The world-changing canyons of Fela Kuti

The rest of Fela’s story is largely a game of cat and mouse, and then a straightforward battle between art and the state, and between Fela and the authorities. One of the series’ big challenges is keeping listeners following a dense, twisty story, and convincing us early on that we should. The show is “presented” by Audible and the Obama family’s Higher Ground, and the first episode has a familiar whiff of narrative angst. (Last year, “The Wonder of Stevie,” co-produced by Higher Ground, worked hard to convince us of Stevie Wonder’s obvious greatness indeed.) “Fela” begins with a collection of voluminous testimonials in support of Fela, from people including Brian Eno, Flea, Questlove, Jay-Z, David Byrne, Ayo Edebiri and Paul McCartney, who describes crying at Fela’s 1973 Lagos concert. Very much in the movie Stevie Wonders, he appears sincerely, in an unbuttoned, “man of the people” mode. “Music like Fela’s is capable of not only moving people, getting them on their feet, but also making them feel alive,” he says precisely. “Our best art and our best music stir the soul.”

Abu Murad follows these testimonies with an “Introduction”: a story from the 1970s, in which we meet Falla, the international star, through the eyes of a Nigerian high school student. The premise is a bit of a risk – we don’t really know what’s going on yet – but it’s worth the risk. Student Dele Sosime is now sixty-two years old. During the turbulent period following Nigeria’s independence, his father, a bank auditor about to uncover evidence of embezzlement, was murdered with an ax by men who broke into the family home in the middle of the night. Twelve-year-old Daily found him in the hallway wearing his blood-stained pajamas. “He was completely frustrated,” Daily says, choking up. Through a school friend, Deeley later met Villa, who pledged to seek financial assistance for Deeley’s family. “My life just changed,” Daily says. By the age of seventeen, he had joined the band Fela; He eventually became an Afrobeat icon in his own right. Interview in London before one of his concerts.

The introduction also gives Abu Murad the opportunity to plant a key theme about Fela’s art: his ability to conjure a transported sonic space. Abu Murad’s beloved vocal manipulation often uses parallel or hesitant pieces of tape, and he and Villa aren’t afraid to delve into the imagination. There were nights when the band would play a song that lasted more than an hour, or when Dele “landed on one note and had to keep playing,” Abu Murad says, over and over, in exactly the same way. (It is said that one jam lasted twenty-four hours.) Did the repetition drive Dele crazy? “No way,” says Daily. Abu Murad describes Operation Daily:

His body will feel calm. His breathing will slow. He would direct his attention to his lungs and then pretend to push the walls of his lungs and push them outward. He would then slow his heart rate, so that his heart would match the kick. About twenty minutes later, it will drift back to the surface.

Abu Mrad says Fela gave Daily the opportunity to move beyond the suffering of his youth — “to break out of that cage and be free, at least as long as he was playing this song.” This is the same process that united Villa fans. “Imagine a million Daily people having almost the same experience,” Abu Murad continues. “Like atoms, one small explosion collides with another, with the next, with the next, until you have a cascade of energy, which creates something much larger.” Subsequent episodes delve into how Villa’s specific musical techniques—ostinatos that spin around and around, often for fifteen minutes—induce a kind of flow state in listeners, preparing them for the words, when they finally appear. “Your neurons are rewired,” says Abu Murad. “You’re opening up. And at this very moment Vela starts singing.”

What Fela sang was something people needed to hear. Between 1973 and 1979, Fela released a “firehose” of new music—more than twenty albums, followed by many more. His lyrics and behavior mocked authority (as in “Expensive Show Off” and “Stealing Power”) and said the unsayable (as in “Hustle and Shrug” about the ways in which religion might encourage people to accept injustice, rather than resist). The audience reacted with joy, relief and a feeling of liberation. Nigeria was ruled by a violent military dictatorship, with soldiers taking to the streets and carrying out public executions on the beach. In Lagos, Fela declared his club, The Shrine, and his local compound and recording studio, the Republic of Kalakuta, a sovereign state independent of Nigeria. That nation had its own atmosphere and rules. Fela worked and lived with a formidable group of dancers and singers known as the “Queens” (in 1978’s “Stunt”, twenty-seven of them were married at once); At the shrine, they were dressed in theatrical costumes and visually stunning. Marijuana was largely illegal in Nigeria — half a pill could put you in jail — but if you entered the shrine “it was this alternate universe,” says Lisa Lindsay, a professor of West African history. “People were dancing and people were getting stoned. It was a complete contrast to how scared the people were outside.”

The other side of this freedom was the state’s response. Abu Murad says that Villa was arrested a hundred times. There were constant cycles of provocation and retaliation: Fela would respond to injustice by singing about it; The authorities will harass him and his people. He was singing about it. In 1976, Fela released a Molotov cocktail song called “Zombies” that mocked soldiers as unthinking automatons. In the show’s ninth episode, set the following year, everything comes to a head. Soldiers descend on the Republic of Kalakuta, and Fela, ever defiant, climbs onto a balcony and plays “Zombie” on his saxophone. It’s a stunning image, followed by scenes of unimaginable horror – Villa’s elderly mother thrown out of a window, the rape of Queens, Villa’s brutalization, the burning of the compound – remembered by the people who survived it. After the raid, the state reclaimed Villa’s land and closed the shrine, but it returned. “They’re killing my mother,” we hear him sing, choked with emotion on “The Unknown Soldier.” He continued to fight for another twenty years, until his death, due to complications from the disease AIDSin 1997.

music feel As Abu Murad explains, it can change the world. Sometimes it actually can: Fela’s mother’s singing marchers, in 1947, helped overthrow a local tyrant. But often they can work in more humble ways – to inspire us, console us, and give us courage. In later episodes, we hear about young Nigerian activists inspired by Fela’s music; Then we hear about a 2020 youth-led protest in Lagos that led to a massacre. Cycles and repetition, in music and in history, can be narcotic, healing, or both. In the final episode, during a visit to Lagos, Abu Murad is astonished by the constant presence of “all the things Fela used to whine about – poverty, lack of infrastructure, state neglect,” and also by the cheerfulness and sense of humor of the locals, including Fela’s relatives. Abu Murad says that struggle and joy “coexist and then repeat endlessly, over and over again, like cycles of music.” He concludes that our choice is simple: “Which part of the groove will you move to?” ♦