Some American

Song of the Day  |  Fela Kuti & the Afrika 70 - “Gentleman”

*(Apologies for the homemade YouTube music video - the song’s mp3 was too large for the Internet.)

Knitting Factory Records is reissuing the work of the great Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and has begun that process by releasing a package of his earlier work, dubbed the “Chop’N Quench” batch. Covering 9 albums-worth of the Afrobeat guru’s earliest output from 1969 to 1974.

Fela Kuti is akin to the classics of great literature for those who claim to appreciate music: he is a landmark, a required stop, and if you have not dived into his transcendent music, you might as well forsake Moby Dick or Crime and Punishment, too. His and his band Afrika 70’s furious blend of Nigerian juju, West African highlife, American jazz and funk music was authentically their own creation, a new music to accompany a new awakening of African identities in the immediate post-colonial period of nascent, turbulent independence. Interwoven melodies, Fela’s strident politics, and the most indescribably irresistible rhythms in 20th century music - courtesy of Africa 70 drummer, Tony Allen, without whom Fela said “there would be no Afrobeat” - propelled the man and his music to international prominence, the most important musician in Africa.

Fela took on the crimes and misconceptions of both Westerners and old colonial masters as well as the evils of the African, specifically Nigerian, politicians who assumed power after independence in 1960. The song “Gentleman” takes on both groups, with Fela wondering why African men aspiring to the styles and customs of their former ‘gentlemen’ masters would wear stifling Western-style suits in the oppressive African heat, when “he go sweat, all over / he go faint, right down / he go smell, like shit”. Fela, as he declares, “I no be gentleman like dat / I be Africa man, original.” The original 1973 cover art featured a baboon wearing a tux. The musical arrangement is tight and intricate, but wild. Jazzy interludes of horns, drums, and organ rise and fall throughout the song’s fifteen minutes. Fela was an undoubted talent at the keys, but when his tenor sax player left earlier in the year, he took up the instrument himself, demonstrating his mastery of it in a meandering, improvisatory solo at the start of the song. Fela could not be stopped, despite the later attempts of a thousand Nigerian soldiers to kill him and destroy his Kalakuta commune in 1977.

“Chop’N Quench” is out on Knitting Factory Records now.

(If you haven’t already, get your hands on the excellent documentary “Music Is The Weapon”.)