Remembering St Janet and the Right to Create

I listened to St Janet just like I listened to Fela’s Na Poi. I have always loved creativity in all its forms, just as I value freedom. My instinct is to let people create, speak, sing, and imagine as they wish, as long as they do no harm to others. I have always admired the free spirit. Society moves forward not just through conformity but through those who are willing to push boundaries.

St Janet’s passing has sparked a lot of discussions. The moralists never accepted her. Many religious folks could not stand her. Yet she had a huge following among regular people, while many who publicly claimed to have refined tastes enjoyed her music in private.

That contradiction is as old as society itself.

Had she been a regular musician, she might have lived and died unnoticed in some corner of Agege. Instead, by refusing to fit in, she forced society to face questions of taste, morality, class, and artistic freedom. Whether you liked her or not, she became impossible to ignore. I would not be surprised if, in years to come, scholars write papers on her music, her language, her audience, and what she represented in the growth of Nigerian popular culture.

Music and Society

Even within Yoruba music, there has always been a difference between the philosophical and the highbrow on one side and the playful and humorous on the other. That is why we have genres like efe and sàje, performances where almost anything goes. They exist to make people laugh, forget their troubles, and take a break from the rules of polite society. It is in these performances that society often shows itself in its most honest, imaginative, and open form.

Popular music has always drawn from themes that polite society pretends to reject but often enjoys, sex, desire, humor, irreverence, and rebellion. Society has never been made up only of the serious and respectable. There is also the market, the street, the bar, and the motor park, what American sociologists once called Skid Row. Each has its own language, humor, codes, and style. Serious research has long recognized that these worlds deserve study rather than dismissal.

As an editor, I always encouraged my reporters to explore areas that respectable society considered off-limits. Some of the best stories we published came from topics others thought were too vulgar or ordinary to be worth attention.

Waziri Adio, one of my reporters and now a respected journalist and public servant, wrote a great feature on life in the houses on stilts over the Lagos lagoon. I commissioned many other stories about the culture, habits, and quirks of people living in Maroko, then Lagos’s most infamous slum. Those stories were not meant to glorify poverty or vice. They were written because good journalism seeks to understand before making judgments.

I also remember asking the brilliant Prof. Ebenezer Obadare, now a respected scholar in the United States, but then a young reporter, to look into the cultural phenomenon around the brassiere. The idea came from Koste, one of Obesere’s famously bold songs. What many dismissed as crude became the basis for an insightful and memorable piece of cultural journalism. Good journalism, like good research, often starts where conventional wisdom says, “Do not go there.”

Exploring Society

That is why, as an editor, I often took my reporters out for what social scientists call participant observation. We spent evenings at places like Tarmac, Lascofils, and other lively bars in Lagos. Although I did not drink, I sat with them, watching lives unfold, listening to conversations, picking up the slang, and trying to understand the hopes, frustrations, and humor of everyday people. One of those outings led me to one of my most lasting friendships, with an itinerant reggae musician known simply as Ras. Decades later, we are still friends.

Scholars everywhere have devoted their careers to studying the lives, tastes, and cultures of the underclass, not because they celebrate them, but because they want to understand them. They study the music people dance to, the language they use, the jokes they tell, even the drugs they take. Understanding does not mean endorsing. To truly understand a society, you must know both its saints and its sinners; not only its churches but also its street corners.

The debate over what people should read, watch, or listen to is old, and no generation has ever settled it. What is seen as offensive in one era can become acceptable, or even celebrated, in another.

History teaches this lesson repeatedly.

In eighteenth-century England, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was prosecuted for obscenity. In the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow was banned and many copies destroyed because its frank talk about sex offended public morals. His Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in Britain until the famous 1960 obscenity trial, when Penguin Books successfully defended its publication. Today, these works are studied in universities around the world.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in both the United States and Britain. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was banned for decades. Gustave Flaubert faced trial in France over Madame Bovary. Charles Baudelaire was prosecuted for Les Fleurs du mal. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was once seen as unacceptable. Today, each of these works holds a respected place in literary history.

Evolution of Music

The same pattern can be seen in music.

Jazz was seen as immoral. Rock and roll was called corrupting for the youth. Elvis Presley shocked respectable America so much that TV cameras were told not to show his hips. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Madonna, 2 Live Crew, N.W.A., and many others faced moral panic before being recognized as important cultural forces.

Closer to home, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was dismissed by many as vulgar, irresponsible, and dangerously subversive. Today he is celebrated all over the world as one of Africa’s greatest musical innovators and one of its sharpest social critics.

None of this means every controversial work is a masterpiece or that every challenge to accepted morality deserves praise. Far from it. Many controversial pieces will rightly fade away. But history warns against letting governments, religious authorities, or self-appointed guardians of morality control creativity.

Art should be criticized. It should be debated. It should even be ridiculed when necessary. But it should rarely be banned.

Freedom includes the freedom to offend, just as it includes the freedom to ignore what offends us.

History teaches us to be humble. It has shown repeatedly that today’s obscenity can become tomorrow’s classic, today’s scandal can be tomorrow’s topic of academic study, and today’s condemned artist can become tomorrow’s cultural icon.

Maybe that is the most lasting lesson from St Janet’s life. Whether you liked her music or not is not the main point. She reminds us that creativity cannot thrive under strict moral rules. A free society is one that is confident enough to let art breathe, trusting that time, not censorship, is the best judge of artistic value.

In the end, the question is not whether we like St Janet’s music. Taste is personal, and morality often reflects its time. The real question is whether creativity should be controlled by the moral trends of the moment or allowed to stand the test of time. Art should be criticized, debated, even mocked, but rarely restricted. Creativity flourishes where freedom exists. The moment society begins to limit imagination, it starts, even if unintentionally, to impoverish itself.