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| Popmatters |
 Fela Anikulapo Kuti was a musical pioneer and a social rebel whose art and life were inseparable. Fela’s recordings and legendary performances embodied his outlook and way of being in the world. He created a new hybrid genre, Afrobeat, out of traditional Nigerian music and American jazz and funk, and used that churning, driving, irresistible music to raise consciousness, agitate, and entertain. He scorned bourgeois propriety, in his sex life (he was an unapologetic polygamist), dress (he mocked Africans who wore Western business suits, and often performed only in briefs), and in his prodigious consumption of igbo, i.e., weed. In his music and public pronouncements, Nigeria’s leading pop star excoriated his country’s corrupt military leaders and wielded his music as a weapon against political repression and economic exploitation. Persecuted by the Nigerian government, adored by his mainly poor and working class audience, and admired by musicians worldwide, Fela Kuti died from AIDS in 1997, at age 58. Sounds just like the raw material of a Broadway musical, right? But Fela!, the most improbable of Great White Way entertainments, turned out to be the most exciting entry in Broadway’s 2009 season, a brilliant and original amalgam of dance, music, and theater. Directed and choreographed by the innovative, boundary-pushing Bill T. Jones, the show boasts an outstanding ensemble of singers, dancers, and musicians led by Sahr Ngaujah, an American-born actor of Sierra Leonean descent, who superbly incarnates the Nigerian star. (Because the role is so demanding, Ngaujah alternates performances with another actor, Kevin Mambo. But as the main “Fela,” Ngaujah has gotten all the media love, as well as a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical.)...full text |
| Rollingstone |
| This soundtrack to the musical about the late Nigerian political activist and inventor of Afrobeat is a powerful Fela primer. It includes some of Fela Kuti's best-known songs ("I.T.T.," "Zombie"), as well as adapted material (like "Trouble Sleep," sung beautifully from the perspective of his dead mother). The band (Antibalas) reproduces Fela's mix of jazz, funk and Yoruba rhythms, and actor Sahr Ngaujah brings him back to life. Still, there's no substitute for the real thing – for that, start with the 2005 collection The Best of the Black President....full text |
| Elbo |
| Nigeria's soul rebel and Afrobeat innovator conquers the Great White Way Fela Anikulapo Kuti was a musical pioneer and a social rebel whose art and life were inseparable. Fela's recordings and legendary performances embodied his outlook and way of being in the world. He created a new hybrid genre, Afrobeat, out of traditional Nigerian music and American jazz and funk, and used that churning, driving, irresistible music to raise consciousness, agitate, and entertain. He scorned bourgeois propriety, in his sex life (he was an unapologetic polygamist)...full text |
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