RIP Dusty Hill, bassist for ZZ Top

  

(from Wikipedia)

 

Joseph Michael "Dusty" Hill (May 19, 1949 – July 28, 2021) was an American musician, singer, and songwriter, best known as the bassist and secondary lead vocalist of the American rock group ZZ Top; he also played keyboards with the band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a member of ZZ Top, in 2004.

 

 

Chris Prior introduced me to ZZ Top in the late ‘70s, when the SABC’s English Service employed him and when I subsequently saw Tejas (1976) in my local record store I bought the album, followed by Deguello (1979), Fandango(1975) and Trés Hombres (1973.) I acquired ZZ Top’s First Album (1971) and Rio Grande Mud (1972) much later as a part of the ZZ Top Sixpack collection of the first five albums and El Loco (1980.) I have no idea why Deguello wasn’t part of the six.  That was it for me regarding ZZ Top. I had little fondness for their ‘80s mega hit period, and simply had no interest in the even later stuff. For me, as with so many bands that came up in the ‘780s, the music that ZZ Top released on those first five albums are the canon and as much ZZ Top one needs in one’s life.

 

I also read a bit about the band, particularly a piece on their “Taking Texas to the People” concert tour in the mid-‘70s,  in the US rock monthly, Hit Parader, and elsewhere and realised how often musicians tend to go through many bands, and even line ups in the same band, before they strike paydirt. It seems that ZZ Top’s success came from some hit singles but mainly from non-stop touring to build a loyal fanbase.

 

I’ve heard a couple of cover versions of “Tush” and in Cape Town’s blues rock scene of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s “La Grange” was a popular number on a couple of bands’ set lists.

 

Apart from “Brown Sugar,” the debut album sounds too tentative and self-effacing and it’s only from Rio Grande Mud that the Top hits its stride, with classics like “Francene,” “Just Got Paid” and “Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell,”  and the following three albums are the results of a creative purple patch.

 

If your taste is ‘70s style blues rock, with rather more blues than rock, and with gospel and country asides, then ZZ Top is arguably the ultimate example of how it can be done extremely well.

 

Dusty Hill held down the bass spot, sang some, co-wrote some tunes and played some keyboards and was an equal contributor to the sound and ethos of the band that managed to survive and thrive as a 3-piece for the duration of their career. 

 

Apparently, ZZ Top will continue to tour in 2021, with a new bassist, and I suppose the sound will be pretty much unaltered with only the visual  anomaly at live performances, that the guy next to Billy Gibbons (who’s been releasing sole records anyway) is not Dusty. I have no ideas whether the new guy also has a huge beard.  It’s relatively easy, for seasoned pros, to replicate the music of an iconic band member they might replace, and Billy Gibbons’  guitar sound and vocals remain intact, but it’s the visual incongruity that will jar.

 

So, you’ve probably gone too soon, Dusty Hill, but your eminent stature in rock and roll history and iconography will never be tarnished and will live forever.

 

The Smiths are just ardinary

Along with REM, The Smiths are probably the top ‘80s band I don’t get, have never liked and fail to understand why they were so popular and how Morrissey has managed to sustain his music career over the past 35 years.

 

I understand that The Smiths quickly became critics’ darlings and were heavily punted and that part of this adoration might have been fuelled and stroked by Morrissey’s media savvy, seeing as how he’d once been a provincial correspondent for the NME. He certainly made a highly noticeable, interesting and even controversial frontman. The lyrics of Smiths’ songs were also quite literate in, when one listens closely, repetitive way. 

 

I heard “Reel Around the Fountain” and “Hand In Gove” on a few Radio 5 (as it then was) shows back in the day, and was moderately entertained by them though the  busy, arpeggiated guitar style (not unlike early REM) didn’t appeal much, I didn’t care for Morrissey’s voice and found the lyrics pretentious.  I wasn’t persuaded to go out to buy their records. The band didn’t seem all that special to me.

 

it was only from reading the NME and The Face that I realised that The Smiths had become a far bigger deal in the UK than I would’ve expected. A couple of years after their break out, the C86 generation of jangly guitar pop bands made their mainstream appearance and seemed to be the most pervasive pop rock sound of the day, yet none of them reached the heights of stardom, acceptance and adulation that The Smiths apparently did.

