It’s spring time! It’s time to start moving! Stretch those dancing muscles and let’s take a trip to Lagos in our minds with Fela Kuti!
The April selection for our Record of the Month Club is Fela Kuti’s legendary 1973 release, Gentleman. The album is pressed on gray/black swirly vinyl with gold OBI strip and lovingly reissued for the albums 50th anniversary by our pals at Partisan Records.
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We encourage you to check out the recent podcast Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, produced by Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. It’s an incredible journey into the history and life of Fela Kuti. The podcast helps make sense of Fela’s music and his quest. Highly recommended.
From Partisan Records:
Fela Kuti (1938-1997) was a Nigerian musician, producer, arranger, political radical, outlaw and the originator of Afrobeat. A titanic musical and sociopolitical voice, Fela’s legacy spans decades and genres, touching on jazz, pop, funk, hip-hop, rock and beyond.
1973’s Gentleman is the 7th in the series of celebratory Fela 50th Anniversary reissues. Like its predecessors in the series, this version will be available on exclusive colored vinyl (Igbo Smoke) and the LP will be wrapped in a gold foil obi strip with a brief essay on the album and Fela’s global impact on music. Like Fela’s other early 70’s releases, he used each side of his LPs to create a deep groove that pulls the listener in and follows with metaphoric lyrics that call out and critique the corrupt hangover of colonialism.
Gentleman is the last of Fela’s early 1970s albums recorded with the Africa 70. The title track can be interpreted literally or as a metaphor concerning a wider issue. Fela deftly addresses the colonialism-induced, inferiority complex which led many in Africa’s new governing elites to reject African style, concepts of beauty, and modes of behavior in favor of European imports. Gentleman’s other tracks, “Fefe Naa Efe” and “Igbe,” have more direct, less metaphorical lyrics. On “Fefe Naa Efe,” an Ashanti motto from Ghana, Fela tells a woman dumped by her boyfriend that she must get over the heartache and move on. On “Igbe,” Fela declares that anyone who betrays a friend is shit, and that anybody who lacks self-respect is shit – something you want to expel from your body as soon as possible. He sings the word “shit” in several Nigerian languages, so there is no misunderstanding.
