Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

0:28Wait, you're listening. Welcome back, old man. Thanks, youngster. Happy to be here. Yeah. Where have you been this whole time? I've just been here in Brooklyn, just, you know, being a dad, making stuff. So pretty much the first thing that happened when I handed you guys the show proudly is I became a professor, kind of a fake professor at Vanderbilt. Been teaching all kinds of things relating to storytelling and interviewing. Dr. Abumrad? Well, you know, none of the other faculty are fooled. But also alongside that, I've been making all kinds of weird music and theater things. We just had a big thing in Brooklyn that launched in May.

1:16It's about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, America's war-making engine, in a way. And I don't know, it felt like, what if journalism were sung by 60 women?

1:31And then somewhere along the way, early, I got into a conversation with Ben Adair, old friend, who has been making audio stories as long as I have. He approached me and he was like, hey, do you want to do a podcast about Felakuti? Felakuti, the Nigerian musician who invented a whole new genre of music and started a political movement and toppled a government just with music. I was like, cool, that sounds interesting. And I said yes to it in the way that you say yes to things that you know are never going to happen. Do you know? I was like, this will be really fun. Sure, I'd love to have dinner at your house.

2:09That sounds great. Well, I wasn't saying yes in a no, like I don't really want to do it. I was just like, I don't know if I'm doing another podcast. But let me just, you know, let's just explore it. Because I knew a bit about Fela. I mean, he was sort of the record that came on at a party and everyone was like, oh, and it was like the party got started. So I knew him from that angle, but I didn't know his backstory at all. So I started making some phone calls.

2:38And I don't know, I just didn't stop.

2:50In this series, we're going to look at the life and the music of Fela Kuti. Fela. Fela. Fela. Fela. Fela. Anikulapo Kuti. Anikulapo Kuti. I always get that. My tongue always trips over that. Anikulapo Kuti. The father of Afrobeat. The black president. The chief priest. I had never heard of Fela until you got obsessed with him. And I was like, who is this guy? And why is Jad spending like three years obsessed with this guy? I mean, yeah, one of the first things that you discover when you're trying to unravel who this man was is that all of these people that you love, love him. Ayo Adeburi, actor, writer, someone I really respect.

3:32She's in The Bear. Great show. On some red carpet somewhere, she was asked... Oh! This question. A musician I have a cult-like fascination with. Her answer? Fela Kuti, who's a, like, Nigerian legend. Bear is a very complicated man. Fela has to be the epicenter. And Questlove, one of the great musical minds of our time. I mean, Fela is the one figure whose story resonates with modern American hip-hop culture. The passion, the pain. Jay-Z. The strength, the need to get the message out there. Beyonce. I don't know. It just presents a question. You're like, okay, what are they hearing? You know? Yeah.

4:11Can I hear it? Can I make other people hear it? Yeah. Okay. So you dive in. You end up churning out this 12-part series called Fela Kuti, Fear No Man, which people can go. Yeah. listen to right now, anywhere, everywhere. And you know, okay, people clearly love his music, but what drove you to make the series? Yeah. He is the answer to a really important question for me personally, which is like, right now, you're looking out in the world, none of it makes sense. It's all insanity. And if you love music, as I do, and you kind of look around, and you're like, what is the point? What's the point?

4:52What's the point of making music? What's it going to do to make our world better? And then you look at the streaming hellscape that we all live in, and artists are now content creators, and they just sell their content to Spotify for precisely 0.01 cents. And you're like, what's the point? What's the point? Like, why? And he answers the question for me, that the music itself, it wasn't just music. It became the catalyst for a political movement that had many, many tens of thousands of young people ready to march into the streets. And just with the music, he almost toppled a dictatorship. He's like, this is the point of making music.

5:36This is the point of making art, is to try and make a new world, try and change the world in some way. And the music itself, though, like how it functions how is that changing the world just what's the almost mechanism mechanism sure okay so here's a so so lulu i love that question because the political aspects of his music weren't just lyrical although they were it was baked into the very grammar of the music itself it's like in the notes it's below the notes it's in the it's in the structure of the music It's in the impact and sequence of impacts that the music creates. Like, which sounds so pretty, but like, what the F does that mean?

