Music genre · Nigeria
Afrobeat
Afrobeat is the music created in Lagos in the late 1960s and 1970s by Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the drummer Tony Allen. It fuses Yoruba rhythms, highlife, jazz and James Brown's funk into long, hypnotic, horn-driven grooves with sharply political lyrics. It is not the same thing as Afrobeats, the 21st-century pop sound.
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Fela and Tony Allen
Fela Ransome-Kuti, later Fela Anikulapo Kuti, was born in 1938 in Abeokuta, Nigeria. He studied music in London, played highlife and jazz, and in the 1960s led a band called Koola Lobitos. The drummer Tony Allen, who joined him in that period, developed the propulsive, layered drumming that became the genre's engine.
A 1969 trip to the United States changed the music's direction. Fela encountered the Black Power movement and the funk of James Brown, and came home with a new sound and a new politics. With his band Africa 70 he turned Afrobeat into what it became in the 1970s.
What Afrobeat sounds like
- Long tracks: ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, often filling a whole album side.
- Interlocking parts: rhythm guitar and tenor guitar repeating short, tight patterns; bass lines that circle; Allen's drumming at the centre.
- Horns: saxophones and trumpets playing riffs and long solos, with Fela on saxophone and keyboards.
- Call-and-response vocals between Fela and a chorus of singers, in Nigerian Pidgin English so the songs reached across the country.
- Politics: songs attacking corruption, military rule and colonial mentality.
Kalakuta and the Shrine
Fela declared his Lagos compound the Kalakuta Republic and played at his own club, the Afrika Shrine. In 1976 he released Zombie, which mocked the obedience of soldiers. In February 1977 the compound was raided and burned by soldiers; his mother, the activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was thrown from a window and died the following year of her injuries. Fela kept recording, later with the band Egypt 80, and was jailed more than once. He died in 1997.
Afrobeat and Afrobeats
The names are one letter apart and often confused:
| Afrobeat | Afrobeats | |
|---|---|---|
| When | Late 1960s–1970s onwards | 2000s–2010s onwards |
| Who | Fela Kuti, Tony Allen | Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Tems and many others |
| Sound | Live band, long jams, horns | Produced pop, dancehall and hip-hop influences, shorter songs |
| Lyrics | Political, confrontational | Mostly love, celebration and success |
Afrobeats artists — Burna Boy above all — often sample or cite Fela, but Afrobeats is a different genre with its own history.
Afrobeat today
Fela's sons Femi Kuti and Seun Kuti lead their own Afrobeat bands, the latter with Egypt 80. Bands around the world, from Lagos to Brooklyn, play the style, and the musical Fela! took the story to Broadway in 2009. Tony Allen remained one of the world's most admired drummers until his death in 2020.
Related
Afrobeat grew out of highlife, the dance-band music of Ghana and Nigeria. For a parallel story of a national sound built from local rhythms and international influences, see Senegal's mbalax.