What Tobe Nwigwe, Fat and The Bengsons Have to teach us about being post-pandemic artists

Here we are. We made it. We’ve hit a point in the US where things are opening again, people are seeing and holding each other. Hooray for us! 

But here’s the thing; most of us are not the same person we were two years ago. We have changed, we have grown in the most glorious and painful ways and have developed a strong distaste for “normal”.

 I’m calling our new America “post-pandemic” only because I don’t have a better term. It is so much more than that. It is post-pandemic, post-George Floyd, post-Trump,post-the-mass-awakening-to-the-horrors-of-capitalism, post-this-is-the-way-things-are-and-there-is-no-way-out. 

The reality is  many of us that have survived have gained the imagination to see a way out.

In the arts, among creatives, there is a lot of concern over returning to normal. The normal many of us experienced in the before-times was toxic and abusive with little recourse. We were expected to take whatever work for whatever pay and shoulder whatever behavior from those with power and often that meant not only absorbing those circumstances but doing it for art that we didn’t believe in. Art that was meant to be marketable and bland, inoffensive and unchallenging. Not to mention art that was often completely insensitive to, well, most of the population because those are the works we have always produced, the only work that deserves attention or admiration. The work that guarantees money.

Now as we start to return to stages and studios how do we bring our new imagination, our new boundaries, our new authenticity? There must be a way out. There are artists showing us the way.  

In July of 2020 a small and simple music video started coming across my Instagram feed. Three people sitting on stools, one holding a guitar, one holding a small drum machine. Simple mint monochromatic outfits, white socks in an empty room painted the same color. It was “Try Jesus” by Tobe Nwigwe and I was in. If you haven’t heard it, it is a sweet melodic song about being ready to fight to protect your people.

Tobe Nwiggwe The Lagosreview

This was July 2020, when the streets were exploding with resistance and many Americans were drawing hard lines in their own lives. Here was an unapologetic piece from a Black man speaking the end of his own tolerance. Also it was just so damn pretty. All the videos produced by Tobe and his wife, “Fat”, are so damn pretty. Seriously go look. But that’s not why they’re heralds of the new artist. 

As I followed along their explosion I noticed something I had never seen before, their kids. Their small children are in the background of all their press interviews, all their announcement videos and many of their music videos. And not as props, not as models, as children. They run around, they interrupt, they climb on the furniture and the adults. Tobe and Fat work around and in harmony with them. They do a lot of their work, their artistic work, one handed. They celebrate their family, the ease of their love and the difficulty in being working artist parents. 

One of their primary contributors was pregnant through much of 2020 and she was just *there* *working* being loved and teased by her collaborators, you know, the way most pregnant people experience work and pregnancy. Her pregnancy was not hidden, was not ignored but she did not become an untouchable goddess either. She was just a pregnant working artist. As a parent artist myself, this small thing was a revelation.

While Tobe and Fat are rightfully praised for their music, their refusal to dim themselves in any regard, their utter commitment to being who they are, the full version of it is what shines. Their effort to welcome, create and celebrate Black joy, to manifest and promote Black legacy and never waste a minute pretending to do anything but, is what I love them for. 

Tobe and Fat being adoring parents while working The Houston Chronicle

Tobe and Fat make the art they want as the whole people they are and will not be told no about it. While Tobe is known to say “I make purpose popular” and yeah, he does, their bold, no bullshit stance of No Deal, No Label, Just The People is what drives the heart of their appeal and why their art is unmistakably authentic.

While Tobe and Fat have a slick but somehow still working-class style to their work on the opposite end is the duo known as The Bengsons. 

Instagram again.  August 2020 when “The Keep Going Song “came across my feed. 

Just two people, clearly in a home, possibly mashed up against a closet door, two microphones, a loop peddle and one guitar. And Abigail Bengson starts that sort of talk singing you might equate with poetry or musical theatre. It feels off the cuff. It feels stream of consciousness. There are melodies and brief harmonies. And they spend 5 solid minutes speaking directly to all our hearts. They spoke the fear, the small challenges and large challenges and small challenges that felt large because of the weight of our collective trauma. They told us, yes, what you are feeling? It is ok, we are feeling it too, we are all feeling it and absolutely none of us know what we are doing.  But this is not a song to put on piles of black eyeliner and cry to (althoughI know I was not alone in tears and snot running down my face while listening), this is a reminder that being human is a beautiful and horrific shit-show and we are all just making it up as we go and wow life really just got crazy and we are connected in that. “ I pray my pain is a river that flows to the ocean that connects my pain to yours and I pray my happiness is like pollen that flies to you and pollinates your joy, oh boy” 

Oh boy indeed. Let’s take a breath together.

The Bengsons performing The Keep Going Song

The Bengsons followed with several other songs of hope and grief  in 2020 and 2021. Then in early 2021 they began to rehearse with other musicians and actors, some together in the theater and some virtually. They posted some videos of this process and what stood out to me is their insistence on patience, gentleness and kindness with each other. That performers are living in a new world, they are as changed as everyone else and the working process needs to reflect that. Absent was the grind, absent was the power struggle, absent was the shutting down of each other’s humanity that so many people have come to expect while doing artistic work.

I said goddam goddam!

So let’s continue to make art but let’s make it as whole people, liberated people. Let’s make it out from under the artists and producers and non-artists who have historically held the power to say what we make, how we make it and who we make it for. Let’s be wholly unapologetic about our boundaries, our priorities, our humanity.

Let’s hold each other in high regard and treat each other with dignity and respect. Let’s refuse to continue to give a platform to those who will not.

There is not a limited amount of art to be made or  a limited number of eyes to see it or ears to hear it. Our fellow artists are not our enemy. Our fellow artists do not need to be seen as competition.

 Instead of going back to normal, let’s take what we have been given and fucking run with it.