/You have Picasso and a warehouse of painters accurately reproducing Picasso’s paintings/
I always like to emphasize the difference between entertainers and artists because too often we tend to use both terms interchangeably. If you go by the dictionary definitions of both words, you will fail to grasp what I am talking about here. This is not a debate on the extent of their creativity because entertainers and artists can all boast high levels of creativity. What I am alluding to is a philosophical interpretation of the terms .
Not to undermine their function in society, entertainers I would say are more of the followers. What do I mean by that you may ask?- Entertainers follow the peoples emotions as their job is to create interesting or relaxing atmospheres for people to spend their free time. Entertainment is more of a passive activity that requires less effort from the entertained while art tends to play a more active role - demanding as much effort on the part of the consumer as it does from the producer.
I was tempted here to create a table listing some of our entertainers on one column and our artists on another column but on second thought, I’m not in the mood for a fight - knowing the title ‘artist’ has been historically and culturally designed to command higher regard in our minds.
In the past, great artists worked independent of public opinion and were usually commissioned by higher classes of society in search for a more sophisticated form of entertainment -financial gain was hardly a defining factor for the pursuit of art. Time passed and the collection of art became a status symbol consequently introducing financial motives and celebrity to the genre. With more money, we have also seen a barrage of people flood into the sacred profession of art to claim the title, in the process, helping to water it down.
Our urban music scene is plagued with entertainers registering themselves as artists. An artist is an innovator - simply put. Non-conformity is another attribute you can ascribe to the artist - the desire to push things beyond known boundaries.
Art plays a pivotal role in the advancement of society and culture and with art, entertainment is hardly the primary motive. Sometimes though, art becomes entertaining, which tends to cause great confusion. In a world filled with sensory overload, it has also become easier for art to get lost in the dance and laughs of a passive audience, something which has caused artists to compromise their art by actively inserting ‘lol’ moments in their design.
Globalization has also caused great misconceptions of our individual needs. Through art, some societies have advanced to become a standard for the measure of progress and to that, we have seen many societies ignore the demands of their particular environments to construct images based on an imported sense of stature. To put this simply - let me use an analogy; it is like focusing on building the next facebook instead of developing the best programmers who can build something different from facebook. What that causes is you now have people reverse engineering Facebook instead of engineering something else that could become even more useful than facebook. We need to know where to draw the line because what works in another society might not necessarily be what we need here even though we can learn from the syntax - hence the phrase -“Think Global, and act Local.”
Art defines possibility by extending limits and in societies where limits are too near, there is a greater need for art. Art is not a function of what works - it talks of what could be instead of what is. Artists do not give us more of what we have. They give us what we never had before. So when everybody is in the belief that rap in Cameroon is or should only be done in pidgin, Blueprint Hakeem drops Excuse My English to ensure we do not subscribe to a static nature of our existence. Tenor’s ‘Bad Things’ and now Boy Cheez’ ‘Don’t Judge Me’ are good examples of pushing the boundaries -what I believe in our context, we need more of. Even Nigeria that we look up to musically is now at the point where it needs musical innovation.
Mind you, when the form becomes more important than the content, art dies and society suffers. In other words, when having a ‘pon pon’ beat becomes more important that creating good music, good music dies. The masses will always steer the ship towards the status quo. It is the role of the artist to create the new status quo and continue to do so - there is always a period of stagnation which is just natural. Progress however is not natural, it requires effort.
- Tino Foy