IN THE KEY OF FELA: CATCH THE (AFRO) BEAT

IN THIS (PANDEMIC) TIME is a Kurated series informed by COVID-19. Times are strange. Let’s dance.

IN THE KEY OF FELA: CATCH THE (AFRO)BEAT

A number of you liked the danceable beats on last weekend’s Kurated playlist for the column on the COVID-19 deaths of African music stars Manu Dibango and Aurlus Mabele.

Comments included one from musician and family member Judy Lea who –while lamenting the deaths– wrote,  “Thanks so much for this…I needed something new to dance to! I feel like I’ve heard grooves very similar to the one in the Soul Makossa album at the jazz fest before, and danced to them with great enjoyment!” 

Longtime friend Ron Verzuh wrote, “How do you stop your toes from tapping when you listen to Soul Mokassa?! Cool music. Thanks for once again keeping me on track with new sounds that I’ve missed over the decades.” 

So I figured more good grooves were called for. In the spirit of anarchist Emma Goldman, I offer, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your pandemic.”

A Dance Playlist

Today’s dance playlist springs from a live studio performance I came across by Chilean band Newen Afrobeat featuring guest artists Seun Kuti and Cheick Tidiane Seck. Kuti is the youngest son of Nigerian Fela Kuti who founded the Afrobeat genre. It’d be inaccurate to label Newen Afrobeat as simply a Fela cover band because – while their set lists feature mostly Kuti compositions –they bring such a high level of musicianship and energy to their performances that their work equals those of the original songs.

Opposite People, the live studio track, features 20 players in tight quarters going full tilt for just under 14 minutes. Whoah! Strong beats and sweaty. It’s followed by their version of Fela’s Upside Down.

The remaining three tracks on the dance playlist feature Fela and his bands.

The Fela Legacy: Musician, Activist, Sexist and Homophobe

As you’ll read in the allmusic.com biography below, Kuti was a towering Nigerian figure whose work and influence went beyond music. He was an ardent, high profile activist and government opponent severely harassed and jailed by his country’s regime. He was also a notorious womanizer, unabashed sexist and homophobe. See the lyrics to his song Lady below to read his regressive take on women’s role.

These flaws don’t detract from the importance of Afrobeat and the political role Kuti played, but they musn’t be ignored. Just as Michael Jackson’s pedophilia stains his musical legacy, so too does Fela’s wilful ignorance which contradicts his democratic socialist politics and runs counter to the work of his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, one of Nigeria’s early feminists. Fela Kuti died of AIDS in 1997 at the age of 58.

12 April 2020

FELA KUTI

Fela was hounded, jailed, harassed, and nearly killed by a government determined to silence him

By John Dougan / AllMusic.com

It’s almost impossible to overstate the impact and importance of Fela Anikulapo (Ransome) Kuti (or just Fela as he’s more commonly known) to the global musical village: producer, arranger, musician, political radical, outlaw. He was all that, as well as showman par excellence, inventor of Afro-beat, an unredeemable sexist, and a moody megalomaniac. His death on August 3, 1997 of complications from AIDS deeply affected musicians and fans internationally, as a musical and sociopolitical voice on a par with Bob Marley was silenced. A press release from the United Democratic Front of Nigeria on the occasion of Fela’s death noted: “Those who knew you well were insistent that you could never compromise with the evil you had fought all your life. Even though made weak by time and fate, you remained strong in will and never abandoned your goal of a free, democratic, socialist Africa.” This is as succinct a summation of Fela’s political agenda as one is likely to find.

Born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, north of Lagos in 1938, Fela’s family was firmly middle class as well as politically active. His father was a pastor (and talented pianist), his mother active in the anti-colonial, anti-military, Nigerian home rule movement. So at an early age, Fela experienced politics and music in a seamless combination. His parents, however, were less interested in his becoming a musician and more interested in his becoming a doctor, so they packed him off to London in 1958 for what they assumed would be a medical education; instead, Fela registered at Trinity College’s school of music. Tired of studying European composers, Fela formed his first band, Koola Lobitos, in 1961, and quickly became a fixture on the London club scene. He returned to Nigeria in 1963 and started another version of Koola Lobitos that was more influenced by the James Brown-style singing of Geraldo Pina from Sierra Leone. Combining this with elements of traditional high life and jazz, Fela dubbed this intensely rhythmic hybrid “Afro-beat,” partly as critique of African performers whom he felt had turned their backs on their African musical roots in order to emulate current American pop music trends.

In 1969, Fela brought Koola Lobitos to Los Angeles to tour and record. They toured America for about eight months using Los Angeles as a home base. It was while in L.A. that Fela hooked up with a friend, Sandra Isidore, who introduced him to the writings and politics of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver (and by extension the Black Panthers), and other proponents of Black nationalism and Afrocentrism. Impressed at what he read, Fela was politically revivified and decided that some changes were in order: first, the name of the band, as Koola Lobitos became Nigeria 70; second, the music would become more politically explicit and critical of the oppression of the powerless worldwide. After a disagreement with an unscrupulous promoter who turned them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Services, Fela and band were charged with working without work permits. Realizing that time was short before they were sent back to Nigeria, they were able to scrape together some money to record some new songs in L.A. What came to be known as the ’69 Los Angeles Sessions were remarkable, an indication of a maturing sound and of the raucous, propulsive music that was to mark Fela’s career. Afrobeat’s combination of blaring horn sections, antiphonal vocals, Fela’s quasi-rapping pidgin English, and percolating guitars, all wrapped up in a smoldering groove (in the early days driven by the band’s brilliant drummer Tony Allen) that could last nearly an hour, was an intoxicating sound. Once hooked, it was impossible to get enough.

