[The Best Best Of Fela Kuti Zip
Abdul Soumphonphakdy
The Best Best of Fela Kuti is a 2-CD compilation album by Nigerian Afrobeat artist Fela Kuti, released in 1999 by MCA Records.[1] It was issued in the United States in 2000 as part of a reissue series of Kuti's albums.[2] The album was reissued as The Best of the Black President in 2009 by Knitting Factory Records and received universal acclaim from music critics.[3] A companion 2-CD compilation, also released in 1999, was reissued in the U.S. in 2013 by Knitting Factory as The Best of the Black President 2.
In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, music critic Robert Christgau said that The Best Best of Fela Kuti is the essential album from Kuti and "a masterful piece of compilation for an artist who deserves the best." He applauded the decision to edit or "unceremoniously" reduce the exhaustive lengths of the original songs in half, adding that they feature "top-notch tirades, explosive horn blasts", and riffs Kuti could "never improve no matter how often he [tried]".[12] Christgau named it the fifth best album of 2000 in his list for the Pazz & Jop critics' poll.[13] Vibe magazine's Harry Allen said that it has Kuti's "finest work".[14] In 2005, Spin magazine ranked The Best Best of Fela Kuti the fourth best world music album of all time.[15]
The album's 2009 reissue by Knitting Factory Records received universal acclaim from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, it received an average score of 93, based on 5 reviews.[3] Allmusic's Thom Jurek recommended the album even for listeners who own all of Kuti's previous music: "this is a killer mix and needs to be in the collection anyway."[4] Michaelangelo Matos of The A.V. Club credited it for doing "the impossible by summing up a singular performer who liked his songs to jam on out to a half-hour or more.[16]
Pitchfork critic Mike Powell wrote that, although it does not have "all of Fela's best material", the album "isn't just a good place for someone starting out, it's probably the only Fela album many will need to own."[8] In a less enthusiastic review, Will Hermes of Rolling Stone magazine said that the music is "killer", but criticized the lack of recording info in the liner notes: "The music speaks for itself, but presidential history deserves better."[11]
There's a diner in central Virginia called the Blue Moon that used to play a Fela Kuti compilation what seemed like every Sunday morning for at least a couple of years-- something I mention because it's how I first heard his music and how I remember it best: Over and over again, at a decent volume. His recordings are defiantly samey, but his style is unmistakable: the horn-head/solo structure of American and European jazz applied to funk; 12-minute songs that seem to start somewhere in the middle; lots of congas, lots of honking. Something like the Nigerian James Brown, sure, but also a little like Monet's series of haystacks-- each iteration a little different but disciplined in their similarity, always some minor variation on an ideal.
So while two straight discs of Fela is exhausting, it's probably the most suitable way to digest him. I can't say that Black President (which is exactly the same as MCA's out-of-print The Best of Fela Kuti) contains all of Fela's best material-- he has too many records, and they've only been sporadically available on CD. (Knitting Factory, by the way, intends to reissue 45 of them over the next year and a half.) What I can say is that his music is so intense and consistent in mood that lesser tracks in his discography just make themselves obvious-- they don't appear hypnotized by the sprit; they lack energy. In 2006 I tried to listen to 20 Fela albums in a row and came to two conclusions: For the most part, his best songs had already made it on compilations, and that compilations best convey the full brunt of his music. There's also the issue of consumer value: Most of Fela's original albums featured only two tracks, each about 15 minutes, so a $20 compilation just gives you a lot more to chew on than a $12 album. Fela: The Best of the Black President isn't just a good place for someone starting out, it's probably the only Fela album many will need to own. True, some of the songs are edited, but if you need the full 15-minute version of "Gentlemen" instead of the 11-minute one, then the Best of is probably not for you in the first place.
