction to the dynamics of the music scene in Africa in the 2nd half of the 20th century, with a nice discography and bibliography as well!