A Study Of The Music And Social Criticism Of African Musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti

Musician, political critic, and hedonist, international superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti created a sensation throughout his career. In his own country of Nigeria he was simultaneously adulated and loathed, often by the same people at the same time. His outspoken political views and advocacy of marijuana smoking and sexual promiscuity offended many, even as his musical brilliance enthralled them. In his creation of afrobeat, he melded African traditions with African American and Afro-Caribbean influences to revolutionize world music. Although harassed, beaten, and jailed by Nigerian authorities, he continued his outspoken and derisive criticism of political corruption at home and economic exploitation from abroad. A volatile mixture of personal characteristics -- charisma, musical talent, maverick lifestyle, populist ideology, and persistence in the face of persecution -- made him a legend throughout Africa and the world. Celebrated during the 1970s as a musical innovator and spokesman for the continent's oppressed masses, he enjoyed worldwide celebrity during the 1980s and was recognized in the 1990s as a major pioneer and elder statesman of African music. By the time of his death in 1997 from AIDS-related complications, Fela had become something of a Nigerian institution. In Africa, the idea of transnational alliance, once thought to be outmoded, has gained new currency. In African America, during a period of increasing social conservatism and ethnic polarization, Africa has re-emerged as a symbol of cultural affirmation. At such an historical moment, Fela's music offers a perspective on race, class, and nation on both sides of the Atlantic. As Professor Veal demonstrates, over three decades Fela synthesized a unique musical language while also clearing -- if only temporarily -- a space for popular political dissent and a type of counter-cultural expression rarely seen in West Africa. In the midst of political turmoil in Africa, as well as renewal of pro-African cultural nationalism throughout the diaspora, Fela's political music functions as a post-colonial art form that uses cross-cultural exchange to voice a unique and powerful African essentialism.

"Olaniyan has given us a profound and beautifully integrated book which culminates in a persuasive interpretation of the relationship between Fela's apparently incompatible presentational selves.... The book's accessible and evocative prose is in itself a kind of homage to Fela's continual ability to seduce and astonish.... This is such an attractive book you feel like... ransacking your collection for Fela tapes." -- Karin Barber "... an indispensable companion to Fela's music and a rich source of information for studies in modern African popular music." -- Akin Euba Arrest the Music! is a lively musical study of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, one of Africa's most recognizable, popular, and controversial musicians. The flamboyant originator of the "Afrobeat" sound and self-proclaimed voice of the voiceless, Fela used music, sharp-tongued lyrics, and derisive humor to challenge the shortcomings of Nigerian and postcolonial African states. Looking at the social context, instrumentation, lyrics, visual art, people, and organizations through which Fela produced his music, Tejumola Olaniyan offers a wider, more suggestive perspective on Fela and his impact on listeners in all parts of the world. Placing Fela front and center, Olaniyan underscores important social issues such as authenticity, racial and cultural identity, the relationship of popular culture to radical politics, and the meaning of postcolonialism, nationalism, and globalism in contemporary Africa. Readers interested in music, culture, society, and politics, whether or not they know Fela and his music, will find this work invaluable for understanding the career of an African superstar and the politics of popular culture in contemporary Africa. African Expressive Cultures -- Patrick McNaughton, general editor

This collection is one of two publications in the Fela Project.

Education and the arts offer multiple, mutually clarifying lenses through which to examine and understand issues of poverty and empowerment. Here, both are combined in a fascinating look at how these two often overlooked elements promote social equality and cultivate personal agency across Africa's diverse political-economic landscapes.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti was the Afrobeat music maestro whose life and time provide the lens through which we can outline the postcolonial trajectory of the Nigerian state as well as the dynamics of most other African states. Through the Afrobeat music, Fela did not only challenge consecutive governments in Nigeria, but his rebellious Afrobeat lyrics facilitate a philosophical subtext that enriches the more intellectual Afrocentric discourses. Afrobeat and the philosophy of blackism that Fela enunciated place him right beside Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, and all the others who champion a black and African mode of being in the world. This book traces the emergence of Fela on the music scene, the cultural and political backgrounds that made Afrobeat possible, and the philosophical elements that not only contributed to the formation of Fela's blackism, but what constitutes Fela's philosophical sensibility too.

NEW BLACK AND AFRICAN WRITING Vol. 2 is our concluding edition of a series that has featured many critical entries and reviews on canonical African fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction. This second edition explores intricacies of relationships and associations, the recurrent tropes for the interpretation and understanding of historical connections, and the shaping of thought brought into fictional and cultural renditions that are evolving and continually reassessed although around the periphery of older canons. The quest for a meaningful heuristic for approaching contemporary arts is almost totally redefined by the contributions of eminent scholars of our time whose balancing and correspondence create room for complementarity of values and toward cultural understanding and value appreciation in contemporary society.

In the seventies, as signs of decay began to show in the capitalist experiment of the newly independent African countries, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti tore his way into popular culture with his signature blend of ethno-traditional music and jazz, drawing lyrics from the flipside of neo-colonial society and his own experience in London and America in the sixties. Afrobeat was born. A dynamic mode of expression in the social history of post-independent West Africa, Afrobeat comprises the lives, loves and politics of a people born to resist.