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“In a globe ablaze, what action can we take with artistry?” Jad Abumrad questions at the outset of his fresh podcast series, “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man,” a profoundly researched and aurally magnificent biography of the celebrated Nigerian artist, Afrobeat groundbreaker, and insurgent. “Like, what role can melody fulfill?” Abumrad goes on to say. “Can it genuinely alter events? Like, truly transform the universe?” Abumrad, among our most unique podcast producers, is a fitting leader through Fela Kuti’s narrative. On “Radiolab,” the public-broadcasting science program that Abumrad originated, co-anchored, and remarkably designed with sound for approximately two decades, he and his group flourished at rendering copious amounts of intricate data digestible for a broad listenership, even when occasionally overdoing the spectacular elements. Essential to the show’s excellence and excess was Abumrad’s eagerness for manipulating sound, arranging and echoing segments to impressive effect. He and Fela Kuti, who may appear to possess minimal similarities, both revel in an enchanting rhythm.
Beginning in the early seventies up until his demise, in 1997, Fela, as everyone references him in the series, generated immensely favored tunes with catchy rhythms and intensely disrespectful verses, kindling courage—illogical bravery, as one interviewee remembers—and political defiance in listeners within and beyond Nigeria. Abumrad and his associates dedicated three years to examining the production, journeying to Lagos, L.A., Paris, and London to absorb what persists of Fela’s domain, encompassing accounts and insights from band members, companions, and family (among them the Nobel recipient Wole Soyinka, his relative). The outcome is a breathtaking eight-hour venture into Fela’s existence and music—and into turbulent post-colonial Nigeria, wherein we catch glimpses of our own precarious period.
Thus, how should this story be conveyed? Just like Fela himself, it’s intricate. Abumrad’s previous significant production, the excellent “Dolly Parton’s America,” from 2019, was another depiction of a musician with a political context. However, that framework centered on unification; the show’s main inquiry was, “In a heavily fractured nation, why is Dolly the solitary element we all concur on?” Fela’s story—overflowing with brutality, dispute, self-indulgence, “an abundance of chaotic material”—revolves around friction. Some exists between the musical and governmental customs of Africa and the West; much lies between the influential and the disenfranchised.
Fela entered the world into a notable Nigerian lineage in 1938, during British colonial governance. His grandfather authored Anglican hymns and converted them into Yoruba, his clergyman father acted as a school headmaster, and his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, evolved into a women’s-rights pioneer. (Within the podcast, a chorus affectingly recreates Yoruba chants formerly executed by demonstrators she guided.) Young Fela played saxophone and vocalized; when Nigeria proclaimed freedom from England, in 1960, he resided in London, studying at Trinity College of Music. Subsequent to creating a band that merged jazz and West African highlife, he briefly toured in the U.S., where he was exposed to the Black Power movement. This marked the genesis of Afrobeat: a genre that amalgamated jazz, the funk and soul of performers like James Brown, the polyrhythms and vocal intonations of Yoruba music, and the potent terminology of dissent that Fela had imbibed from Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
The remaining portion of Fela’s story largely depicts a cat-and-mouse pursuit, succeeded by an outright clash, between artistry and the state, Fela and the establishment. One of the series’ great hurdles involves maintaining listeners’ engagement with a dense, winding narrative—and, initially, persuading us that we ought to be engaged. The show is “presented” by Audible and the Obamas’ organization Higher Ground, and the premiere episode exudes a recognizable sense of storytelling unease. (Last year, “The Wonder of Stevie,” co-created by Higher Ground, exerted significant effort to convince us of Stevie Wonder’s already apparent magnificence.) “Fela” commences with a selection of prominent pro-Fela endorsements, by figures including Brian Eno, Flea, Questlove, Jay-Z, David Byrne, Ayo Edebiri, and Paul McCartney, who recounts crying at a Fela performance in Lagos in 1973. Barack Obama, who sounded elated on “The Wonder of Stevie,” materializes dutifully, in top-button-unfastened, man-of-the-people persona. “Melody akin to Fela’s can not just stimulate individuals to groove, get them on their feet, but it additionally causes them to perceive themselves as alive,” he articulates, accurately. “Our premier art and our superior music awaken the spirit.”
Abumrad trails these endorsements with a “prologue”: a tale from the seventies, wherein we encounter Fela, a worldwide icon, through the perceptions of a Nigerian high-school student. The prologue constitutes a slight gamble—we lack genuine comprehension of the situation thus far—but a worthwhile one. The student, Dele Sosimi, presently stands at sixty-two. Throughout the unsettled period following Nigeria’s autonomy, his father, a bank inspector poised to uncover evidence of misappropriation, was murdered, via pickaxe, by individuals who attacked the family’s residence at midnight. Dele, twelve, discovered him in the hallway, in blood-drenched sleepwear. “He was utterly ravaged,” Dele states, choking up. Through a school acquaintance, Dele subsequently encountered Fela, who pledged to seek monetary aid for Dele’s kin. “My life simply shifted,” Dele reflects. By seventeen, he had enrolled in Fela’s ensemble; he ultimately ascended to Afrobeat stardom in his own capacity. The conversation unfolds in London, preceding one of his shows.
