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.
