Wunmi awoniyi biography samples

Home / Biography Templates & Examples / Wunmi awoniyi biography samples

That was the beginning of accepting completely me, really letting go of my past, my history, the pain of growing up in Nigeria, alone.”

* * *

I had seen clips of Wunmi performing. It was like ‘wow I’m really a foreigner here’”, she explains. For those of us who are neo-African, fear of the other also leads to self-multilation.

Our African tongues were cut out once by civilization, do we really need to cut our colonialized tongues out our mouths too?

“Get on your feet and drop some moves” is the instruction. This English-language brokenbeat and Afrobeat dance floor counter-attack against the attackers is a remix of a song featured on the Red Hot series Fela tribute.

“Crossover (Commercialism)” is a confrontation with conformity. Wunmi’s music is the soundtrack for embracing contradictions, embracing our organic chaos, for making a compost pile out of our mulatto-histories, and growing Black and strong out of the mélange of diverse roots and influences.

Which brings us to “Talk Talk Talk.” Listen to Sisterlove talk about over-talking, how everyone is talking, no one is listening.

And besides, isn’t multi-lingualism common for Africans?

Like notice hand-drum beats pushed up against a house electronic beat, that mash-up exemplifying the co-existence not just of acoustic/electronic, nor just African/European, nor even only female/male, but rather exemplifying all of that, exemplifying that we can put it all together, pull together differences that have often been mischaracterized as opposites.

But you see as Wunmi demonstrates: differences don’t have to be opposition even though the mashups might not be to everyone’s taste.

I’m saying: Wunmi’s music is no comfort to those of us confused by a desire for a purity that can never be and, more importantly, for post-colonial us, never was.

So when Wunmi says be yourself, she means be all the selves you are, rather than one romantic self to the exclusion of the reality of a composite self.

Proud to be herself. I had recordings on which she made guest appearances. She is so tight in the mix you could easily miss her vocal work thinking that it is an instrument, but listen closely. There are no maps for where Wunmi goes to get her shit.

Heart of Africa.

The way the chorus sounds, the arc of the lead voices—of course, it’s all Wunmi singing, I’m just offering a reference to help us appreciate that Wunmi is doing a bit more than simply talk-singing. Wunmi had the energy of Africa, the sun hotness but there was something else happening. They may have turned her on to Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat revolution, which would later prove a crucial influence, but she always felt out of place there”

“I was always made to feel that because I wasn’t born there that there was something about me that was not quite right.

Proud. And beyond the aesthetics, the song is hard political statement framed in the personal plight of those who are dubbed illegal by the descendants of slave masters.

“Interlude” is a little gem of a mix with Wunmi meditating out loud on the isolation of being a frontliner. A music video was shot for the single "Crossover" and posted on YouTube.

In 2002, she also collaborated with Bugz in the Attic on the Red Hot Organization's tribute album to Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, appearing on a track titled "Zombie (Part One)." The album, Red Hot and Riot, was released to highly favorable reviews across the board, and all proceeds of the album were donated to AIDS charities.

Her second album "See Me" was crowdfunded and co-produced by Kwame Yeboah in his Mixstation studio in Accra, Ghana and Jeremy Mage in Brooklyn, US.