Few artists can credibly lay claim to inventing a genre. The genre Fela Kuti created, Afrobeat, remains difficult to define. The word connotes musical influences (Nigerian traditional music, Ghanaian highlife, funk, soul), instrumentation (horn-heavy, percussion forward), and a musical ideology (energetic, experimental, political). All of this is a reflection of Fela’s time and place: a globalizing world in which music across oceans was available to be synthesized into local styles, and also a time of creeping despair in which Nigerians, and peoples all over the world, began to realize that they had traded brutal colonial regimes for elite corruption. But it takes genius to transform the currents of history into music that reveals and then redirects those currents. Original Sufferhead, released at the height of Fela’s fame as both musician and activist, is a blunt statement about what it feels like to have hands around your throat, every day, every hour. Water, light, food, house: all dissolved in the power show. And yet these tracks will far outlive even the names of the generals that tried to suppress them. 8
Kuti, Fela. Original Sufferhead. Knitting Factory Records, 1981. Reviewed October 6, 2024. Notable track: “Original Sufferhead.”