No. 087 - King Sunny Adé’s “Kiti Kiti” changed my life
Friends become family, cultures collide, and one song breeds confidence for Eric Drobny
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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.
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• 3 min read •
It may be the single greatest accident of my life that I was exposed to so much music out of 1970s West Africa at a time when my brain was malleable, starting sometime around age 10.
Most of my friends idolized Lennon and Page and Clapton and whoever else their parents were feeding them. Meanwhile my (white) jazz musician father exposed me to Herbie and Miles and B.B. and James Brown and Aretha and Motown. Black American music tradition had already been guaranteed a front row seat at the concert of my life. But before my adopted family arrived, Black music tradition from the rest of the world was nowhere to be found.
My Dad’s best friend is a Nigerian immigrant who lived in our small town when I was a kid. He and his family became our extended family. His three sons became my brothers in childhood, my cousins for life. Their Dad, my “uncle,” was deliberate in his teachings about life, but much of what I learned came not from an explicit lesson but rather from exposure to their culture. It was that accident of geography, that we lived together in a town of 50,000, that saved me at a time when I needed it most.
Every part of their presence in my life had a major impact. There was the really important stuff like unconditional love and full-tilt exposure to an otherwise completely foreign culture. There was the gigantic ecosystem of new music, the stuff that lives rent free at the front of my memory. And finally there was the self confidence that came from hearing something new, something fresh, something apparently designed to teach me how to stand up for myself.
Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest country by population, and King Sunny Adé is one of Nigeria’s most influential artists ever. The vortex of jazz, soul, R&B, rock, and traditional West African music quickly became my savior.
Around this same time, at school and while playing sports, I was teased for being overweight. I was bigger, taller, and pudgier than basically every other kid my age. I was also fairly athletic, healthy, and lucky enough to have a wonderful, supportive family. But this was the 90s, damnit, and there was no guidebook for dealing with this kind of tedious torture. To make matters worse, I had zero language or confidence to combat it.
Fortunately I didn’t spend much time ruminating over why some angry peer of mine had the audacity to put me down. The most clear memory I have of someone calling me “fat” happened just before the very first time I heard King Sunny’s “Kiti Kiti.” Hearing this song was a huge turning point for me. I leaned on music the same way I lean on it today — to feel alive. And inevitably, that bred confidence which eventually led to me fighting back.
I recalled this incident to my therapist a few years ago. He could feel the joy as I shared the anecdote and he wanted to know more.
“Tell me more about the scene,” he asked, “Where were you when the lightbulb switched on?”
My adopted family’s house was small, barely a fit for three adolescent boys and an immigrant father. As I walked through the front door, the smell of fried plantains. On TV, Arsenal’s star Thierry Henry. On the patio, the song of pet canaries. And on the speakers, as ever, was King Sunny.
For 25 years I sang along, not knowing the English translation of the Yoruba lyrics to “Kiti Kiti.” They don’t matter, of course, but out of sheer curiosity I asked my “uncle” to translate them.
The hook? “To pull one up by [his] bootstraps.”
That tracks. ◆
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About Eric
Eric Drobny is a Dad, longtime media professional, and incessant talker. He also pens the *new*(!) Substack How to Drob, which combines memoir and music recs.
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