Seun Kuti, son of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, continues his father's legacy leading Egypt 80. Ahead of his BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn performance on the "Dey Tour," he spoke with Andy Thomas.
“Fela always used to say ‘my band is the most important thing to me’. So to be keeping Egypt 80 going was the one thing I could do for my dad, because he had done so much for me” says Seun Kuti, from his home in Lagos on a baking hot Summer’s day.
Fela Kuti had launched Egypt 80 with the album Original Suffer Head for Lagos International Records in 1981 shorty after his final LP with Africa 70 Coffin For Head of State. When Fela passed away in 1997, the Egypt 80 mantle was passed on to his youngest son who led the group from the age of just 14. “We were so close he really was my hero and best friend. So taking forward Egypt 80 was the one way I could repay him,” he says.
Like Fela before him, Seun Kuti has fought against injustice on his own Afrobeat albums recorded with Egypt 80 as a continuation more than an evolution of his father’s work. “In Western culture there is always this need to update and for there to be progress rather than just seeking the beauty in art and how it moves you,” he says. “That must be what we are searching for. I really don’t believe in comparing music. Art is not like sport - it’s not a competition.”
Seun Kuti’s musical future with Egypt 80 was mapped out at The Shrine, the Lagos club founded by Fela in the early 1970s and continued by his family today at its new home in Ikeja, Lagos State.
The seed for The Shrine was planted at a club Fela founded called Afro Spot in the Lagos suburb of Yaba. Moving to the courtyard of the Empire Hotel in Mushin across the road from his compound Kalakuta Republic on Agege Motor Road in 1972, the renamed Africa Shrine took on a significance that went beyond live music club. “He considered it an actual shrine to his ideological heroes and the ideology of Pan Africanism in general - a space in which his political inclinations fused with is musical incantations to assume spiritual dimensions,” wrote Michael E Veal in his biography Fela : The Life & Times of an African Musical Icon.
The Shrine remained at Agege Motor Road until the venue was closed in 1977 during the viscous attack by 1,000 armed soldiers that Fela named the ‘Kalakuta Massacre’, in which his compound was raised to the ground and his mother thrown from a window, subsequently dying from her injuries.
Moving to Pepple Street in Ikeja, in 1979, The Shrine provided a permanent home for both Africa 70 and Egypt 80 and a base for the man who declared himself the Black President. For Fela’s youngest son who was born in 1983, The Shrine was like an extension of his home. “I loved the music and hearing the band but because I was born in it I was never in awe of what was happening,” says Seun. “It was just normal but when I look back now I can see what a crazy life it was to be amongst this wild ass band. But that was just my everyday existence.”
Before he was five years old, Seun Kuti was taking to the stage with the mighty Egypt 80. “My earliest memories of playing at The Shrine was on a little recorder with me trying to imitate what the band was playing,” he says. Watching and learning from his father, by the time he was eight he was singing with members of the Egypt 80 band as the support act for Fela Kuti.
He had soon graduated to the saxophone, entering the ranks of Egypt 80 at the age of 12 and experiencing first hand the famously firm leadership of his father who made no exceptions for family members. “Fela was a strict bandleader that’s for sure. I would always get a good talking to if I played anything wrong,” says Seun.
The Shrine (renamed The New Afrika Shrine) was rebuilt at its current home by the Kuti family in Ikeja in 2000. This is where Seun Kuti took on the legacy of Fela with his continuation of Egypt 80 who still perform there on the last Sunday of every month when Seun is not on tour.
Originally performing solely Fela numbers, Seun began to add his own socially conscious compositions into his sets soon after taking on the leadership of Egypt 80. It wouldn’t be
until 2008 though that these songs would reach beyond The Shrine, when Mr Bongo picked up his first album Many Things for their offshoot label Disorient. Recorded at Lagos’ Eko Studio Ikeja in October 2006 with the towering Egypt 80 band, Many Things was produced by Martin Meisonnier, who had worked with Fela on two of his albums for the Celluloid label in the mid 1980s.
While the soaring horn arrangements (now under the direction of alto saxophonist Lekan Animasahun), razor sharp call and response vocals, hypnotic guitars and heavy drums that were Fela’s signature were all there, Seun and Meisonnier weren’t simply replicating what came before. Where Fela’s compositions chopped and turned over 20 minutes, his youngest son’s take on Afrobeat was faster and shorter with most tracks coming in at under 10 minutes.
What had not changed in the passing of the baton was the powerful messages in the music, as African music historian Chris May wrote in the All About Jazz website of numbers like ‘Na Oil’ and ‘African Problems’: “Seun doesn't quite match Fela's genius for a telling metaphor or insult, but his subject matter—poverty, corruption, tribalism, Western economic exploitation—is precisely the same…The beauty is in the music, that leonine and majestic blend of rhythm and fury.”
Seun’s follow up album From Africa with Fury: Rise was co-produced Brian Eno and John Reynolds and recorded with three quarters of Fela’s original Egypt 80 group. On the lead track ‘Rise’ Seun spoke of the same corruption that his father had dedicated his life to opposing.
We must rise up against the petroleum companies
We dey use our oil to destroy our land oh ho
We must rise against the diamond companies
Wey dey use our brothers as slave for the stone
We must rise against our African rulers
For the cover art, Seun called on Fela’s regular sleeve designer Lemi Ghariokwu. Continuing the thematic and visual themes of his art for Fela, Ghariokwu’s cover featured grotesque cartoon depictions of Nigeria’s greedy and powerful elite walking on the shoulder of Seun while he was blowing his horn against oppression.
Whether campaigning against police brutality in Nigeria through the #EndSARS movement or reviving the Movement of the People (M.O.P.) party Fela set up in 1979, Seun is following in the footsteps of his father politically as well as musically. “Fela had an African message, it was a message his mother had before him,” he says. “But the majority of his songs were about class consciousness because he understood that above all struggles was the one around class. And that is what unites the working class people across the world.”
On the notes to his 2018 album for Strut Black Times Seun explained how the record was written as a direct reflection of his poitical and social beliefs. “It is an album for anybody who believes in change and understands the duty we have to rise up and come together. The elites always try to divide the working class and the poor people of the world. The same oppression felt by workers in Flint, Michigan, is felt by workers in Lagos and Johannesburg.”
This fight is sadly every bit as important today as when Fela used his music as a weapon on those seminal Afrobeat albums with Africa 70 and the first Egypt 80. Currently working on a new album with Lenny Kravitz on executive production, Seun Kuti directs his fury with a message of unity. “In these modern times I want to embrace the class struggle globally and to see ourselves in each other and not by these constructs or narratives they use to create these divides,” he says.
While the music Seun Kuti creates today is deeply indebted to the work of his father, as a torchbearer for modern Afrobeat he is continuing to follow his own path. “My music, just like the person I am comes from my father and my roots but it’s also me in an individual way,” he says. “It’s part of the history and tradition I am from but it’s also my art.”
Seun Kuti’s new album produced by Lenny Kravitz is released later this year.