The rest of Fela's story is very much a game of cat and mouse, and then an outright battle between art and the state, Fela and the authorities. One of the show's biggest challenges is keeping listeners engaged in a dense, meandering narrative and convincing us early on that we should do it. The show is “presented” by Audible and Obama's company Higher Ground, and there's a familiar whiff of narrative angst in the first episode. (Last year, Stevie's Miracle, co-produced by Higher Ground, worked hard to convince us of Stevie Wonder's already obvious greatness.) Fela opens with a collection of famous testimonials in defense of Fela, written by the likes of Brian Eno, Flea, Questlove, Jay-Z, David Byrne, Ayo Edebiri and Paul McCartney, who describes tears at Fela's Lagos concert in 1973: Barack Obama, who sounded overjoyed in “Stevie's Miracle,” appears obediently, top button undone, as a man of the people. “Music like Fela’s has the power to not only make people move, to get them on their feet, but it also makes them feel alive,” he says accurately. “Our best art and our best music stir the soul.”
Abumrad accompanies these reviews with a “prologue”: a story of the seventies in which we meet Fela, an international star, through the eyes of a Nigerian schoolboy. The prologue is a little risky—we don't really know what's going on yet—but it's worth it. Student Dele Sosimi is now sixty-two years old. During the volatile period following Nigeria's independence, his father, a bank auditor who was about to uncover evidence of embezzlement, was killed with a pickaxe by men who broke into the family's home in the middle of the night. Twelve-year-old Dele found him in the hallway, wearing blood-soaked pajamas. “He was completely screwed,” Dele says, choking up. Through a school friend, Dele later met Fela, who promised to seek financial help for Dele's family. “My life just changed,” Dele says. By the age of seventeen he had joined Fela's group; he eventually became an Afrobeat icon himself. The interview will take place in London, before one of his concerts.
The prologue also gives Abumrad the opportunity to explore a central theme of Fela's work: his ability to create a transporting soundscape. Abumrad's favorite sound manipulations often employ echoes or parallel tape fragments, and both he and Fela are not afraid to delve into the phantasmagoric. There were evenings, Abumrad says, when the band played a song that lasted more than an hour, or when “Dele would stop at one riff that he just had to keep playing,” repeatedly, in exactly the same way. (One jam reportedly lasted twenty-four hours.) Has the repetition driven Dele crazy? “No way,” says Dele. Abumrad describes Dele's process:
Fela, according to Abumrad, gave Dele the opportunity to move beyond the suffering of his youth – “to get out of that cage and be free, at least as long as he was playing that riff.” It's the same process that brought Fela's audience together. “Imagine a million Deles having more or less the same experience,” Abumrad continues. “Like atoms, one tiny explosion collides with the next, and the next, and the next, until a cascade of energy is created that creates something much larger.” Later episodes explore how Fela's particular musical techniques—ostinatos repeated over and over again, often for fifteen minutes—induce a kind of flow state in listeners, tuning them into the lyrics when they eventually appear. “Your neurons are rewired,” Abumrad says. “You're open. And that's when Fela starts singing.”
What Fela sang was what people needed to hear. Between 1973 and 1979, Fela released a firehose of new music—more than two dozen albums, and then even more. His lyrics and his behavior mocked authority (as in “Expensive Shit” and “Stealing Power”) and said the unspeakable (as in “Shuffering and Shmiling” about how religion can encourage people to accept injustice rather than resist). The audience reacted with jubilation, relief and a sense of liberation. Nigeria was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship, with soldiers on the streets and public executions on the beach. In Lagos, Fela declared his club Shrine, as well as his home complex and recording studio Kalakuta Republic, a sovereign state independent of Nigeria. This nation had its own atmosphere and rules. Fela worked and lived with an impressive group of dancers and singers known as the Queens (he married twenty-seven of them in a stunt in 1978); in the Temple they were dressed in theatrical costumes and looked amazing. Marijuana was strictly illegal in Nigeria—half a joint would get you in jail—but walk into the Temple, “and it’s just an alternate universe,” says Lisa Lindsay, a professor who specializes in West African history. “People were dancing and people were going crazy. And it was such a contrast to how scared the people were outside.”
The other side of this freedom was the reaction of the state. According to Abumrad, Fela was arrested a hundred times. There were constant cycles of provocation and retribution: Fela reacted to injustice by singing about it; the authorities will persecute him and his people; he sang about it. In 1976, Fela released a Molotov cocktail of the song “Zombies,” which ridiculed soldiers as mindless automatons. In the show's ninth episode, set next year, things come to a head. Soldiers attack the Kalakuta Republic and Fela, ever defiant, goes out onto the balcony and plays “Zombie” on his saxophone. It is a stunning picture, followed by scenes of unimaginable horror – Fela's elderly mother was thrown out of a window, Queens was raped, Fela was brutally beaten, the estate was burned – as people who lived through it recall. After the raid, the state took back Fela's land and closed the Temple, but it returned again. “They're killing my mother,” we hear him sing, choked with emotion, in “The Unknown Soldier.” He continued to resist for another twenty years, until his death from complications AIDSin 1997.
Music feels as if it could change the world, Abumrad demonstrates throughout. Sometimes this is actually possible: Fela's mother's singing protesters helped overthrow a local tyrant in 1947. But more often than not, it can work in a more humble way—to inspire, to comfort, to give us courage. In later episodes we hear about young Nigerian activists inspired by Fela's music; then we hear about the youth protest in Lagos in 2020 that led to the massacre. Cycles and repetitions in music and history can be numbing, healing, or both. In the final episode, during a visit to Lagos, Abumrad is struck by the continued presence of “everything Fela railed about – poverty, lack of infrastructure, neglect of the state”, as well as the playfulness and humor of the locals, including Fela's relatives. Struggle and joy, Abumrad says, “coexist and then repeat endlessly, over and over again, like cycles of music.” Our choice, he concludes, is simple: “Which part of the rhythm are you going to go to?” ♦
