Afrobeat

Afrobeat developed in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and blends elements of Yoruba music, jazz and funk rhythms with an instrumentation that emphasizes African percussion and vocal styles.

Afrobeat was pioneered by Fela Kuti, a Nigerian bandleader and instrumentalist whose musical ideas and political ideals formed the core of Afrobeat's aesthetic as it appeared in the 1960s. Kuti's experience with Highlife music in the Koola Lobitos Band moved Kuti to include the African pop-jazz hybrid as one of the primary influences upon the new style.

Afrobeat elements

Some common elements of Afrobeat:
- Big bands: Performing forces requiring many performers on a variety of different instruments.
- Energy: Fast tempi combined with polyrhythmic percussion.
- Repetition: The continual deployment of some musical cell in a repetitive pattern.
- Improvisation: Spontaneous creation of music within a set of parameters that may place melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic restrictions.
- Mixed genre: Seamless integration of several musical styles.

Afrobeat evolved during the 1960s in southern Nigeria and drew some of its inspiration from the free jazz movement. Fela Anikulapo Kuti took African harmonic and rhythmic concepts and surrounded them with the musical trappings of Highlife, free jazz, and other contemporary musical genres to create the sound.

As is often the case with Afrocentric genres of music, politics play a role in the subject matter of many Afrobeat songs, which in turn serve as part musical expression and part social commentary. Fela Kuti, in his songs, adopted a stance opposed to the contemporary African political climate of the 1960s, broaching topics as diverse and military corruption and national sovereignty, which resonated across much of the continent. This resonance spurred a blossoming number of Afrobeat performers throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and although much of this music was recorded, evidence of those performances is now scarce.

Afrobeat uprising: the musicians fighting against a tide of sugary pop

West Africa's biggest musical export may be Afropop, but there is a movement to revive big band music with a political spirit

Once upon a time, Lagos was the city where Afrobeat stars such as Fela Kuti and Fatai Rolling Dollar cast musical spells under tropical skies. Backed by dozen-strong live bands, their words incited live crowds into, musically speaking, launching Molotov cocktails at the palace doors.

Nowadays, a flood of sugary Auto-Tuned anthems threatens to drown that rich musical heritage, but a small but growing group of musicians is fighting against the tide. West Africa's biggest musical export may now be politically vacuous afropop, but some among the upcoming generation want to return to socially conscious music.

Often singing in pidgin and taking their cue from traditional religions, music and instruments, they meet each month in the grounds of a former colonial prison where the British tortured and hanged those who agitated for freedom.

"Afrobeat is more than just music, it's a movement. It's about politics, economics – all of that, in musical form," said Seun Kuti, who grew up playing alongside his father, Fela, at his famous nightclub, the Shrine. Authorities razed the original site as Fela's popularity grew on the back of songs that wove trance-inducing beats with a searing take on local realities. And though Seun continues to play at a renovated Shrine, Afrobeat music today draws its biggest crowds in Europe and America rather than at home.

The monthly Afropolitan Vibes night aims to revive a spirit of rebellion.

"Until recently, we artists would all have to meet in Europe – we'd go to Paris, London, Berlin, to record," said the event's dreadlocked creator, Ade Bantu. "The whole idea of Afropolitan Vibes is to bring it back to ourselves. We want to take all the complexity and coolness of being African, and to connect it to the realities on the ground."

On a recent Saturday night, several-hundred sweating, foot-stomping, cheering fans watched Bantu open a show. "As a Nigerian, it's almost your birthright and responsibility to know and study Fela's musical genius. This is one of the few places trying to keep the tradition of the Shrine alive," said audience member Tara Hecksher , as the crowd was wreathed in pungent smoke and palm wine flowed.

Fela Kuti: Chronicle of A Life Foretold

By Lindsay Barrett, Published in The Wire

No one who knew him well was surprised when Nigeria’s greatest musician Fela Ransome-Kuti changed the first part of his double-barreled surname to Anikulapo in the mid-1970s. He was just being consistent. Throughout his career, up to that point, Fela had constantly changed his mode of living and transformed the nature of his music. Eventually this process of change was to become the force that motivated his entire life.