6:19Well, okay, so this is this episode that I think you're going to play. Yeah. And okay, just for context, the first episode, we met a bandmate of Phela's. We got the story through his eyes. Then in the second episode, you traced his evolution into a revolutionary. and then in the third one, the one we're going to play, this is the one where we really get into the music itself. Yeah. It really tries to first give you the experience and then explain what the experience is. Yeah. So it's called The Shrine. Anything else before we walk in? I should explain. The Shrine is his club in Lagos and it really was sort of the epicenter of his movement and we interviewed, God, so many people who described what it was like to be there.

7:09People who were once asleep and are now awake.

7:27My experience in being in the shrine was like, like the music was like inside of me, It's all around and just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like you're all inside the music. The secret of life is to have no fear. We all have to understand that.

7:54This is Phil Akuti, Fear No Man, Chapter 3, Enter the Shrine. One of the ingredients of a movement, necessary ingredients, is to have a place where you can experience the promise of that movement right here, right now, in the present. Can you tell us about your first visit to the shrine? Yes, of course. What do you remember about that? It was very, very funky. This is Michael Veal, musician, professor of music at Yale. He's also one of our advisors on the project. To hear that music in New York is one thing. You know, you listen to that music in New York, you're like, oh yeah, whatever. Look, the first night I was in Lagos, you know, as you're walking up the shrine, you hear that.

8:37Then you get closer, you start to do. So you start to do.

8:47I remember that very clearly. It was at night, and there was no power. Blackout. It's like going to Times Square But there are people all in the street Like thousands and thousands of people It's a jam-packed mob with people It's total darkness But thousands of these little sterno lamps Illuminating the place

9:12Because the power went out all the time in Lagos But there are thousands of these sternos So you imagine the scene It's almost like Woodstock You know what I mean? Yeah

9:26Yeah. To hear that music in New York is one thing. You're like, oh yeah, whatever. But then if you ever get in a plane and go to Lagos, they open a hatch and it goes with the humidity and the heat. And the minute they open the hatch, it's like, blam! and then you walk out of the plane and you've got to go down the steps and you're like, oh, now I get it. Welcome to Nigeria. That's the way reality feels in this setting.

10:01You know what I'm saying? That interview with Michael Veal was one of the many reasons why when we finally got to Lagos, after a 13-hour flight, I'm good. Taking it all in. The top item on our agenda was to go to the shrine.

10:29Let me fill in a few gaps. 1969. After the whole Sandra Isidore experience in L.A., Fela comes back to Nigeria, radicalized, steps off the plane, and takes the country by storm.

10:44He becomes the massive star that we know him to be. And then between 1973 and 1979, he releases this fire hose

10:59of music. Something like, by my count, 27 records in six years-ish. One hit after another after another. Now, the shrine. During that time, early on, he sets up a club that he calls the shrine. And it's important to understand where. Lagos, Lagos City, the most populous city in Africa. Lagos is on the coast, the Atlantic Ocean. And it consists of a giant landmass, a mainland, that curves around this bay. And in the bay are two major islands that connect back to the mainland with bridges. On the islands, this is the sound you hear. Peacocks. Golf. It's very lush, very beautiful.

11:58On the mainland, very different sound.

12:11You will find places on the mainland where the sheer density of people is just breathtaking. For example, this audio that you're hearing is from a market that we visited in a neighborhood called Muxin, a poor working-class neighborhood where a million people are packed into seven square miles. In this neighborhood, not the island, this spot is where he decided to put the shrine. To say basically, I am the voice of the people. The Sufferheads, as he called them. When we visited the shrine, at night it was more or less as Michael Veal described it. People all in the street, like jam-packed mob with people.

