In the first thirty seconds of William Onyeabor’s Atomic Bomb, you hear a tambourine, a Moog synthesizer, an electric guitar, a bass, and a keyboard. A one-man operation, Onyeabor recorded the song in his own studio in Enugu, Nigeria, and self-released Atomic Bomb in 1978. According to the Noisey documentary Fantastic Man, online blog posts, and Uchenna Ikone, a Nigerian-born Boston-based writer, Onyeabor was a hit in Nigeria, and especially Enugu, his southeastern hometown. You could hear him in the car, blast him down the street, right at the storefront, his music a recording, never live, just the electronics. His biggest hit, “When the Going is Smooth and Good,” released in 1986, spread his name from Nigeria to Ghana. It was one of the last songs he ever recorded.

Onyeabor’s sound was wholly new. A businessman who owned a semolina flour mill and was eventually named the 1987 “West African Industrialist of the Year,” he traveled to Western Europe to obtain his synthesizers (and oh, he had so many synthesizers) and to Sweden to study record manufacturing. From Sweden, he bought and imported his own recording pressing machines to his home studio in Enugu. Synthesizers, recording equipment, and vinyl pressing machines were a luxury that few others in the world could afford at the time – and if they could afford it, even fewer had any interest in going out of their way to fly-in such an elaborate set-up from the States, the U.K., Germany, or Japan. The musical technology was brand-new and hard to come by. The first commercial album to use the synthesizer as a sequencer to generate bass loops and repeated melodies, Phaedra by the German electronic music band Tangerine Dream, was released in 1974, just three years before Onyeabor self-released his first album with the same innovation.
Probably, Onyeabor was the first West African musician to record songs with synthesizers; certainly, he was the first to record them in a West African studio (his own) and then release them on a West African label (also his own). Most musicians, including ones in Western Europe, East Asia, and the States, instead used keyboards, electric pianos and/or “combo” organs, like the Imperial Duo, to simulate the sounds of a keyboard or drum machine. Fela Kuti himself used both the electric piano and the Imperial Duo, not synths; in 1978, Mamman Sani, a musician from Niger and a pioneer in minimal electronic music, recorded an album under the name “Mamman Sani et son Orgue” (which went unreleased until 2013).
In Wilton Schereka’s “mini-thesis,” Sonic Afrofuturism: Blackness, electronic music production and visions of the future, Schereka argues that through Onyeabor’s radical newness – his loops, drum machines, and multitrack synthesizer sounds – Onyeabor’s sound existed outside tradition, hardly in line with any particular heritage. Highlife (a jazzy, Afro-Cuban influenced genre from Ghana), funk and gospel infect the eight-minutes of “Atomic Bomb,” but Onyeabor’s reverberating synthesizers set him outside a place and time. I’m hesitant to assign Onyeabor such an exceptional position in music-making, but he was truly the only man in West Africa who owned these instruments; he was the first person to ever encounter the particular sounds of the synthesizer with his cultural and musical heritage; the burden to way that excited his own ear was entirely on him. He had no inheritance, participating outside any delineations of genre, tradition. Even within Nigeria, Lagos (and Fela Kuti) dominated the music industry; staying in Enugu, Onyeabor sat outside the localized mainstream, outside the traditional structures of music and sound production. According to Schereka, Onyeabor would hold no interest to ethnomusicologists. He wears a cowboy hat, sings in English, and mixes with fresh instruments: he is “out of sync with place and time” (54). Onyeabor revolts against the traditions of highlife, of Fela Kuti, of gospel, existing outside a traceable and delineated history.
This turns Atomic Bomb, in its original 1978 release, into something of a song for the “future.” Through its existence as solely a musical recording, Onyeabor could only be felt in the grooves of the vinyl, or the airwaves of the radio: transmissions for the modern age. His lyrics, tinged rather apolitical (and worshipful of God), speak to personal pleasure and joy, inward-facing and personal in the post-colonial era. His songs retain the qualities of typical anthems – repetitive melodies that, as Redmond says anthems do, “unfold over brief, constantly reiterated structures,” antiphony (call and response), distinct and multilayered sounds that build horizontally, equitable yet distinct, and that repeated insistence on “you,” – all features that Redmond points out in anthems throughout her book (224). Onyeabor adds his own spin to the structure, though – that four on the floor, a steady dance beat that grounds the whole symphony.
