Fela Kuti's Expensive Shit

By: Zac Locke

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Few artists have captured the world’s imagination so deeply, yet remain so enigmatic, as Fela Anikulapo Kuti. “Fela,” as his millions of fans across the world know him, was one of the most outspoken and talented musicians of the 20th century. His 1975 album Expensive Shit showcases the best of his defiance and artistry. The album, consisting of two, twelve-minute songs, is the gold standard for Afrobeat music. In it, Fela fuses his jazz roots with James Brown-style funk, Marley-esque protest lyrics, and 1970s Black Power sentiments. The result is an inimitable African sound: a churning, sparse-yet-complex canvass of rhythm and call-and-response refrains over which Fela wails on his sax and rails against the corruption in his home country of Nigeria.

While Fela Kuti’s influence is far-reaching, he is still one of the lesser-known pillars of modern music and social activism in comparison to his European counterparts. Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit will be an important addition, and hopefully an inspiration, to Fela’s “Movement of the People”. Although the album released in 1975 in Nigeria, Fela’s protest of police brutality, abuses of justice and governmental corruption, and his fight for cultural independence, economic justice, human rights, and racial equality are unfortunately more prescient and pressing than ever fifty years later and throughout the world. His fight continues today.

Today, Femi Kuti continues his father’s legacy. He famously covered one of the songs on Expensive Shit (“Water No Get Enemy”), and continues to perform at the Shrine, the modern incarnation of the music venue Fela built in Lagos, complete with fifteen-person band, brightly-clad dancers and two-hour band introduction.

Personally, I have been obsessed with and inspired by the energy, life and music of Fela Kuti for more than twenty years. I have had the opportunity to interview musician Femi Kuti, Fela’s daughter and manager of the Shrine Yeni Kuti, former Fela band members, and other collaborators of Fela. In 2007 I travelled to Lagos Nigeria, the biggest, baddest, and most exciting city in Africa. I sat in with Fela’s associates at a jazz club he frequented, and saw Femi Kuti perform at the Shrine. Though my experiences I can give readers a vicarious idea of what Fela’s creation of Expensive Shit may have been like, how seeing Fela at the Shrine may have felt.

Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit Expensive Shit alternates between short framing narrative chapters of my time in Lagos, and chapters that recount the events leading up to and surrounding the making of Expensive Shit, describe the actual music, and explore Fela’s message. At all times, the music will be in the forefront. I want the reader to become as lost in the descriptions of the music as one does when listening to Fela’s infectious Afrobeat rhythms, and to feel as educated and inspired when reading about the songs as one does when listening to Fela’s pointed, evocative lyrics.

An essential book for music lovers.

Well-written & deeply interesting. Fela Kuti’s enduring influence goes beyond just music & this book manages to capture that well. Definitely recommended for both musicians & music fans as he is such an important figure & this album is a key milestone in his creative output. Only negative is the AI voice. Particularly when talking about the bass player as it repeatedly pronounces the word like he’s playing the fish, not the instrument. Some QC there wouldn’t go amiss.