Listening to Fela Kuti, a.k.a. Fela Ransome Kuti, a.k.a. Fela Anikulapo Kuti.  My mind wanders through the record store.  I don’t see why we don’t file this in the dance bins with the breakbeat, house, and trance records, but you will never find it anywhere but the whirled music bins.

Fela wants you to dance.  And he offers endlessly repeated syncopated patterns and vamps, taken right out of those thumpy funky bumpy beats that Fela heard when he visited America in 1969 and over which he honks and serenades with his sax, and the reverbed trumpet humms and stumbles, and the electronic piano bobbles and bubbles, and Fela sings and growls and cries and if you understood the pidgin of his words you would know that he is dancing blowing strumming beating and singing truth against power.  “Let’s start what we have come into the room to do!”

Fela Ransome Kuti.  Vol. 1 & 2.  M.I. L. Multi Media LLC/Esperanto, Esp 8502 (1995, 1996).  Album Design – Not Credited.