The great, late Nigerian musician Fela Ransome-Kuti expressed a very American idea of freedom, one which seems increasingly hard to find in our native land. And he could make you dance to it.
Suggested listening: Zombie, Original Sufferhead, Shuffering and Shmiling/No Agreement, Confusion/Gentlemen.
[Goat] na goat o, for Yoruba land
Him go bend him [the behind] he go shit
Him go [come out] away from the shit
The shit go be the last thing wey he go like to see
Because why o?
Because the shit dey smell
. . .
No be so for some people wey I know
No be so for some fools wey I know
No be so for some stupid people I know
People wey go like to [destroy] your soul
En! Alagbon o
Them go use your shit to put you for jail
En! Alagbon o
My shit na exhibit it must not lost
En! Alagbon o
So goes "Expensive Shit" from the great, late Fela Ransome-Kuti, really just Fela. The song is about an experience he had, one of many, with the Nigerian government: police came to arrest him for possession of a joint, possibly one they planted - Fela smoked prodigious amounts of pot - so he swallowed it. The police then arrested him and planned on finding the joint passed in the singer's shit, but Fela used the pooled, uh, resources of his fellow prisoners to thwart the authorities. To paraphrase Spinal Tap, you can't dust for shit . . .
So, it's a song about shit, and one you can dance to. It's a protest song in a way that I cannot hear in protest music in American pop culture: funky, loping, and sexy, with long instrumental solos and possessing, to quote Kurt Elling, "indelible groovitude." Fela's music is frequently irresistible to the ear, the hips and the feet, it's insinuating, fresh and free from the American commercial restraint of commoditized, commercialized pseudo-rebellion. Sixty years after the death of the 78 record I would think America could accept the thirteen minute long pop song. But American is not yet safe for that kind of freedom. It's not just that the American attention span can't swallow such magnificent length, but that Fela had more to say than he didn't like the president, he was protesting against his government and his society.
Here, recently, musical protests against the political status quo have been relatively mild. There are many pop musicians who dislike the current state of affairs, not surprising considering that's the popular attitude across the country. Green Day, Eminem, the Dixie Chicks, they point out their obvious displeasure with things, and they do so in ways that are also obvious, no matter how sympathetic. That's one of the problems with political art in general, which is that the sentiment is often anodyne and commonplace, and the expression of it alone seems to a lack of the artful. There's also an essential commercial component to a lot of political art in America, a built in audience that confirms a kind of popularity or conformity of the work to received opinion: there's not much good or bad I can say about musicians and artists stating things like racism, war, poverty and human exploitation are bad. They self-evidently are bad. Pointing this out risks neither the overthrow of the government or sales, not even with the smug scolding of our self-appointed moral leaders.
For Fela, things were different. He didn't spend time in jail just for swallowing a joint, he was arrested frequently for criticizing the Nigerian government in public and in concert, and this not only in Nigeria. He lived in an armed compound to protect himself against his own government, although this was eventually stormed by 1,000 troops who nearly beat him to death and threw his mother from a window, mortally injuring her. Musical protests by popular artists in America just don't have the same frisson. Although the NSA is collecting all our emails, money transactions and phone conversations in a massive database they can mine at any time, they are not yet storming the homes of musicians who criticize the government. And although the mildest, most obvious and clichéd expressions critical of the government draw the predictable, obvious and clichéd condemnations from all the usual suspects, what kind of damage can the opinions of a bunch of cretins without any sense of taste do to a popular artist? Elvis, The Beatles and The Dixie Chicks all ended up doing pretty well with audiences.
I wish we had someone like Fela, though, but I'm not sure we can. He was not just in direct, profound and dangerous opposition to his government - of course, we don't have a full dictatorship just yet, but then Roberts and Alito will have their chances - but he was in opposition to society itself, at least polite, middle-class, opinion-making society. In Walt Whitman's words, the received morals of the parlor, what were they to him? That's a very American sentiment, and there are those who live that way here and now, but who in popular culture both expresses that idea and maintains a high level of popularity? Fela himself was wildly popular across Africa, and he was a radically individual figure. His compound was not just a place to protect himself from the regime, it was a self-declared country within a country, his Kalakuta Republic. This alone led to a great deal of arrests and beatings and did not endear him to the bourgeoisie. Nor did his taking of some 27 wives. And what did he think of religion? In "Shuffering and Shmiling" he sings:
Suffer suffer suffer suffer
Suffer for World
Na your fault be that
Me I say na your fault be that
Suffer suffer for World
Enjoy for Heaven
Christians go dey [talk]
"In Spiritum Heavinus"
Moslems go dey call
"Allah wa Akbar"
. . .