Fela changed the course of funk, African music, and almost anything groove-based that came after him, but it sometimes seems like his contributions to music in general are more interesting than actually listening to his music in specific, or that the sum of his work is more exciting than any particular set of songs. It's like seeing the forest but missing the trees, or being in love with the idea of love. Or like a complaint I remember being attributed to guitarist Arto Lindsay when he was in the no-wave band DNA: That people either loved or hated them, but never talked about which songs worked or didn't. This might be a personal opinion, though-- I also find it hard to actively enjoy James Brown after two hours. At a certain point I just become passively reverent, and have a suspicion that other people do, too, unless they're dancing. (This prompts the question of Fela's utility in scenarios facilitating human propulsion to rhythm. He's useful.)
His biography is even more sellable-- and more bullet-point friendly-- than his music: twenty-seven wives, a commune/recording studio for his band members and family, an actively hostile relationship with Nigeria's military government. The African rebel. Even if you don't like his records, take the time to watch Stephane Tchal-Gadjieff and Jean Jacques Flori's 1982 documentary, Fela Kuti: Music Is the Weapon-- a real testament to the power of an artist as a political figure (quaint, I know). All to say that he's an outsized personality; a person who stands for an idea-- an icon, I guess. "They cannot kill me, because my name is Anikulapo," he says in Music Is the Weapon-- an adopted middle name meaning, roughly, "he who carries death in his pouch."
Fela's political lyrics usually forsake subtlety for immediacy, but I find it easy to forgive him-- the soldiers who threw his mother out the window after a raid on his commune weren't very subtle either. After she died, Fela dragged a coffin to one of the army's central barracks and wrote a song about it: "Coffin for Head of State". His music is feverish, urgent, and simple, but it reflects on simple evils: Corruption, subjection, brutality. Of all verbs commonly used to try and convey music's intensity, I prefer "boils" for Fela's-- nothing abstract, just a matter of excited molecules banging against each other to produce a state simultaneously sustainable, dangerous, and transformative.
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Zombie [M.I.L. Multimedia, 1977]
Fela Anikulapo Kuti is a Nigerian pianist-saxophonist who makes real fusion music--if James Brown's stuff is Afro-American, he is Amer-African. No U.S. percussion ensemble would distinguish between first and second conga, but Fela's harmonic, melodic, and improvisational ideas are all adapted from Afro-American (which means part European) models. His sax style recalls the honkers, but it's more staccato, more complex rhythmically. Not only that, there are lyrics, in English, with crib sheet--very political, very associative, explicitly antibook. A-
Original Sufferhead [Capitol, 1984]
The musical definition is so sharp it's hooky, with arresting commentary from a backup chorus that includes many of the leader's wives. And the lyrics help, especially "Power Show"'s bitter observations in re bureaucratic status-tripping. The title (and other) track, in his geopolitical mode, makes its point less cleanly. B+
Army Arrangement [Celluloid, 1985]
I've never had complete confidence in Fela's myth. By both African and Euro-American standards, his arrangements are repetitive, his singing and playing nothing special, and his political ideas ill-informed and grandiose. But as pop pros of any culture go, he's an original and a radical, and even if he weren't his music would deserve our attention and his imprisonment our abhorrence. Let's hope this Bill Laswell remix proves propitious. Rather than bedizening it with aural gee-gaws, Laswell imports sympatico cousins to beef up the groove--Bernie Worrell (on Hammond B-3!), Aiyb Dieng (on five different percussion devices), and, most spectacularly, Sly Dunbar, whose Simmons pulse could make a skinhead dance once foot at a time. Fela's best album--wonder if they'll let him hear it. A-
Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense [Mercury, 1986]
Fears that imprisonment has turned him into a shell can be put aside, and by tacking twelve- and fourteen-minute instrumentals in front of fourteen- and eighteen-minute songs Wally Badarou goes a long way toward solving the man's record-making problem. At half an hour apiece, his grooves have time to prove themselves, and the vinyl sound is bright enough if you pump up the volume a little. As for message, the lyrics are certainly touched by his incarceration, but his pan-Africanism seems unchanged: it's as limited, as scathing, and as justifiable as ever. B+