Day 38: Fela Kuti – Zombie

Album cover courtesy of Coconut Records

I’ve recently started running. As a former cardio hater, that’s a very big deal for me. I could wax poetic about how my previous ultra-hedonistic lifestyle didn’t allow me to experience momentary suffering for long-term gain, but what I’m getting at here is that I was lazy and I didn’t like it. But these days, I run.

I had done a short run outdoors and wanted to do a cooldown walk on my stepper and I thought I’d combine that with my album of the day, so I put on Zombie by the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. I didn’t know a thing about the history of the genre, so I decided to plug up this gap in my knowledge and start with the man who is the innovator behind it.

Fela Aníkúlápó Kútì was creating his own type of sound, which was a combination of funk, jazz, Apala, salsa, Calypso and traditional Nigerian Yoruba music, calling it  Afrobeat. He’d studied trumpet in London at the end of the 1950s and had a band there called Fela Ransome Kuti & His Highlife Rakers. He returned to Nigeria in 1963 and started a band that mixed jazz and highlife, called Fela Ransome Kuti and his Koola Lobitos.

In 1969, he travelled to the US and became acquainted with the Black Power movement through his girlfriend, who was a member of the Black Panthers. Fela says she opened his eyes to Black nationalism and related that to his homeland, Nigeria:

 I realized that to be a great man you have to have a great country behind you. I had no country, just a bunch of Africans running around in suits trying to be Englishmen. I decided to come back and try to make my country African.

From there on out, he pivoted to making political songs and protest music. His best known album is Zombie, which criticised the Nigerian government and military junta in no uncertain terms. As a result, the Nigerian army stormed his commune with over a thousand soldiers, beating Fela Kuti and killing his mother. During his life, he was arrested more than 200 times for his political activism.

Zombie is a scathing critique of the military rule that doesn’t mince words, with the titular track mocking the soldiers for mindlessly doing what they’re told, like zombies. While the album is fiery, it’s not just angry, it feels like there’s a real warmth and a sense of hope to it. It’s fiery and endlessly interesting, but also a bit hypnotic in the repetitiveness of the rhythms. It’s easy to lose yourself into it.

I ended up going for much longer and much faster on my little step machine because I completely lost track of what I was doing. For me to get so into it that I forget what I’m doing while I’m doing cardiovascular exercise is almost unheard of. It’s a great album, especially when you know a bit more about Fela Kuti and his activism. Mainly, though, it just sounds great. 8.5/10.