I am not a fan for some unexplainable reasons, but it’s undeniable that he’s been for a long time the mainstay of Fuji music. Longer than SAB and of course longer than Kébé- the two Godfathers of the genre! For any Nigerian artiste hoping to have a lasting musical career, he is one of the very few to diligently look up to.
His critics in the early days dismissed his talent, and very few in and out of the industry gave him the chance to make it beyond one album. Maybe two, or at the very most, three and a half if such opinion happened from a kind, generous critic! Then he dropped the Talazo Series. Then he started those live shows- the ones with the keyboard synthesizer. Then he started the overseas trips which I think was one of his best formulas for the huge success that later followed. American Tips, Consolidation and many records after, he developed a great panache that converted a generation of kids, who hitherto looked down on Fuji music as the entertaining vibe of the layabouts, street urchins and those other miserable souls already damned to perdition by the Nigerian bourgeois society and made it supercool! From Lagos, to NYC to Chicago, Belgium, Rome, Spain and those other sexy metropolises outside of our shores, he made Fuji ‘Miles’ kinda cool. Miles Davis, that is. So cool that Pop and other western music, which at the time was the Nigerian epitome of cool became…secondarily cool! Relegated to the lower league!
His talent per se is not in his sense of composition. Neither is he an extraordinary nightingale too! For amongst those in his rank when he started, I can list singers, composers and lyricists that ranged far higher. But Anifowose had the weirdest, supernatural instinct; almost an uncanny ability to feel or see far ahead, through the thickest fog. A restless bandleader who knows how to constantly re-create, reinvent and re-brand himself. In every decade since the last three, he’s been everything far apart from when and how he started. And he started from below the bottom rung! His name, his sound, his look, his women and his personality- entirely nothing within the borders of his original essence, escaped some constant form of cosmetic reevaluation and reinvention! He is indeed a fruitful chameleon! A classic musical shapeshifter!
In the 90s in the gradual waning days of contemporary Fuji, Wasiu held down the fort and kept the incursion of the dynamic Sir Shina Peters and his near total musical dominance with his Afro-Juju gimmick considerably at bay. He got even the Igbos interested in Fuji when Morris Ibekwe, John Nebolisa, Toscanini, Fred Ajudua and Goddy Anabor stumbled upon his music and ultimately became part of his posse.
Wasiu is a crazy fellow in person and musically. If you don’t know that by now, I bet you don’t know the man. He’s funkified Fuji. He’s Jujufied Fuji. He’s even Rappified Fuji. He has done well unifying the traditional genres into just one highly acclaimed, amplified body. He has all the notable sections now prominent in his orchestra- strings, horns, percussion, rhythm and the nines. Something entirely unthinkable in the year SAB released Fuji Reggae or when Kollington recorded Bata Fuji. Omogbolahan is only 60. A relatively spring chicken with many years still ahead. Only God knows what that crazy fellow is up to next in the coming years?