Upon returning to Nigeria, Fela founded a communal compound-cum-recording studio and rehearsal space he called the Kalakuta Republic, and a nightclub, the Shrine. It was during this time that he dropped his given middle name of “Ransome” which he said was a slave name, and took the name “Anikulapo” (meaning “he who carries death in his pouch”) . Playing constantly and recording at a ferocious pace, Fela and band (who were now called Africa 70) became huge stars in West Africa. 

His biggest fan base, however, was Nigeria’s poor. Because his music addressed issues important to the Nigerian underclass (specifically a military government that profited from political exploitation and disenfranchisement), Fela was more than a simply a pop star; like Bob Marley in Jamaica, he was the voice of Nigeria’s have-nots, a cultural rebel. This was something Nigeria’s military junta tried to nip in the bud, and from almost the moment he came back to Nigeria up until his death, Fela was hounded, jailed, harassed, and nearly killed by a government determined to silence him. In one of the most egregious acts of violence committed against him, 1,000 Nigerian soldiers attacked his Kalakuta compound in 1977 (the second government-sanctioned attack). Fela suffered a fractured skull as well as other broken bones; his 82-year old mother was thrown from an upstairs window, inflicting injuries that would later prove fatal. The soldiers set fire to the compound and prevented fire fighters from reaching the area. Fela’s recording studio, all his master tapes and musical instruments were destroyed.

After the Kalakuta tragedy, Fela briefly lived in exile in Ghana, returning to Nigeria in 1978. In 1979 he formed his own political party, MOP (Movement of the People), and at the start of the new decade renamed his band Egypt 80. From 1980-1983, Nigeria was under civilian rule, and it was a relatively peaceful period for Fela, who recorded and toured non-stop. Military rule returned in 1983, and in 1984 Fela was sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of currency smuggling. With help from Amnesty International, he was freed in 1985.

As the ’80s ended, Fela recorded blistering attacks against Nigeria’s corrupt military government, as well as broadsides aimed at Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (most abrasively on the album Beasts of No Nation). Never what you would call progressive when it came to relationships with women or patriarchy in general (the fact was that he was sexist in the extreme, which is ironic when you consider that his mother was one of Nigeria’s early feminists), he was coming around to the struggles faced by African women, but only just barely. 

Stylistically speaking, Fela’s music didn’t change much during this time, and much of what he recorded, while good, was not as blistering as some of the amazing music he made in the ’70s. Still, when a Fela record appeared, it was always worth a listen. He was unusually quiet in the ’90s, which may have had something to do with how ill he was; very little new music appeared, but in as great a series of reissues as the planet has ever seen, the London-based Stern’s Africa label re-released some of his long unavailable records (including The ’69 Los Angeles Sessions), and the seminal works of this remarkable musician were again filling up CD bins. 

He never broke big in the U.S. market, and it’s hard to imagine him having the same kind of posthumous profile that Marley does, but Fela’s 50-something releases offer up plenty of remarkable music, and a musical legacy that lives on in the person of his talented son Femi. Around the turn of the millennium, Universal began remastering and reissuing a goodly portion of Fela’s many recordings, finally making some of his most important work widely available to American listeners. 

Lady
Fela Kuti 
If you call am woman
 African woman no go 'gree
 She go say, she go say, "I be lady, oh"
 She go say, "I be lady, oh"
 She go say, "I be lady"
 She go say, "I no be woman"
 She go say, "Market woman na woman"
 She go say, "I be lady"
 I want tell you about lady
 I want tell you about lady
 I want tell you about lady
 She go say him equal to man
 She go say him get power like man
 She go say anything man do himself fit do
 I never tell you finish
 I never tell you finish
 I never tell you finish
 I never tell you finish
 I never tell you
 She go want take cigar before anybody
 She go want make you open door for am
 She go want make man wash plate
 For am, for kitchen
 She want salute man
 She go, sit down for chair
 She want salute man
 She go, sit down for chair
 She want sit down
 For table before anybody
 She want sit down
 For table before anybody
 She want a piece of meat
 Before anybody
 She want a piece of meat
 Before anybody
 Call am for dance
 She go dance lady dance
 Call am for dance
 She go dance lady dance
 African woman go dance
 She go dance the fire dance
 African woman go dance
 She go dance the fire dance
 She know him man na master
 She go cook for am
 She go do anything he say
 But lady, no be so
 But lady, no be so
 But lady, no be so
 But lady, no be so
 Lady na master
 Lady na master 

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Fela Kuti

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