 

I took note of the various Smiths’ albums that my local record store stocked, especially Meat is Murder, whose title track was the best Smiths song I’d heard on the radio  and passed them by. For ‘80s UK rock I preferred The Cult and U2, and otherwise cast my eyes towards the USA.

 

The other day I watched two clips, well, part of one and most of the other, of The Smiths performing live. The longer clip, at over an hour, was of a concert at the Passeo de Camoens in Madrid in 1985. The shorter clip, at less than 15 minutes, was of a performance on the Channel 4 show The Tube in 1984. 

 

The performance on The Tube is by a young band, just making it’s mark, though Johnny Marr is utterly self -assured on guitar and Morrissey’s weird, awkward floppy dancing could only be done by someone who is supremely confident or just high. A bunch of daffodils stick out of the back pocket of Morrissey’s loose jeans and his shirt is equally baggy. He must have been extremely thin.

 

Mike Joyce keep good time on the drums and Andy Rourke concentrates intently on his bass playing, which is a nice, almost melodic, rhythmic counterpoint to the guitar filigrees Marr plays. Clearly, the rhythm section are not the stars of the show.

 

The audience of hip ‘80s kids in their terribly dated hip ‘80s clothes and hairstyles is rapt and dances enthusiastically while the band performs four or five tunes.

 

It must have been better when one was in the audience than watching  the video so many years later. Marr’s guitar style, although he’s obviously technically very able, lacks punch and the convoluted melodies Morrissey croons in a voice almost devoid of modulation, except for the excitable yelps he makes every now and then, aren’t very catchy at all.

 

The concert at a much large venues and for a much large audience, is when The Smiths were at their pomp but the music sound pretty much like it did on The Tube. Morrisey’s famous quiff is hidden under a hat and he wears glasses but his pants and shirt are still loose and his awkward dancing and arm gestures are still present and correct.

 

As I’ve mentioned, I could sit through only a few songs before I gave up. It might be that the sound quality isn’t of the best but the general impression is that the music is kind of anaemic, almost diffident and with almost no force or drive and Morrissey’s almost emotionless, whiny vocal style starts grating too soon for comfort.

 

Somehow, the band impressed enough journalists to be heavily punted and captured something of the zeitgeist of the audience it drew, to become a phenomenon, a cultural icon and an influence beyond its immediate impact. I don’t get it, but I will accept that, like REM, I might not have been the target market and simply did not have the emotional need for this kind of music.

 

Over the past few years I’ve had a couple of projects where I listened to all the albums of various groups or individuals, in order of release, either because it’s an act whose music I’ve always liked but never got around to buying all, or any, of their records, especially rock acts from my teenage years and twenties, or bands I’ve never rated (Uriah Heep, for example) just so I could hear what I’d missed out on, or had happily ignored. The Smiths was one such project and I don’t think I got beyond the debut album.  The music just didn’t engage me in any sustainable fashion.

 

Perhaps I should attempt investigation the oeuvre again, and persist.

 

There is a another generation of jangly, melodic, guitar based bands (of which Two Door Cinema Club  is a prime example) that might have been influenced by The Smiths and their twee, anaemic sound also grates on my ears. It’s all quite proficient, with high production values and plenty earnestness, but  there is no visceral attraction.

 

I did buy Beethoven Was Deaf (1993), a Morrissey live album, some years after its release, because it was cheap and because I’d read that he was backed by a rockabilly band of sorts and this seemed to me to suggest a tougher, more agreeable sound than The Smiths  provided, and I was right.  Morrissey’s vocals were still quite dispassionate and his melodies were as oblique as ever but the tough band behind him elevated the tunes and provided the requisite visceral element that can make recordings of live shows such compelling listening.

 

Having said that, this album also didn’t motivate me to seek out Morrissey’s studio albums. His music is an acquired taste I doubt that I’ll ever acquire no matter how hard I try.

 

 

 

Bob Seger

Bob Seger’s huge 1976 hit, “Night Moves,” a heartfelt, moving, rock ballad was my first exposure to his music. I might have read about him before, perhaps in Hit Parader  magazine, but knew very little of him before his purple patch of late Seventies hits, establishing him as a gruff, ‘authentic’ rocker with a sentimental streak. Later, I read bits of his history as Detroit rocker, struggling and hustling as a local legend, until he formed the Silver Bullet Band, released a live album and made his breakthrough with  chart topping tunes like “Night Moves.” 

