Fela Kuti and the music of political resistance

This is Fresh Air. I am Terry Gross. You may know my guest, Jad Abamrad, as the creator and former host of the public radio program and podcast Radio Lab, and the creator and host of the popular and Peabody Award-winning nine episode podcast series. Dolly Partons America. Nowjad has a terrific new series of episodes about the life and music of Fela Kuti.

He's known as the father of Afrobeat, but music was also Fela's weapon against the colonial values that tried to civilize Nigerians, erase African culture, and inflict punishment often brutally to keep Nigerians in line. With Fela's danceable, almost trance like grooves and political lyrics, he started a youth movement that rebelled against the repressive postcolonial government and military. For that, he was jailed about a hundred times, beaten frequently, enduring multiple broken bones, leaving scars all over his body. The military breached the electric fence that protected his compound, threw his mother out a second story window, and burned his home to the ground. He's also a problematic figure.

He fashioned himself into what you might describe as a cult leader. He had twenty seven female backup singers and dancers, and married all of them in one day. And He didn't believe AIDS was real, advised men not to use condoms, and even wrote a song about it, and when he contracted AIDS, he denied that was possible. We'll talk about all that and how his music continues to get people listening and dancing and rebelling against injustice.

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