Fela Kuti: The Afrobeat Blueprint Every Producer Ends Up Sampling

From highlife to Afrobeat

Fela was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1938, and studied music in London at Trinity College of Music in the late 1950s. His early band, Koola Lobitos, played highlife and jazz. A trip to the United States in 1969 changed his direction: he encountered Black Power politics, through activist Sandra Smith among others, and heard James Brown's funk at full strength. Back in Lagos he renamed his band Afrika 70 and began making the music he called Afrobeat.

He was also a political figure. His Kalakuta Republic compound in Lagos declared itself independent of the military government; after the album Zombie (1976) mocked the army, soldiers raided and burned the compound in 1977. His mother, the activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, died of injuries from that raid. Fela kept recording and kept attacking the government in his lyrics until his death in 1997.

Tony Allen and the engine room

Fela credited his drummer directly: without Tony Allen, he said, there would be no Afrobeat. Allen's playing combines a steady hi-hat with a kick and snare that dance around the beat, closer to jazz than to the straight four of funk. Underneath him, a bassist repeats a short ostinato, two guitars play interlocking patterns (one choppy and rhythmic, one a single-note tenor line), and percussion such as shekere and congas fills the gaps.

Allen left the band around the end of the 1970s and went on to a long solo career, working with everyone from Damon Albarn to Jeff Mills. If you love the drums on a Fela record, follow Allen's own discography too.

How a Fela track is built

• •Groove first: drums, bass and guitars establish the pattern for minutes before anything else happens.
• •Horns layer in: baritone and tenor sax, trumpet and trombone add riffs one after another, building density.
• •Solos: Fela on saxophone or keyboards, often long and modal.
• •Vocals late: call-and-response in Nigerian Pidgin English, often only in the second half of the track.

For samplers, that structure is a gift. The opening minutes of almost any Afrika 70 record are an instrumental bed with drums, bass and guitars and nothing else, often with each element entering separately.

Records to start with

• •Gentleman (1973)
• •Expensive Shit (1975), with "Water No Get Enemy" on the other side
• •Zombie (1976)
• •Sorrow, Tears and Blood (1977)
• •Coffin for Head of State (1981)
• •Tony Allen with Afrika 70: Jealousy (1975) and Progress (1977), Allen's own records with the band

Afrobeat beyond Fela

Once you know the sound, the wider scene opens up: Nigerian and Ghanaian bands of the 70s working with the same ingredients, many of whom recorded only one or two albums on small labels. Reissue labels have spent the last twenty years bringing these back, but plenty of the originals still sit on Discogs with only a handful of collectors listing them. They are perfect territory for random digging.

Fela's influence also runs straight through modern music: the 2002 tribute Red Hot + Riot, the Broadway musical Fela!, and the whole of today's West African pop scene, which took the name afrobeats even though its sound is different.

Dig it on CrateDrop

Filter Funk / Soul or Folk, World & Country to Nigeria or Ghana, set the years to 1970–1980, and use the DEEP or RARE obscurity settings. You will get highlife, juju and Afro-funk alongside Afrobeat. Save the drummers' names when you find a groove you love; in this world, the drummer is often the best thread to follow.