- Oduduwa / Were Oju Le (The Eyes Are Getting Red) - Single · 2024
- Oduduwa / Were Oju Le (The Eyes Are Getting Red) - Single · 2024
- Zombie (Themba's Herd Mix) [feat. Fela Kuti & Afrika 70] - Single · 2022
- Motherland Journey · 2021
- Dance (RED) Save Lives III [curated by Don Jazzy and Aluna] · 2021
- Stand Up (feat. fela kuti) - Single · 2021
- ITS YA BOY Donte Skate Music - EP · 2020
- The Bellyand the Beast · 2020
- Mr. Grammarticalogylisationalism Boss (Blond: Ish Remix - Edit) [feat. Fela Kuti] - Single · 2019
- Mr. Grammarticalogylisationalism Boss (Blond: Ish Remix) [feat. Fela Kuti] - Single · 2019
- Galactic · 2018
- Favorite Season · 2016
- Finding Fela - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack · 2014
Essential Albums
- Like Sly Stone in America, Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti understood that the secret to protest music isn’t getting people to think so much as getting them to dance. Gentleman marked a peak of Kuti’s early ‘70s sound, mixing political commentary with simmering funk—a style as hypnotic as it was angry. A fascinating figure (proudly anticolonial, but also a polygamist who considered contraception un-African), Fela carried the contradictions of his politics into his music, a push-pull between freedom and restraint, Western influence and the total rejection thereof. “I no be gentleman at all,” Kuti sings midway through the title track, “I be Africa man original”—the presumption being that in the eyes of the European, one can’t be both.
Artist Playlists
- The King of Afrobeat mixed furious protest songs with impossibly funky grooves.
- Ecstatic highlife jams influenced by the Afrobeat pioneer.
- The Afrobeat pioneer shows his jazz roots on these rare grooves.
Appears On
More To Hear
- Honoring the political activist and pioneer of Afrobeat.
- Part 2 of Q-Tip's tribute to the great James Brown and Fela Kuti.
- Q-Tip closes out Black History Month with a tribute to James Brown and Fela Kuti.
- An episode dedicated to Sacha Baron Cohen's basketball league.
- Laid back tracks from Anderson .Paak, Fela Kuti, and Kari Faux.
About Fela Kuti
Fela Kuti’s influence is so immense that even the sprawling African continent can’t contain it. During his heyday in the ’70s, the Nigerian bandleader revolutionised African pop with a genre dubbed Afrobeat—a potent blend of Yoruba rhythms, American funk and scathing social commentary that rattled his country’s postcolonial order and still reverberates worldwide today. Born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti in Abeokuta in 1938, Kuti grew up listening to regional stars like Victor Olaiya and Geraldo Pino, borrowing from their breezy highlife when he started his first band in the early ’60s. But at the end of the decade he took a more radical turn, embracing James Brown-style funk and pan-African politics for his new group, Africa ’70. Kuti’s most famous albums—like 1975’s Expensive Shit and 1977’s Zombie—combine piercing lyrics sung in pidgin English with invigorating horn riffs and marathon grooves, and in all-night performances at his legendary Lagos club The Shrine he would challenge listeners to think while goading them to the dance floor. Kuti’s prolific output included collaborations with Western artists like Cream drummer Ginger Baker, and in the ’80s, Kuti moved into denser, jazzier territory with a new backing band, Egypt 80. Although his huge personality and frequent confrontations with the authorities occasionally overshadowed his musical innovations, Kuti’s legacy following his 1997 death has lived on through a wide range of Afrobeat torchbearers—including his sons Femi and Seun, his grandson Made and groups like New York’s Antibalas and Berlin’s Afrobeat Academy.
- HOMETOWN
- Abeokuta, Nigeria
- BORN
- 15 October 1938
- GENRE
- Worldwide