On Friday, July 5, 2024, Chukwuebuka Amuzie uploaded a video to his Instagram account, and, because he has performed a variation of this ritual each week since becoming one of Nigeria’s most successful comedians four years ago, he did not think much of it. He certainly did not think that the item uploaded that Friday would incite a hay fever of excitement that would sweep across the Internet. In the video, which is a little under ten seconds, Amuzie—or Brain Jotter, as he is more commonly known—breaks into a dance, a smart shuffle of feet, timing it perfectly to a guitar-studded song sounding off in the backdrop. A young man moseying in the comedian’s direction imitates him, so that the two men are synchronized in movement. Taking the imitation as an affront, Brain Jotter chases after the copycat, and there the video ends. Perhaps because of the neat synchronicity of sound and movement, or perhaps because of the absurd drama, the video tickled the public’s fancy—it has been viewed thirty million times, and also it inspired a downpour of copycat videos, many of them taking liberties with the template provided by the original video. However, even in their differences, the rip-offs were united by two elements: a pas de deux and a song.
That song was Mike Ejeagha’s Ka Esi Le Onye Isi Oche, although it would not be a hard task to find a significant population who think that the title is “Gwo Gwo Gwo Ngwo,” a line in the song which figures indelibly in Brain Jotter’s video. Though all but forgotten until a few days ago, the song, a slow-tempo serving of Highlife, had been a crowd favorite when it debuted in 1983, especially in Eastern Nigeria, a Highlife stronghold. Born to an Igbo family, Brain Jotter had heard the song as a boy; much to his annoyance, his father played the song ad nauseam during several road trips that his family took to their native Owerri. A millennial in lockstep with the Afro Hip-hop of the early aughts, young Brain Jotter must have considered the easygoing pace of Ejeagha’s song as old-fashioned. And so it was a remarkable turnaround when, scrolling through TikTok a few weeks ago, Brain Jotter chanced on the song and, rather than annoyance, felt a new-found appreciation towards it, and then thought that “It just made sense.” He was thinking about the song’s suitability for a pre-recorded video, the video with the nifty dance routine. It was one of those rare occasions where dance precede song.
For reviving a lost musical treasure, Brain Jotter’s video met overwhelming gratitude, but also some confusion. Renditioned in Igbo, the song’s meaning was closed off to non-Igbo speakers. Sundry netizens volunteered translation services, and soon many people understood that the song, like many of Ejeagha’s songs, is grounded in Igbo folklore. It recounts a fable about a tortoise who, to win a princess’ hand in marriage, betrays the trust of a friend, an elephant; and so the song is an admonition against disloyalty, its didactic strain consistent not only with the tenor of many of Ejeagha’s songs, but also with Highlife convention.
Some people called attention to the other elephant in the room: the question of whether or not Brain Jotter, in using an unlicensed version of the song, had violated copyright laws. “Ejeagha ought to sue,” one fellow said, inspiring both approval and disagreement. Some other people accused Brain Jotter of unduly profiting off of the musician’s labor. “Why give him only two million naira?” one fellow queried, referring to the cash gift that the comedian promised Ejeagha some days after the video went viral. The fellow seemed to believe that the gift, though well-intentioned, was but a spittle compared to the heap of money that the comedian must have made from the video going viral.
Those critics, in part at least, may have been haunted by the injustice in recent examples of brazen copyright violation, such as one involving the Afro-Pop artist Shallipopi and another Highlife geriatric, Monday Edo. Responding to the accusations in a short video, Brain Jotter said that he did not “earn a dime” from the song, and then, with admirable equanimity, admitted the criticisms as fair. He added that the proceeds, in terms of income generated from streaming platforms, all went to Ejeagha. Though Brain Jotter, indeed, may not have profited from the video in the sense of receiving payment for it, his statement ignored the more unquantifiable kind of profit that may accrue in the video’s aftermath: more visibility online for Brain Jotter, thus plausibly increasing his own earning power.
It is not clear-cut whether or not Brain Jotter has infringed on any copyright law, for the Copyright Act 2022, which provides the legal basis for intellectual property disputes, contains language which would both convict and acquit the comedian. The act allows for the use of a work so long as it is for “private use, parody, satire, pastiche, or caricature,” and also “non-commercial research and private study,” none of which accommodate Brain Jotter’s video. But also the act says that, in the arbitration of a copyright case, some extenuating factors will be considered, such as the “nature of the work” and the “amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the work as a whole,” thus offering Brain Jotter a lifeline. And yet, though there is no definitive evidence of an infraction, Ejeagha, if he so pleased—as one lawyer pointed out—has enough grounds to litigate.
But Ejeagha apparently has no interest in seeing the inside of a courtroom. The nonagenarian was a vision of weepy joy when, days ago, Brain Jotter and a sizable entourage visited him in his home in Enugu. Seeing the small crowd that had come to pay him obeisance, the musician was stunned into a stupefying silence. A younger relative, speaking on the old man’s behalf, thanked Brain Jotter for the renewed attention he brought the song. Days after the video was released, the song’s popularity surged across streaming sites, and played in places it normally would not play in—nightclubs, and sundry other places that are usually the domain of more youthful music. “It was the will of God,” Brain Jotter, wearing a smile made unsure by a half-shyness, said in response to the praise heaped on him by Ejeagha’s relative.
Will of God though it may be, the renewed success of Ejeagha’s song is also a token of the power that social media wields in distributing music, even long-forgotten ones. Several resurrection miracles have been wrought by various social media platforms, especially TikTok, such as when the app revived interest in CKay’s Love Nwantiti, two years after its release, sending it to the top of various music charts. In 2021, a social media trend—the Silhouette Challenge—brought renewed attention to Paul Anka’s 1959 song Put Your Head On My Shoulder. And also Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes), by the English Pop band Edison Lighthouse, saw nearly a seven hundred percent uptick in streaming numbers after it became a TikTok staple, five decades after its release.
Though some of the songs became popular in ways that seemingly defy analysis, the lot of them yield an observable pattern, which is that the renewed popularity seemingly was due to the songs fitting the theme of the video or set of videos that reintroduced them to the mainstream audience. The suggestive undertone of Paul Anka’s song, for example, fit the suggestiveness of the challenge it inspired. And so too did Ejeagha’s song fit the comic tone of Brain Jotter’s pre-existing choreography. Any song can be made to go viral online, but it’s got to fit the situation that it finds itself in; it’s got to fit in an absolute way. For Brain Jotter, however, the whole affair was a lesson on the unpredictability of life. Or, as he put it: “Anything can happen in this life.”