The prologue additionally grants Abumrad the chance to introduce a core theme regarding Fela’s artistry: his aptitude for conjuring a transporting auditory realm. Abumrad’s cherished sound manipulations frequently incorporate reverberating or analogous bits of tape, and both he and Fela display no hesitation in exploring the fantastical. There existed evenings, Abumrad recounts, when the ensemble would perform a composition that would endure for longer than an hour, or when “Dele would immerse himself in a solitary riff that he would simply have to persist in performing,” repetitively, in the exact manner. (One improvisation purportedly extended to twenty-four hours.) Did the recurrence drive Dele insane? “Absolutely not,” Dele affirms. Abumrad characterizes Dele’s approach:
He would perceive his physique calming. His respiration would decelerate. He would direct his awareness inward to his own lungs and then simulate pushing against the boundaries of his lungs, thrusting them outward. And subsequently, he would diminish his heart rate, until his heart corresponded with the beat. And following approximately twenty minutes of that, he would then gradually return to the facade.
Fela, Abumrad asserts, provided Dele with the chance to transcend the anguish of his youth—“to break out of that confines and find liberty, at least for the span that he performed that riff.” This embodies the identical mechanism that united Fela’s audience. “Envision a million Deles undergoing virtually the identical experience,” Abumrad continues. “Like atoms, one minute explosion impacts the next, then the subsequent, until you possess a surge of energy, that engenders something substantially larger.” Subsequent episodes delve into how Fela’s precise musical methodologies—ostinatos looping repeatedly, frequently for fifteen minutes—elicit within listeners a form of flow state, preparing them for the lyrics, upon their eventual emergence. “Your neurons undergo rewiring,” Abumrad articulates. “You stand receptive. And it is at this precise juncture that Fela initiates singing.”
What Fela vocalized resonated with a deep need in the populace. Between 1973 and 1979, Fela unleashed a “fire hose” of novel compositions—surpassing two dozen albums, pursued by numerous more. His lyrics, and his conduct, derided the authorities (as demonstrated in “Expensive Shit” and “Authority Stealing”) and voiced the unspeakable (as evidenced in “Shuffering and Shmiling,” regarding the manners in which religion could embolden individuals to accept injustice, instead of retaliating). The audience reacted with jubilation, alleviation, a sensation of liberation. Nigeria existed under the rule of a brutal military government, with soldiers patrolling the streets and public executions taking place on the beach. In Lagos, Fela proclaimed his club, the Shrine, and his residential compound and recording studio, the Kalakuta Republic, as a self-governing nation, independent from Nigeria. That nation possessed its distinct ambiance and regulations. Fela collaborated and resided with a remarkable assembly of dancers and singers recognized as the Queens (in a 1978 “stunt,” he wedded twenty-seven of them simultaneously); at the Shrine, they appeared theatrically adorned and visually striking. Marijuana was profoundly illicit in Nigeria—half a joint could land you in prison—but venture into the Shrine “and it transforms into this alternate reality,” Lisa Lindsay, a professor specializing in the chronicles of West Africa, remarks. “Individuals dancing and people profoundly intoxicated. And it stood as such a divergence from the pervasive dread outside.”
The reverse aspect of this autonomy lay in the state’s reprisal. Fela was apprehended, Abumrad states, on a hundred instances. There occurred persistent cycles of provocation and consequence: Fela would address injustice via musical expression; the authorities would harass him and his followers; he would then vocalize regarding that. In 1976, Fela launched a volatile composition, “Zombie,” which mocks soldiers as mindless automatons. In the show’s ninth installment, transpiring in the subsequent year, circumstances reach a climax. Soldiers descend upon the Kalakuta Republic, and Fela, consistently defiant, approaches a balcony and performs “Zombie” on his saxophone. It presents an astounding depiction, followed by scenes of indescribable horror—Fela’s aged mother propelled out of a window, Queens subjected to rape, Fela subjected to mistreatment, the compound incinerated—recalled by individuals who endured it. In the aftermath of the raid, the state reclaimed Fela’s land and sealed off the Shrine—yet he reappeared once more. “Them kill my mama,” we overhear him singing, overcome with emotion, on “Unknown Soldier.” He persisted in resisting for an additional twenty years, until his passing, from complications related to AIDS, in 1997.
Melody can feel transformative, Abumrad demonstrates throughout. Occasionally, it genuinely proves so: Fela’s mother’s singing demonstrators, in 1947, contributed to unseating a local oppressor. Nevertheless, it frequently functions in subtler manners—to galvanize, console, bestow us with valor. In subsequent episodes, we gain insight into young Nigerian activists ignited by Fela’s sound; subsequently, we become aware of a 2020 youth-driven demonstration in Lagos that culminated in a massacre. Cycles and repetitions, in music and within history, can be enervating, therapeutic, or both. Within the concluding episode, during a sojourn to Lagos, Abumrad finds himself affected by the ongoing prevalence of “all the elements that Fela had been condemning—poverty, deficient infrastructure, governmental negligence,” and additionally by the levity and humor of the inhabitants, inclusive of Fela’s kin. Tribulation and elation, Abumrad states, are “coexisting and then reiterating endlessly, repeatedly, analogous to the rhythms of the music.” Our decision, he deduces, remains uncomplicated: “Which segment of the rhythm will you embrace?” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
