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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2020
This article explores political and aesthetic dimensions of the ‘bubu music’ made by Sierra Leonean émigré Janka Nabay while living in the United States from 2010 to 2017. It narrates Nabay's story while tracing granular flows of creative labour, collaboration, and negotiations of cultural and economic capital at some level of ethnographic detail. The central sections of the article excavate the complex and often non-linear labour that went into the production of his band's music, and gives readers a sense of the way Nabay himself intellectually framed this process. It ultimately argues that Nabay was a resilient but often-dehumanized subject who exemplified the cultural and economic cross-currents of ‘World Music 2.0’ in ways that set privileged Western values of artistic autonomy into vivid relief. As an economically precarious subject split between indigenous nationalism and Western forms of cultural capital, Nabay lived a life of profound contradictions, by turns dissenting and exuberant.
Many thanks to Boshra AlSaadi, Amy Cimini, Eric Drott, Sumanth Gopinath, Sidra Lawrence, Kaley Mason, Louise Meintjes, Jairo Moreno, David Novak, Cornelia Nuxoll, Matthew Rahaim, Shayna Silverstein, and Jason Stanyek alongside the editors of this journal and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Finally, thanks are also due to the many folks who gave feedback to the oral version of this presentation at the University of Chicago, King's College London, University of California-San Diego, University of California-Irvine, the IASPM-US conference at the University of Texas-Austin, Comfort Station in Logan Square, and the University of Minnesota. Any remaining errors or insufficiencies in the article are mine. Many unrecorded conversations also contributed to the thinking in this piece, including those with Nabay's collaborators in the United States including Boshra AlSaadi, Jonathan Leland, Doug Shaw, Daniel Schlett, Nico Testa, Drew Hagelin, Tony Lowe, Cem Misirlioglu, Rob Coltun, Michael Coltun, Curt Sydnor, Ofir Gannon, Anais Blondet, Paul Wilson, Patrick Noecker as well as engineers/producers Benjamin Greenberg, Steve Marion, and Matthew Mehlan. Outside the band, I had many conversations with Nabay's first manager, Wills Glasspiegel, Luaka Bop president, Yale Evelev, his two staff members, Mat Hall and Eric Welles-Nystrom, Dean Bein of True Panther Sounds, US booking agents Michelle Cable and Derek Becker, and John Stevens at Qu Junktions (Nabay's agent in the UK and Europe), as well as Zebulon co-owners Jocelyn Soubrian, Jef Soubrian, and Tyler Nolan. Sierra Leonean musician Pupa Bajah was a crucial collaborator and friend to Nabay as was Lanzo on D Beat, who is based in Freetown, Sierra Leone and collaborated with him on tracks for Build Music. Lanzo worked with Nabay in Freetown during the final months of his life. Nabay's wife in the United States, Sandra Nabay, his friends Justin Vitarello, and Pa Follah in Freetown, Sierra Leone, helped him in many difficult situations. Legal advice was provided either pro bono or at a generous discount from Heidi Boas, Kevin Brothers, Randall Cohn, Smita Dazzo, Michael Lehach, and Paul Sommerstein. Many thanks to Nabay's family in Sierra Leone for their correspondence and friendship from afar, namely Nabay's first wife, Rugiatu Marvelous Nabay, his children Ahmed Nabay (in Kuwait), Zachariah Osman Nabay, Sia Precious Kemoh and his partner at the time of his passing, Kadiatu (Kadi) Nabay.