Falana

FALANA; Alté Royalty

by Oris Aigbokhaevbolo

The video for ‘Ride or Die’ features some striking scenes of a dark-skinned singing woman. At first her surroundings are spare, bare. There is a horse at some point, a car spewing coloured fumes at another. The only unity to these scenes is the singer herself unusually costumed. When first I saw it, I thought the last scene devolved into a picture of the singer on a vintage car wreathed with flowers—well, until the singer blinked.

No surprise then that those clothes are from such designers as Orange Culture and Andrea Iyamah, and the video was directed by Daniel Obasi. The music itself, an up-tempo love song delivered in a soulful voice, is delivered by the mononymous Falana. If you wanted an introduction to what is called the alte scene, you could do a lot worse than tracking down all of those names. With the Ride or Die video, the lady has somehow brought parts of the scene together.

“I like seeing how other designers, and pieces from their different collections, can intermingle,” she told Vogue about the video, a statement that can be extrapolated to the artist’s own life. She represents such a confluence in life. Her music takes elements from soul, jazz, poetry but is quite percussive. She has been in a video featuring Wizkid and listens to Bjork and names Bez as an artist she would like to work with. She was born in Canada but has lived in Cuba.

Little wonder then, she named her first EP Things Fall Together, an inversion of either the Achebe title or the original W.B Yeats line. With an artist with as much influences as this, who can tell what the more influential source is?

What is clear is that Falana has absorbed sounds and influences from all of these places. She is sui generis: Her music is hard to place—but she listened to the Lijadu Sisters, King Sunny Ade and Yinka Ayefele as a child.

Later she became interested in Erykah Badu, Amy Winehouse and Lauryn Hill, whose Grammy-winning album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill informs her songwriting. Today, she says her music is soul fusion—a mix of Afrobeat, soul and Jazz—and says her time in Cuba helped harness her own sound.

In 2016, she embarked on a series of pop-up concerts around Lagos. The concept, she said in an interview with Music In Africa was “exploring and re-inventing spaces in Lagos. A music experience can go beyond the music; the environment you are in, the energy, all influence how you vibe as an audience member. So I just wanted to invest in curating a whole experience.

“There is an appetite for many different types of music, in Nigeria specifically, so I feel privileged to be a part of the narrative that is broadening what is available. I also love performing live, and I wanted to be able to share that in Lagos as well.”

She has shared this love of performing live with the Afropolitan Vibes audience before. That was back in 2014. At the time she starred alongside Yemi Alade and General Pype. This time, she has Reminisce and Moelogo as co-headliners. The times and crew might have changed—But the love Falana has for the stage, one has to believe, is unwavering.