 

It was the typical American success story of an artist who remains true to himself and his vision of his art, struggling all the time and never giving up, making only the most minor of compromises, initially out on his own, despite a local following, out of step with the mainstream until the mainstream comes into step with him, after which he reaps the rich rewards.

 

At the time, I wasn’t interested in buying any of the contemporary releases because the radio hits suggested to me that I wouldn’t actually appreciate his brand of heartland rock because I thought he’d mellowed out and that the ballad was his strong suit now that he was older. In terms of heartland rock and roll, I preferred John Mellencamp.

Somewhere along the way, in the Eighties, I found, Smokin’ OP’s, his 1972 collection of cover versions (except for a re-recording of a Detroit hit “Heavy Music”) in a bargain bin somewhere. I’d read enough of his history by then to suspect that this record would be filed under his pre-“Night Moves” rock oeuvre, and that it might be worth investigating. The price was right, too.

 

Smokin’ OP’s is a delightful mix of up-tempo rocker and slow, reflective songs – the archetypical tough guy with a sweet, tender side – and hugely enjoyable to listen to. It’s what the Americans like to call rock and roll, as opposed to, say, heavy metal, or pop rock, with a band of professionals that have been around the block a few times and whose musical DNA contains strands of blues, funk, soul, pop, rock, country, and whatever other strains of indigenous popular music there is in the USA.

 

The rockers were familiar to me and only the slower songs like “If I Were a Carpenter.” “Hummin’ Bird” and “Someday” were previously unknown, so it’s a bit like the proverbial bar band being the human jukebox.

 

During the Nineties, I found a bargain bin copy of Live Bullet (1976), recorded in Detroit  with the Silver Bullet Band and  a neat summary of Seger’s best songs prior to the breakout success of “Night Moves” and its eponymous album. I’d read about it before and saw it hailed as allegedly one of the best live rock albums of all times.

 

Live Bullet is an excellent record of a high energy home town gig before adoring fans, with the can’t fail mix of slow songs and fast rockers.

 

“Bo Diddley,” “Heavy Music” and “Let It Rock” are reprised from Smokin’ OP’s and the other tunes represent the various stages of Seger’s recording career before his commercial breakthrough and is a insightful picture into music made by an artist who aspires to greater things than local success but who could achieve that larger success only by smoothing out his edges and adding superior production values to the recordings.

 

I’ve never added to this small collection of Seger music and, other than the albums preceding Night Moves, I never will. The later, more sophisticated chart rock sounds are not 100% my taste although I’ve always liked the radio hits, and with this kind of musician my interest will always be piqued far more by the earlier work, when he was still finding his way and commercial pressures, or imperative, did not inform his music. I prefer raw over smooth; rough over sophisticated; loud, fast, over mellow and reflective.

 

 

 

The Flaming Firestones Demos from August 1986

 

From January 1984 to the end of 1994 I attended just about every rock gig  I could get to in venues in and around Cape Town and most of those bands never released any recordings that I knew of. They weren’t signed to record labels and back then bands seemed not to have the money or opportunity for  recording in a studio setting and to press records, or make cassette tapes, for selling at gigs.  No-one ever mentioned any merchandise or recordings for sale from some band girlfriend at the back of the venue.

 

I always suspected that most bands would’ve recorded themselves either at rehearsals or from the sound board at live gigs, but only for themselves and not for commercial exploitation. Pity. One could make a monster compilation album from those pre-1995 “SA Rock Explosion” bands, even of only one track each.

 

The Flaming Firestones was one such band that I followed until its demise and whose music was not available to me other than attending the gigs.  At least one of their final run of shows, before breaking  up,  at the Café Royal Hotel in Church Street, Cape Town, was recorded on video, and as far as I know, is not in the public domain at all.

In fact, if you search “Flaming Firestones” on YouTube you get links to fire making apparatus, cooking and some music, but not the band of this name. The only connection is an upload of a cassette album, digitally transferred, of a gig at the Smokehouse Blues Club in Cape Town on 16 August 1991, by an ensemble called The Blue Stones, featuring Clayton Frick, Dave Ferguson (The Mavericks), Rufus Winstain (several alternative bands), Alistair Musson (Have no idea who he is/was) and Russell Weston (once drummer for All Night Radio.) The set list comprises some of the tunes played by the Flaming Firestones, and some by the Blues Broers, and is a mixture of blues standards and Clayton Frick compositions.

