 Fela Kuti If I were held at gunpoint and forced to choose one CD to take with me into exile on a distant planet, I would be faced with one of life's most difficult decisions. Since I'm not in that situation right now, I will only say that this CD would be in strong contention to accompany me in my intergalactic journey – I'm not sure I can call it my "favorite album" or "desert island disc" or whatever, but it's the music I think that I absolutely love the very most. Listening to it is the most thoroughly sumptuous experience, it makes great opera seem like the sounds of the humpback whale. Completely musical, deeply grooved, and entrancing, it's the kind of music that makes everything else disappear while it's playing. Few artists knock me out so completely, and leave me in total awe. Fela Kuti is one of those rare artists, and this album probably knocks me out most of all. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if Fela did get in the position of being forced at gunpoint to choose his essential album – certainly the guy had about every other conceivable personal violation committed against him during his very long, enormously popular career as an entertainer and agitator. Fela's music was a politicized, personalized fusion of Black nationalist funk and soul-jazz – tight horns, call-and-response chorus, exhausting track lengths, spacey keyboards, spellbinding percussion, and bold words, words that often got Fela in deeper trouble than he got in to make his previous album. Each successive album chronicled his struggle against the Nigerian military government, which sought every opportunity to shut him down. The only comparable musician in American music would be Elvis Presley, if Elvis had Abbie Hoffman's politics and James Brown's simmering anger. Expensive Shit details an arrest in which Fela was detained on suspicion of consuming a package of marijuana, and held under supervision until he passed the aforementioned expensive shit. Stories differ on what actually happened – whether he was clean, or whether he somehow managed to get rid of it without the police knowing – but in any case, the preposterousness of the whole scenario makes for a very charged recording. The anger on this record is more mischievous than later recordings like Coffin For Head of State, which are weighted with a greater gravity commensurate with increasingly more tragic events in Fela's life. Also, the music on the mid-70s albums is more heavily funky, whereas the later-70's stuff has more of a contemplative feel, though the funky element is always there. Expensive Shit and He Miss Road are much more dance-oriented, much more percussive (both are great examples of Tony Allen's amazing style, which served as the backbone to Africa 70 for many years – Allen was Bootsy to Fela's James Brown, as well). It's a very spacious, less overt kind of funk, almost an inverted version of American funk, which is a good deal more expressive. Fela's Afrobeat is supersoft but intense, boiling under the surface and occasionally exploding outward to let you know what is rising underneath. It's exceedingly subtle and consequently, multifaceted in offering new things with repeat visitations to Fela's sound world. The liner notes don't offer any credits, but I think that Ginger Baker produced He Miss Road, a long Fela album at three tracks. As with the other two-fer reissues in Barclay France's "Fela Originals" series, this one is well paired, with each album lending a lot to the other and forging a unit: in this case, Fela '75. His style is in full maturity at this point in his career, and it's one of the great peaks in a career that didn't have many artistic valleys, despite an inordinate amount of personal loss. It's too bad that Fela gets lumped together with "world music" artists and, outside of a pretty small circle of very serious music fans, doesn't get nearly his due in this country. A thousand years from now his music may well be ruling the galaxy. In which case I'll be well prepared on the icy moon they have exiled me to, as I listen to this incredible CD and know that tremendous injustice can lead to indestructible art.
Review by Jacob Ocular-Migraine |
