Methods in performing Fela in contemporary Afrobeats, 2009–2019

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1982 documentary Music is the Weapon, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, arguably the inventor of Afrobeat, pronounced that: ‘My name is Anikulapo: I have death in my pouch. I can’t die. They can’t kill me!’ Fela passed on in 1997, yet his revolutionary practice, in message and in musical form, means that he lives on in the imagination. Over the last decade, Afrobeat has transformed in both terminology and practice. For some, Afrobeat has morphed into an ‘apolitical genre by an industry more concerned [ … ] with producing easy listening [and danceable] music’ (Negus 1996, 41). While Fela’s sons Femi and Seun Kuti continue to play Afrobeat as originally proposed, thus maintaining a relative patent on their father’s invention, the bulk of the current usage relies on simulation and as Afrobeats. This paper focuses on the practices of a selection of Afrobeats musicians who have appropriated the text, synthesised the sound, conjured the appearance and invoked the name and symbolisms of Fela. The paper draws from Tejumola Olaniyan’s delineation of the stages in Fela’s creative career in illustrating how contemporary popular musicians entextualise Fela in their respective creative careers. These Afrobeats artists have performed the ‘Fela stages’ in their corresponding bodies of work through several means including, but not limited to, the textually analogous, dedicatory, apparitional, amalgamated, and by the means of coming to realisation.