 

In the early ‘90s Clayton Frick led a different blues band in Cape Town but eventually left the country and pursued other ventures.  As far as I know, he still plays regularly but  presumably not as a day job.  His younger brother, John, was a founder member of the Blues Broers (still going) but also eventually left the country to go to the Netherlands were he’s been leading the John Frick Band for many years, with at least 4 albums to his credit, the latest one of which is simply credited to John Frick.

 

The other day Clayton Frick posted a brief video on Facebook, of himself doing two songs at a Blues Broers gig in the old drydock at Cape Town harbour in 1992.  After I commented on this video, he sent me copies of the Flaming Firestones’ demo recordings from August 1986.

 

The tracks are mostly standards of many a blues set list and very familiar to anyone who’s got a yen for the genre and has a good, representative collection.

 

They cover ZZ Top’s “Fool For Your Stockings” and my guess is that their version of “Fever” is influenced by Otis Waygood Blues Band’s take on it on their debut album. “Lowdown Woman” is from The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ second album.

 

Then you have the oldies but goodies like “My Babe,”  “Wang Dang Doodle,”  “Smokestack Lightning,” “Killing Floor,” “Walking by Myself,” “Diving Duck” and “Sloppy Drunk” (usually a Rob Nagel vocal and harp feature), and more.

 

 The originals “Hey Mr Coolstuff,” “Got No Love,” “Ain’t Too Late” and “Baby Done Gone” are of a piece with the blues standards and there is a seamless transition from the one to the other. 

 

The recordings present a band that’s instrumentally adept but almost too respectful of the source material yet the rhythm sections swings nicely and never plods. Rob Nagel’s fiery blues harp playing is the most impressive, virtuoso solo instrumental voice. The slight disappointment is that the vocals are foo low down in the mix to make much of an impact, though, if the vocalist is Mervyn Woolf, he already has the promise of being the great bluesman he sounded like live. 

 

When I first wrote about The Flaming Firestones, in 1997,  I mentioned that my recollection of Clayton Frick’s forceful live guitar style was that it leaned towards blues rock, but here he’s definitely more sedate and proper blues, quite lyrical in fact,  perhaps because of the slightly sterile studio situation but none the less very affecting. There’s no bombast about the performances and the respect and love for the source material Is evident.

 

The Flaming Firestones play these blues pretty straight up, without putting much of an individual, quirky stamp on the tunes, but the collection is an impressive representation of a serious band with serious intent on bringing us their take on  a beloved genre, that had seen some bounce back in the early ‘80s, but was still probably highly unfashionable  in this era of  “alternative” rock bands who, try as they might, could not make music as much fun as the rollicking, roistering live sets of the Firestones did. For me there is something incredibly satisfying about a backbeat, a wailing blues harp and a sharp, deep blues guitar solo; generally, it‘s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

 

The Blue Stones was possibly a short lived project, perhaps for  a few gigs only, and by this time the musicians had been around for a while and, if they were ever amateurish, were highly proficient. Clayton obviously knew the tunes inside out. What you get is a professional set of blues tunes played in the atmosphere of a smoky, crowded room at a time when the Smokehouse was probably the only venue for live music in Cape Town and therefore quite well supported. I can’t recall whether I was at this gig but I was at the Smokehouse pretty much each night it was open, so I might have been.  Sounds like a lot of fun, anyhow.

 

Sadly, I was not sussed enough to make contemporaneous notes of the bands I saw and my opinion of them and now I’m left with fond memories diluted over time and with no more than a general impression of the nights and the music. One of the strongest memories is of how much cigarette smoke hung in the air, so much so that at some point I was forced to hang out at an open window at the central air shaft to get some clean, cool air in my lungs. The other memory is of how large the venue was, with different areas where the punters hung out, drinking, playing pool or watching the bands, depending on their predilection.  The music has become just a blur.

 

I guess I can say much the same of The Flaming Firestones gigs, where my only specific memories are of the gigs at the Three Arts Theatre in Diep River and the final gigs at the Café Royal. This is one reason why it’s such a boon to hear these demos from 1986 as a reminder of those halcyon days; they don’t jog my mind much but they’re an assertion that those things did happen: the band did play and I was usually there. 

 

Joni Mitchell turns blue and righteous

  Blue  (1971)

Thinking about it now, the Stellenbosch Municipal Library, my favourite destination after the CNA and Sygma Records, must’ve had a progressive buyer for contemporary pop. The library offered, as to be expected, a good selection of classic music albums, some jazz and a lot of spoken word stuff, but also an excellent selection of contemporary pop and rock though always mainstream stuff.

