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.
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