Fela Kuti

Nigerian world music composer, singer, saxophonist, and guitarist

• Born: October 15, 1938
• Birthplace: Abeokuta, Nigeria
• Died: August 2, 1997
• Place of death: Lagos, Nigeria

A pioneer of Afrobeat, Kuti offered his fellow Nigerians and the rest of the citizens of the world Africa’s musical heritage.

Member of Koola Lobitos; Africa 70; Egypt 80

The Life

The son of middle-class Nigerians, Fela Anikulapo Kuti (FAY-lah a-nih-ko-LAH-poh KOO-tee), born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, received musical training from a young age. He honed his skills at Trinity College of Music in London, where he formed his first band, Koola Lobitos. After returning from college, Kuti toured Nigeria and Ghana in search of an audience for his musical style, called highlife jazz. In 1969 Koola Lobitos toured the United States, and there Kuti’s encounters with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Black Panther Party, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) combined to shape his new style, Afrobeat.

When he returned home, his band was renamed Africa 70, reflecting Kuti’s increasingly Pan-African aesthetic. Police raids on Kalakuta Republic (his home and recording studio) in 1974 resulted in Kuti being imprisoned on a drug charge; this incident inspired the album Expensive Shit. Another raid in 1977 left his mother dead, which fueled Kuti’s rebellion. In 1978 Kuti married twenty-seven women in a single ceremony, and he formed his own political party, Movement of the People (MOP).

Following the breakup of Africa 70, Fela began touring Europe with his new group, Egypt 80. They toured the United States in 1986, returning during the summers of 1989, 1990, and 1991. Numerous arrests over the next several years did little to harm Kuti’s popularity. When he died of AIDS in 1997, a million people attended his funeral in Nigeria.

The Music

A prolific composer and arranger, Kuti produced a body of work that reflects his musical development from highlife to Afrobeat.

Early Works. Kuti returned home from college in 1963 to a country still interested in highlife music, which had filtered in from Ghana to fuel Nigeria’s independence movement. Tunes such as “Highlife Time,” “Omuti Tide” (the drunkard is here), and “Olufe Mi” (my lover) were popular, and Kuti’s initial reaction was to bring his jazz influences to highlife, playing what he called highlife jazz in the context of the Fela Ransome-Kuti Quintet. Despite the remnants of highlife in this style, his harmonies were too complex and unpredictable for dance music, and his vocal delivery was overshadowed by his enthusiasm for instrumental breaks.

“My Lady Frustration.” Playing music that appealed to the masses was not simply a question of looking for a steady income; it was also a matter of making music that spoke truth to power. “My Lady Frustration” is representative of the new style called Afrobeat that Kuti forged during the The ’69 Los Angeles Sessions. He fuses rhythmic and tonal aspects of Yoruba language with the horn lines and song architecture of highlife, jazz, and American soul. He opens with a call-and-response section, follows with horn solos, and returns to the main theme, this time punctuating it with improvised vocal variations.

“Jeun Ko Ku.” After returning home from a U.S. tour with his newly named band, Nigeria 70, Kuti released “Jeun Ko Ku” (“Chop and Quench”) in 1971, selling more than two hundred thousand copies in six weeks. He had finally located the ideal combination of musical sophistication and popularity in mesmerizing percussion breaks alternating with flashy horn lines. His lyrics interpret Nigeria’s postcolonial problems as a politics of the belly: He berates a drunken glutton who has taken advantage of his generosity, a metaphor for African leaders who seize independence as an opportunity for personal political and financial gain.

Expensive Shit. From 1970 to 1975, Kuti produced nearly fifty songs, many of them critiques of the police and the government. If tunes like “Je’Nwi Temi” (don’t gag me) showed the authorities that Kuti would not be silenced, his release of “Alagbon Close” and “Expensive Shit” reinforced this point. Following his stint in Alagbon, Lagos’s largest prison, these tunes retained an energetic, percussive backdrop behind punchy horn lines that accented his biting lyrics. Particularly in “Expensive Shit,” he delivers the vocals with a burning sense of urgency.

