Another Man’s Thing. Joe King Cologbo and His Black Sound. 1973. Afrodisia.

 The pace at which Another Man’s Thing opens is immediate, unrelenting. Like a herald it announces, almost from the very start, the arrival of an authority not only of the groove but of conscience, too. The densely compressed polyrhythms over which Joe King Cologbo shouts each verse play so fast that the guitarist’s virtuosity quickly becomes an auxiliary voice, the galvanizing contemporary model of communicative freedom. The song is sublime; it easily pushes itself and the listener beyond excitement into a state of urgency, the possessed voice of controlled panic. Imagine instead of lower Manhattan Talking Heads were describing a literal life during wartime somewhere out in west Africa. Cologbo was living and working in Ghana, apart from his family, when the Nigerian civil war broke out in 1967. When he returned home following the Biafran surrender, and after having been reunited with his family in Ghana, he discovered that, save his family and a relationship with Fela Kuti, he’d lost everything. The impression of radical deprivation informs Another Man’s Thing. It’s there in how obsessively Cologbo  enumerates which temptations to avoid, lest they perpetuate a cycle of rapacity you couldn’t hope to outlive. He breathlessly presents his list, over and over, as one would who is truly war sick and even a little mad. Only Cologbo’s guitar solos ring of liberation and a clear eyed direction forward. From the 2008 Soundway compilation Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock and Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria


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