By DCist contributor W Jacarl Melton

Femi Kuti performs tonight at the 9:30 Club. Doors at 9 p.m. $25

Following in your father’s footsteps isn’t easy because there will be the inevitable comparisons, especially if your dad was a musical vanguard. Femi Kuti can’t avoid the path his father, Fela, blazed so he’s decided to embrace it and further his family’s legacy in Afrobeat.

It goes without saying that Fela Kuti was one of those artists, and people, who only comes around once in a lifetime. He was to Afrobeat what James Brown was to funk. A prolific musician, he was responsible for over 80 albums and collaborated with the likes of Roy Ayers and Ginger Baker. Fela wasn’t only a performer, though. He ran for president in his native Nigeria only to be violently persecuted for speaking about the government’s corruption. If this wasn’t enough, Fela married 27 women in 1978 as a protest of government-sponsored attacks against him (he later divorced all of them). In 1997, he died of AIDS-related complications.

Femi isn’t as controversial as Fela was during his heyday but it doesn’t mean he’s abandoned every trait that made his father legendary. Thematically, his music focuses on pan-African ideals of unity and self-love as well as calls to fight AIDS and oppression. Musically, Femi features much of the same instrumentation as Fela but with fewer players.

Unlike Fela, though, Femi puts great emphasis on vocals. His father was essentially a jazz musician and it showed as his arrangements went minutes without a word. Femi highlights not only his own voice but has also featured Common, Mos Def, and D’Angelo on his songs. As a result, Femi’s tracks tend to be more succinct as is evident in his most widely distributed albums Shoki Shoki and Fight To Win.

But whatever the similarities or differences might be, showmanship for a Kuti is always paramount. So special are Femi’s performances that his Friday show at the 9:30 Club was deemed worthy of a live Internet broadcast on NPR Music’s concert series (which we highlighted this spring). How easily the dancers’ movements or the looks of intensity on the musicians’ faces translate to just audio isn’t yet known. Still, live or via the Internet, Femi will come with an energy that only his late father could match.