RM: Another one of the most beautiful protest songs in the world. It's a downtempo tune in the spirit of “Water No Get Enemy,' basically breaking down what the “civilized' definition of gentleman is and explaining the difference between that and a true African original man. It's strange, the lyrical content of what he's talking about really stands in contrast to how beautiful the rhythm section of the song is. There's a particularly beautiful bass line in that tune. Fela said, “I no be gentleman at all, I be African man.' The original man is not a gentleman, he's a man. The colonizers were supposedly trying to civilize Africans-the story was, you know, follow Christianity and be a gentleman. Later, when he was in jail, they waited for him to use the bathroom so they could test his shit as well. So Expensive Shit is based on that story.

At one point, when they broke into the compound, they gathered up specimens of shit to inspect for traces of marijuana to try to find a charge.

RM: The military police in Nigeria were notorious for raiding Fela's compound, the Kalakuta Republic, on a regular basis, trying to find different ways to trump up charges on Fela. I got an original Nigerian EMI pressing so that record is very close to me.īuy on Amazon / iTunes Follow our Best of Fela Kuti playlist on Spotify. It took me until about '97 to track it down. It took me about four or five years to track it down after the first time I heard it, which was around 1993. RM: It's a record that I first heard on CD and MP3. And how ironic is it that it's 2016 and we ain't. It was a call to the future that, by the year 2000, all black people should be free. They're thinking towards the future and, even in the post-civil rights era in which Africans and African-Americans had a closer relationship, and there were all these laws created that gave black people a little more freedom in the United States, they were still not truly free. They were talking about how in the year 2000 all black people should be free. I'm pretty sure it was released around 1989. RM: It's a collaboration with Roy Ayers, so you have a coincidental, ubiquitous vibe player, songwriter, collaborator writing with the James Brown of Africa. I've played the hell of out that record.īuy on Amazon / iTunes 2000 Blacks Got To Be Free It's a major component of anything having to do with afrobeat or with conscious music. It's universal law again, no matter what kind of race, color, creed or nationality you have, without water it's over. it starts off with the chorus which is a departure from his normal arrangement process.īuy on Amazon / iTunes Water No Get Enemy Most of the time, when you're dealing with Fela Kuti's music, you don't really hear any vocals for a good seven to eight minutes. When you think about Fela's catalog, one of the most interesting things about this tune is that the vocals start practically right away with the hook.

Fela kuti top songs