The renaming was instructive. Anikulapo means ‘I have death in my pocket’, which is to say, as he often did, ‘I will be the master of my own destiny and will decide when it is time for death to take me’. When he died in August of 1997 at the age of 58, Fela appeared to fulfill the prophecy implicit in that earlier name change; and the manner of his dying was as dramatic and unruly as the manner of his living.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Fela’s condition deteriorated while he refused to accept treatment from Western-trained doctors, in spite of the fact that many of his family were illustrious medicos (Koye, the eldest, and former Minister of Health; Beko the younger, who was once President of the Nigerian Medical Association, detained incognito by the Nigerian government for his outspoken protests against what he believed to be the anti-democratic activities of the military; and his elder sister, a former matron in Nigeria’s health services). To the end Fela was a conscious rebel. The themes of his rebellion never changed, and the anarchy which often seemed to surround his life and music was always tempered by the fundamental truths which he sought to elucidate with regard to both African society and the ongoing exploitation of people in African nations.

Marching to the Afrobeat

Unless you're a fan of West African highlife music from the 1960s, there's a good chance you haven't heard of Cardinal Rex Jim Lawson. But for Nigerians who came of age during the first decade of the country's independence, Lawson was Nigeria's Otis Redding - a singer with a powerful voice who captured the mood of his generation but died tragically in a car accident, in January 1971.

Highlife is the ultimate cosmopolitan music, with roots stretching across much of West Africa, and across the Atlantic to Brazil and the US. Yet, Lawson hailed from the epicentre of one of the great ethnonational conflicts of the 20th century, the breakaway Niger Delta region of Biafra. Its drive for independence led to one of the last century's cruelest, genocidal wars. With three million dead from 1967-70, its carnage dwarfs that of Syria today.

Oil was at the heart of the Niger Delta's war-time misery: Discovered only two years before Nigeria's 1960 independence, the British pressured Nigeria's military government (which came to power in a 1966 coup) to crush Biafran independence at any cost. The massive influx of petroleum revenues with the mid-1970s oil price boom further enriched the military, disconnected it from the mass of Nigerians and ensured a system governed by corruption and violence, even after the return to civilian rule in 1999.

The Afrobeat must go on

Even US intelligence analysts admit that the existence of Boko Haram is intimately connected to the aftermath of the Biafran war, and subsequent decades of military and civilian misrule.

Femi Kuti: 'Africa needs to love Africa'

The music of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, who so powerfully chronicled the violence, corruption and militarism of Nigeria's political system, is as relevant today as it was when he wrote many of his classic songs almost two generations ago.

Fela began his political career in the midst of the oil boom, which made the ongoing poverty all around him that much more unforgivable. But in the 1970s, the Nigerian government still had a modicum of commitment to education and other public goods.

That all changed with the oil price crash of the next decade, which saw the predictable imposition of IMF-sponsored structural adjustment programmes that demanded the government cut social expenditures.

Ade Bantu, one of Nigeria's best and most political rappers, explains: "I'm the generation that's a product of the cuts on music education; so I became a rapper instead of a musician."

The renewed spike in oil prices in the last decade and a half has produced enviable macro-level growth of seven percent per year, enriching Nigerian elites to unprecedented levels. Yet predictably during this period, extreme poverty and unemployment rose to "bleak" levels along with systemic corruption.

If Nigeria's young artists find their critical voice, a Nigerian Spring might arrive soon.

Fela Kuti had the balls to protest. When did Afrobeat stars get so tame?

On a quiet, otherwise nondescript street in Lagos stands the Kalakuta museum. The striking white, three-storey building opened in 2012 to honour Nigeria’s most influential and outspoken musician and activist: Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

The museum houses numerous artifacts, photographs and mementos from Fela’s life including his saxophones, an impressive shoe collection and even his bedroom, left unchanged since the day he died. Outside in the courtyard of the museum is Fela himself, buried beneath a sizeable marble pyramid.

It’s not unusual to see the odd bottle of gin in front of his shrine as a tribute from fans, particularly during Felabration, an annual week-long festival organised by the Kuti family every October (the month he was born) to celebrate his life.

To begin to understand Fela and his immense popularity you have to understand something about Nigeria.

Described as a mix between Che Guevera and Bob Marley, Fela was for many Nigerians more than just a musician or an activist. He was a fearless teller of truths, a musical revolutionary. A man who not only changed the face of Nigerian music but whose scathing criticisms of the polity shook the establishment to the core.

To begin to understand Fela and his immense popularity, you have to understand something about Nigeria. The status quo of the 170 million-strong nation is to ‘suffer and smile.’ It is more or less a national characteristic.

Have a great funkin' weekend!