 

The library had Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Harvest, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Déjà Vu, MU and Songs From the Wood (both by Jethro Tull), various Cat Stevens albums, and probably others I don’t recall, and. for the purpose of this piece Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon (1970) and Blue.

 

I borrowed all these records mostly from curiosity and not necessarily because I  was a fan of, for example, Cat Stevens or Jethro Tull, and because I’d read of, or heard of, some of the artists without hearing any of their music on the radio. This was specifically the case with Joni Mitchell.

 

Mitchell’s literate, confessional, folky style of music was not at all my taste when I was 12 or 13, when loud, fast was my preferred style. Over the years my taste has broadened and I can now listen to many different genres and styles with appreciation and enjoyment but when Blue was released, it was not a record I’d have paid money for or wanted in my collection. Being able to listen to it for free was a blessing and satisfied my curiosity.

 

Ladies of the Canyon was, initially, the more fun album of the two, with well-known songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock” and “The Circle Game” but Blue caught up too, and the amazing thing was that it’s tunes could be as catchy. Just as I know “Woodstock” best from its versions by Mathews Southern Comfort and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.  I know “This Flight Tonight” best in the Nazareth version, which is not a million miles away from the way Mitchell performs it on Blue.  My other favourite tracks from the latter album are “My Old Man,” “Carey,” “A Case of You” and “The last Time I Saw Richard.”

 

The impact of Blue fifty years ago is obviously no longer as visceral or intellectually appreciative when one listens to the record now but I do love the basic, and often quite tough, acoustic backdrops to the songs, Mitchell’s evocative lyrics and the way she makes them both intimate and universal. 

 

Over the years, and probably because I was a teenager in the Seventies, much of the singer songwriter era appeals to me, though not all of it, because it’s still not a genre I particularly favour, but at least partly because the backing musicians were highly proficient session people who did not rely on studio gimmicks, synthesisers or digital enhancement to make music that feels as organic and honest as the confessional lyrics of the singer songwriters. There are many musicians mining the same vein today, and it seems to me that there’s a revival, but they record in modern studios with modern techniques and, for me, the music isn’t as intimately joined to the hip with the lyrics anymore for this reason. Alternatively, when the musicians rely on simple acoustic guitar backing, the arrangements and intricacy of the melodies often make them sound incredibly twee to me and just grate on my nerves.

 

Joni Mitchell may not have the first folkie type to write in the style she perfected, or as radically progressed in her musicianship and styles, but she was pretty good at it and expressed views and emotions the younger musicians repeat today, with minor tweaks for contemporary mores and the zeitgeist, as if theirs are the very first insights into the human condition and interpersonal relationships.  Life is cyclical and every generation seems to disavow the same basic principles afresh, as if their parents never taught them anything and I guess it’s part of our maturing process  that we start out thinking that our parents are old idiots who have no comprehension of the current experience of their children or other young people, yet when the children become parents an elder citizens they, in turn, are eviscerated as old fogeys out of touch with the times.

 

Mitchell’s personal songs appeal, whether they’re strictly autobiographical or not, because they seem to be about real people and actual situations and not merely “universal” truisms that are intended to be vague enough to apply to just about anyone who listens to the song. For the Mitchell afficianado general truths, or just insights, can be extrapolated from the particular, and that’s the great strength of her work.

 

 

Afrobeat's heart is still beating

 

For me the word afrobeat will always be identified with the jazzy, polyrhythmic, guitar, keyboard and horn section compositions of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, with songs that were often longer than 15 minutes and were not unknown to take up both sides of a LP, with an instrumental first part and a second part with vocals, mostly social and/or political commentary. The tracks are hypnotic and enthralling, musically astute and intricate and the words thought provoking.

 

I’d read about Fela long before I first heard any of his music, principally in the UK music publications such as the NME, The Face  and the various other magazines that popped up in the Nineties (Q and  Select in the UK; Spin in the USA), who namechecked him often enough to emphasise to me that he was a musical leader in Africa, a pioneering anti-establishment  and alternative society figure in Nigeria and, not unlike Bob Marley, perhaps not such a great guy when it came to his treatment of women.  So, though I knew a little about the guy, his music was a mystery to me, because it wasn’t played on South African radio and I never saw his records in the local record shops.