“I.T.T.” Between 1976 and 1979, antiauthority critiques continued to dominate Kuti’s music. “I.T.T.,” or “International Thief Thief,” critiques neocolonial practices levied on Africa by multinational corporations. The call-and-response features of these critiques highlighted the popularity of their message, and his mention of specific “rats” in the lyrics publicly decried local participation in processes of economic exploitation.

“Perambulator.” Kuti’s critical stance on national and international politics culminated in his notion of the “perambulating state.” His lyrics posit perambulation both as structural feature of official postcolonial institutions and as a state of being for many Nigerians. His ensemble sound in “Perambulator” grows from an insistent bass guitar vamp into a chaotically funky keyboard solo and eventually roaring and dramatic horn lines, all of which preface his piercing lyrics. This tune exemplifies the developed master in his multiple capacities as a composer, arranger, lyricist, and bandleader.

Musical Legacy

Kuti’s political rantings and Afrobeat music gave average Nigerians a voice. In traveling to the United States during the Civil Rights movement, he actively educated himself about the tenets of pursuing liberty by any means necessary. If his offstage actions displayed incredible hubris, they were balanced by the eloquence of his performance art and lyricized rhetoric. Kuti combined African music and religion, jazz, activism, and a spirit of pure rebellion in a career of performance art with pan-African and worldwide appeal. Just as American funk and soul artists found their Afrocentric voices in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Kuti produced in Afrobeat a voice every bit as timely and forceful.

Principal Recordings

albums (solo): Fela’s London Scene, 1970; Two-thousand Black, 1980 (with Roy Ayers); Black President, 1981; Original Suffer Head, 1982; Army Arrangement, 1984; Mr. Follow Follow, 1986; Music of Many Colours, 1986 (with Ayers); Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense, 1987; Black Man’s Cry, 1992; The ’69 Los Angeles Sessions, 1994; Buy America, 1997.

albums (with Africa 70): Live!, 1970 (with Ginger Baker); Open and Close, 1971; Roforofo Fight, 1972; Shakara, 1972; Afrodisiac, 1973; Gentleman, 1973; Confusion, 1975; Everything Scatter, 1975; Excuse O, 1975; Expensive Shit, 1975; He Miss Road, Noise for Vendor Mouth, 1975; Monkey Banana, 1975; Na Poi, 1975; Ikoyi Blindness, 1976; Kalakuta Show, 1976; Unnecessary Begging, 1976; Upside Down, 1976; Yellow Fever, 1976; No Agreement, 1977; Opposite People, 1977; Shuffering and Shmiling, 1977; Sorrow, Tears, and Blood, 1977; Stalemate, 1977; Zombie, 1977; Authority Stealing, 1980; I. T. T., 1980.

albums (with Egypt 80): Beasts of No Nation, 1989; ODOO (Overtake Don Overtake Overtake), 1989; Underground System, 1992.

Bibliography

Labinjoh, Justin. “Fela Anikulapo Kuti: Protest Music and Social Processes in Nigeria.” Journal of Black Studies 13, no. 1 (September, 1982): 119-134. Labinjoh’s quasi-biographical article takes Kuti’s experiences in the United States and in Nigeria as a starting point for an ethnographic analysis of individualism and collectivism as social processes.

Moore, Carlos. Fela, Fela: This Bitch of a Life. London: Allison and Busby, 1982. Jamaican-Cuban author Moore wrote the first biography of Kuti based on interviews with Kuti, his wives, and his mother.

Olaniyan, Tejumola. Arrest the Music! The Art and Politics of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. A resource for scholarly study of Kuti, this is an excellent ethnographic monograph. Includes a song index and a discography.

Olorunyomi, Sola. Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003. This source describes Kuti’s invention of Afrobeat and the subsequent innovations in that genre.

Waterman, Christopher A. “Chop and Quench.” African Arts 31, no. 1 (Winter, 1998): 1-9. An anthropologist and leading scholar of Nigerian popular music, Waterman provides a thoughtful obituary of Kuti, giving a brief overview of Kuti’s life and work.