Joe Tangari reviews
Femi Kuti's
The Best of Femi Kuti.
Being born of greatness has its perks, I'm sure, but it seems it's mostly a burden. How does Jakob Dylan even get up in the morning knowing he's doomed to be judged against his father every time he writes a song or cuts a record? There are hundreds of children of musical giants roaming around the industry these days, working with varying degrees of success to carve out their own names separate from their parents-- Zak Starkey, the Lennon half-brothers, Moreno Veloso, Eric Mingus, and the various offspring of Charlie Haden, to name just a few. Femi Kuti is in this same position, perhaps dealing with an even more insurmountable legacy. As far as African music goes, his father Fela wasn't just Bob Dylan; to continue an imperfect analogy, he was also Bob Marley and John Coltrane, and that doesn't even take into account his political impact.
Femi of course is acutely aware of his father's towering legacy, and seems content to extend it, realizing that trying to equal it is impossible, regardless of genes. Femi had something of a head start, playing sax in his father's Egypt 80 bands for close to two decades, assuming leadership of it during his father's various politically motivated imprisonments. Though he had performed his own right for years, he only released his first solo album, Shoki Shoki, in 1998, a year after Fela's death from AIDS, in effect picking up the torch his father finally had to let fall. In the time since then he's recorded another album, contributed to records by Common (Like Water for Chocolate) and Rachid Taha (Made in Medina), opened up the Afrika Shrine, a successor to his father's iconic Lagos nightclub, and founded an organization aimed at galvanizing and educating working-class Africans, all of this between multiple world tours.
So to say he's a busy, conscientious guy is something of an understatement. He may be the son of a legend, but Femi Kuti has paid his dues to arrive where he is, and now Wrasse Records has released this compilation of material drawn from his two studio albums as an introduction. Given that it's a 70-minute disc drawing from only two albums, you can imagine that it includes the bulk of both records and it does. Being familiar with both records, I really can't think of any of the usual wounded-critic objections to the track selection-- a better introduction to Femi's modern take on Afrobeat isn't in the offing.
Read MorePlease Visit Echoes of the Land aStore
Nigerian musician Femi Kuti was recently in Britain as part of the third African Soul Rebels tour.
Femi burns with conviction that music can have a social impact. “What I do is communication,” he told Socialist Worker. “My music says the struggle is not over. Africa still has a very long way to go, but the fight is on.”
His father Fela Kuti was a seminal African musician and a powerful political focus in Nigeria in the 1970s.
Influenced by the Black Power movement in the US, Fela developed Afrobeat – a fusion of different styles of African music with jazz and funk.
A long series of albums denounced the state and led to continual raids from the Nigerian state, beatings and imprisonment. Fela died in 1997.
Femi’s music is smoother and less confrontational than his father’s – but it is still overtly political.
Read MorePlease Visit Echoes of the Land aStore
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti. But, in the run-up to the annual "Fela-bration" in Lagos, his eldest son and chief musical heir is in no mood to reminisce. "There's so much in my father's life," says Femi Kuti. "Just his musical works you could listen to all year long. But I don't want to be derailed. I have it at the back of my mind, and I just use it as a strength to keep me grounded."
In the 1970s, Fela Kuti pioneered the exhilarating meld of horn-driven jazz, funk and west African highlife that took James Brown's soul beat "back to Africa". For more than 20 years he played to thousands in his famous Lagos club, the Shrine. But his politically inflected lyrics brought clashes with successive military regimes in Nigeria, including frequent beatings and jail. In one raid in 1977 on Fela's walled compound - his self-declared "republic of Kalakuta" - his mother died of her injuries after being thrown from a window by soldiers.
Femi Kuti rebuilt the New Afrika Shrine in 2000, after it was closed down the previous year following harassment from the landlord, and he plays three free concerts there a week. He also founded, in 1998, the student-based Movement Against Second Slavery (Mass) to push for social change. Although he has been less confrontational with the government than his father, his appearance to many as Fela's reincarnation has drawn attacks in the Nigerian press for "standing by my father's legacy".
Read MorePlease Visit Echoes of the Land aStore