However, as much as Onyeabor’s songs might structurally remind us of anthems (already a broad category of structure), I don’t think I would call his initial 1978 release of “Atomic Bomb” an “anthem,” and neither would Redmond, even in the hyper-local sense (though I cannot access the experience of its (re)playing in Enugu). Redmond seems to think of music, and anthems specifically, as a worldly endeavor, one that travels across space and time; she calls music “a meaning-making endeavor, one that is strategically employed to develop identification between people who otherwise may be culturally, ideologically, or spatially separate or distinct from one another.” In 1978, Onyeabor’s music was simply released on his own label, hardly traveling outside his hometown, and his music, in fact, spoke to a synth-heavy, multilayered imaginary without predecessor; in its history, it was unfamiliar and foreign, not identifiable and collective. Because Onyeabor never performed publicly, his songs never inspired a crowd of movement gathered for that purpose; perhaps he was sprinkled into a dance set or played on the radio. For Redmond, anthems create new ways of imagining the state and citizenship, and black anthems speak to the exclusion of that citizenship: reimagining, in the process, new ways of being. Certainly, Onyeabor never inspired a mass, social movement: he was a little too obscure for that, and he never referenced his own blackness. Nor did Onyeabor ever explicitly speak to the state or its citizens, except to broadly denounce war and Western imperialism. Though he claims he only made music to better the welfare of others, Onyeabor gave up instruments, in fact, because he didn’t think his music worshiped God enough: it failed in its movement, its inspiration of others.
Why, then, am I bringing up Redmond’s analysis at all in this reading of Onyeabor? First, it’s to expose the limits of anthems, as defined in the more traditional sense that Redmond often employs, and their reliance upon the “popular.” Because of the fragility of archives—we have libraries and universities of decaying vinyl records across the world, and many of the hard facts on record sales or charts have been lost—the speed of sound-making, the tradition of folk songs, and the rather intimate nature of music-listening, our understanding of what is “popular” or “mainstream” fluctuates widely from community to community, and unless something was an indisputable international hit, like Miriam Makeba’s oeuvre, it’s hard to judge a song’s “reception” without living through it. Genuinely, the only way to gauge Onyeabor’s popularity is through the testimonies of people who lived in Enugu throughout the ‘70s, and since Onyeabor is such a contemporary hit in the West and a controversial figure in Enugu, his relative importance in memory is likely augmented and enhanced. Can a song be an anthem for a family, a group of friends, a particular church, if it helps to re-imagine their relationships to one another and to the whole?
Moving to the contemporary age, I’d also like to argue that Onyeabor’s “Atomic Bomb” has reached anthem status, although only through Luaka Bop’s 2013 reissue of the compilation: “Who is William Onyeabor?” In the early 2010s, Uchenna Ikone, a Nigerian-born, American writer who runs a label and blog on world music, worked with the world music label Luaka Bop, founded by David Byrne from The Talking Heads, to track down William Onyeabor and ask his permission to re-release his songs. Precisely because of Onyeabor’s lack of inheritance, his synths, his English, his cowboy hat, and his unidentifiable relationship to place/time, “Atomic Bomb,” and the “Who is William Onyeabor?” compilation, has become the anthem of the world music re-issuing industry. His historical unpopularity becomes an object of fascination, a badge of honor. Though he’s no longer listened to very much in Nigeria—especially because vinyl records have largely become unplayable—his music is played by DJs all over Western Europe and North America. Luaka Bop hosted a William Onyeabor festival called “Fantastic Man,” and Noisey—the music division of Vice—filmed a documentary of attempting to track him down. Refusing a biography, Onyeabor never gives details about himself in interviews (re-issue labels thrive on connecting to the artists that originally created the music, so that they can build a history and narrative of the artist through the album and its liner notes, much like an ethnomusicologist might). Now a born-again Christian, Onyeabor speaks only of praising God, dismisses his own musical past, and didn’t even attend his own music festival (not that David Byrne and the Luaka Bop team didn’t try to convince him to perform or hang around). The music lives on without him, then, as the icon of the re-issue; it is granted a second life, but without the participation of those who originally created the music and who first listened to it.
For those interested, my annotations on the song “Atomic Bomb” can be found on Genius.
Works Cited
Gardner, Abigail, and Gerard Moorey. “Raiders of the Lost Archives.” Popular Communication, vol. 14, no. 3, 2016, pp. 169–177., doi:10.1080/15405702.2016.1193181.
Redmond, Shana L. Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. NYU Press, 2013.
Schereka, Wilton. “Sonic Afrofuturism: Blackness, Electronic Music Production and Visions of the Future.” University of the Western Cape, University of the Western Cape, 2018.