My sister [what] you go hear?
Archbishop dey for London
Pope dey for Rome
My people - them go follow Bishop - Amen
Them go follow Pope
Them go follow Imam - Amen
. . .
Them go - talk Bishop
Talk Pope
Talk Imam
Them go start to talk themselves
. . .
Everyday my people inside bus - Suffering and smiling
Forty-nine sitting ninety-nine standing - Suffering and smiling
They go pack themselves in like sardine - Suffering and smiling
. . .
Them go reach house water no dey - Suffering and smiling
Them go reach bed power no dey - Suffering and smiling
. . .
Them go look pocket money no dey - Suffering and smiling
Everyday na the same thing - Suffering and smiling
. . .
How many many you go make - Many many
Suffer suffer for World - Amen
Fela was a man free from all political and social constraints, the more so because he endured all the punishment this brought him. He wasn't a political revolutionary, he wasn't interested in destroying things, he had no coherent political philosophy, not even a naïve one, he just wanted "I no be gentleman at all o, I be Africa man original," to be a free person in a way that our current popular discourse about freedom cannot possibly contain. One the one side in American, "freedom" seems to mean unrestrained commercial activity, as long as it doesn't involve selling contraceptive products or anything that might encourage the libido [except for medically induced erections], while one another side, "freedom" seems to mean unrestrained personal expression, except for when it may hurt another's feelings or be an expression of animosity for a person or group, in which case it should be restrained through some means, specifically hate-crime legislation. What's an American supposed to think about freedom? All the pressures on freedom, from all directions, leave me contemplating Glenn Gould's ultimate idea of freedom, which is a prison cell in which his mind could yet not be constrained in anyway. That's a philosophical view, certainly, but it does emphasize the freedom of conscience, unrestrained, from which the possibility of freedom or action, especially moral action, arises.
Which gets me back to Fela and freedom. What he embodies, personally and musically, is anarchy. Personally he lived without rules, not without order. Musically he was the same. His work is not free in the sense of free jazz, it's free in the sense that he was going to do what he needed to do to express his ideas, no more, no less, and then `hit it and quit.' If he had to lay down a groove and blow his horn, or pound on the keyboard for eight minutes before even beginning his say [and Fela was not a great singer, saxophonist or keyboard player, simply a great musician], then that's what he did. Fela believed in pleasure, he was a sybarite - another thing distasteful to polite society, Nigerian and American - and he wants to seduce you before he says his piece, and even then he doesn't argue. He was never a didactic artists, he was more of a satirist, but mainly a man who said it is terrible what is being done to people, but they can't take away our joy. It strikes me now that he was also a Stoic in this way.
On a musical level, this kind of thing comes closest to jazz in American popular culture. And there's nothing popular about jazz, and even within the tiny audience for the music, there is an even tinier one willing to entertain freer styles. I think the closest cognate to Fela is Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, without the lyrical content but with the fluid, electric ensemble, the urgency and the funkiness. But the last Prime Time record was 1995! In more popular music, I think Sonic Youth has some of these qualities: they can be critical lyrically of the received morals of the parlor, and certainly they make music with a beautiful, magnificent sense of freedom and cooperation, without rules but with order. But they seem more separate from, rather than engaged with, society, and they don't have a mass following.
On a personal level, anarchy is the political idea that speaks most directly and intuitively to my soul. But I'm no longer in the season of the rising sap, so I have to think critically about that kind of stimulation, and I know in my head that when groups of people start to believe a political idea can bring about a Utopia on earth, the best one can hope for is a charming and short-lived cult, while the worst and all too frequent result has been massacre and destruction. It is sweet to me to think of a society without rules, but with the order that comes about when people treat each other fairly and decently, but we're all human, and that's never going to happen. And I certainly don't have any interest in living like Fela. I can't imagine the strength to be in such constant, physical, dangerous opposition to government, much less maintain his pleasures in their quantities. All this, perhaps, adds to the pleasure of listening to him, and the power, because there's a quality of a leap of faith in finding that great pleasure in his sense of freedom, the slim hope that it could all possibly be true.