 

My introduction to Fela came on a road trip from Cape Town to Clanwilliam in early 2000, when the driver of the vehicle tuned in to an African music show on, I think, Radio 2000, and the presenter played “Teacher, Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” all 25 minutes of it, as a tribute to Fela whose birthday it had been, or was coming up. around that time. I was entranced and captivated and the following Monday I went to The African Music Store (now defunct)  in Long Street, found the CD of the Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense album and bought it. Over the next few years I bought just about every Fela Kuti album they stocked, and each one was a stupendously great as the previous one. The only other African act whose records I collected so assiduously, once I heard them was Tinariwen, the Tuareg “desert blues”  band from Mali.

 

Like so much African music the deceptive simplicity of the repetitive  style makes the music sound samey  yet, when one listens carefully, there are crucial distinctions between songs that  quickly become individualised.

 

I never gave it much thought but, to my mind, afrobeat was so quintessentially identified with Fela that it died with him, though his drummer Tony Allen outlived him and released a bunch of records, more jazz based, that carried on the genre. I had no idea whether there were other afrobeat inflected or informed bands in Nigeria or the rest of Africa.

 

As was to be expected, I guess, also in the way some of Bob Marley’s children, and two of Muddy Waters’ sons, have become musicians (and, if they’re not actively promoting their fathers’ music, they’re at least active in the same genre), two of Fela’s sons, Femi and Seun, lead afrobeat bands though their approach to the music is very much, it seems, motivated by commercial concerns and the perceived sensibilities of their worldwide audience, in that the tunes are standard length and do not run to 15 or 25 minutes. Afrobeat-lite as it were, updated for the modern audience.

 

Much to my surprise, during 2020, I came across Newen Afrobeat from Chile on YouTube, who played a mixture of Fela covers and their own interpretation of afrobeat, and was quickly smitten. The band comprises of young men and women and the lead singer is, almost conventionally, a woman. It was exceedingly odd that an ensemble from South America would have taken up the torch from Fela and were re-popularising, or perhaps popularising for the first time in South America, Fela’s very African style. Some of their performances are, in fact, covers of Fela tunes but they also write and perform their own material in his style and with Spanish lyrics.

 

I did as cursory Wikipedia search and found a list of afrobeat bands, or bands influenced by afrobeat, and when I trawled through YouTube I came across videos of live performances by Kokoroko (featuring a female horn section) and The Young Thugs Afrobeat (hip young Nigerians), and a whole festival of Argentinean afrobeat groups.

 

It seems that afrobeat is very much alive and well and thriving, albeit not necessarily practiced by Africans.  I don’t listen to music from across the African continent but have a general interest in it, with emphasis on afrobeat, the desert blues of the Sahara region (which is also more varied than simply Tinariwen) and, of course, the older musical styles of South African Black music, with diversions into music from Zimbabwe and  Senegal, specifically Orchestra Baobab. Whose Pirate’s Choice album was probably the first music from outside South Africa or Zimbabwe I ever heard.

 

Fela Kuti and Tinariwen are the only African artists whose music I’ve made an effort to collect. The styles contrast, and Tinariwen sings in a language I don’t  understand, but both are satisfying as representations of musical and cultural idioms from a part of Africa where the two styles are not that far apart geographically if the musical styles are almost 180 degrees opposite to each other, with Tinariwen being cool and reflective, and afrobeat (Fela’s version) almost overheated and very militant. 

 

Even where, for example, Newen Afrobeat covers a Fela composition I doubt that they’d be intent on promoting the same socio-political criticism that drove Fela, unless they want to universalise his particular African viewpoint, and that for them the fascination is with the rousing polyrhythmic sound, much as so many white musicians are, or have been fascinated, with US African-American street funk from the ‘70s and attempt to replicate it.  in South Africa, since at least 1994, there have been a number of bands trying to be very funky, with jazz influences on top of the funk, but, sadly, none of them actually have the funk and  it always seemed to me that they’re playing a musician they’ve learnt to play (the formal parameters of the style) because they’re technically capable but without feeling it viscerally.

 

The various neo-afrobeat bands I’ve heard on YouTube do seem to have the chops and the emotional connection but I guess the afficianado may be able to criticise them for the same reasons I’ve mentioned above. So be it, I enjoy the performances very much and for me these bands are doing something important if only to preserve and promote the Fela Kuti legacy.