12:57He was there in 92. We were there in 2024. And the shrine has closed a few times and reopened and moved around a bit. But it was kind of the same. It was dark. You had about 50 food sellers lining the block. this very long block in front of the shrine. People smoked weed openly, which in Nigeria can carry a heavy prison sentence. Our fixer in Lagos told us that even now, 28 years after Fela died, this is the one place where that can happen. One of the sellers that was there explained it this way. Fela is like life after death. Evergreen, yes. Yes. Do you feel like Fela still protects this street, this place?

13:40Yes, exactly. His sense was the ghost of Fela is still there protecting this one block. And as he said that, he nodded towards the end of the block where there were policemen waiting, standing almost like on the other side of an invisible line. You've done your research. You know that the shrine and also Fela's compound, the Calicut Republic, He had kind of declared independent of Nigeria.

14:10That's Lisa Lindsay, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in the history of West Africa, and she brings up an important point. It was that in 1970, when Fela got back to Nigeria, he declared his club, the shrine, and also his house nearby, which he called the Kalakuta Republic. He declared them a sovereign nation within Nigeria. Sort of like the Vatican is to Italy, that he was a country unto himself. Lisa Lindsay visited the shrine in the early 90s. It was just all this craziness that we saw. Well, okay, so outside there's a dictatorship that was shooting people.

14:53At that time, and there are videos of this on YouTube, the government would hold public executions of criminals and dissidents on the beach. There were soldiers in the streets. It wasn't safe to be out at night. You go in.

15:12And it's just this alternate universe. Describe what it looks like. It was like a warehouse, sort of. Everybody smoking. A lot of weed smoking. Giant, giant joints. Joints the size of police megaphones. Keep in mind, at that time, people were getting thrown in jail for 10 years for a half-smoked joint. There's just this massive cloud up at the top of the thing. It's hot, it's humid, there's a lot of people in there. People dancing and people stoned out of their minds. And it was such a contrast to how scared people were outside of the shrine. The shrine was not far from his house, a couple of blocks.

15:55That's John Darton, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote for the New York Times, worked as a foreign correspondent based in Lagos in the mid-'70s, wrote many, many articles about Fela, including this one where he watched Fela get ready right before he performed at the shrine. Would you mind reading this? This is you. You reading you. Because Ruby and I have been trying to find as vivid descriptions as we can of the atmosphere, and this is actually one of the more vivid that we've ever read. New York Times. That voice is Nina Darton, John's wife, also a longtime journalist. Fela's pregame ritual.

16:33The show begins at 1 a.m. Inside the nearby Calakuta Republic, Fela prepares for it laboriously. From a jar, he spoons up liberal doses, glitter, gooey substance nicknamed Fela Gold. Distilled extract of marijuana. Full-length mirrors are brought before him and held by two young boys. He slowly slips into skin-tight sequined pants and a white shirt open to the waist, arranging his strings of beads as if he were smoothing a necktie. Six bodyguards draw near. Let's go, fella says. And the entourage moves outside where there is a crowd of several hundred people. Some have been waiting for hours, clinging to the barbed wire to catch a glimpse of him.

17:27A chant, Fela, Fela, rumbles out of the dark. That is really good, John. It is really good. And as he walked and... Wait, he got on a donkey. Well, that was the second time. He got on a donkey? What? Okay, wait, sorry, as he walked. He was a showman. Drivers would get out and raise a fist and yell, Fella! Fella! Anyway, then he starts playing. And I have never seen, I think, a performer quite as dynamic as that. He was absolutely incredible. Before we go back into the shrine, well, first let me give you a picture. It is an open-air club, fits about 500 people. There's a tin roof over the stage, but no roof over the dance floor.

18:15and to either side of the stage are four Studio 54-ish cages where dancers dance. Also to one side, there is an altar where Fela had a picture of his mother, a picture of Malcolm X, and a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. But I'll be honest, what's most interesting to me is not so much the shrine itself. I mean, it was a club. But rather what happened to people when they went inside of it. Because do you know how people talk about psilocybin now? We all have one of those friends who did some mushrooms and it changed their life and they can't stop talking about it. And there's a way to explain those experiences.

18:54You can say in neurochemistry, right? There's something about these drugs. They rewire your brain. Fine. We ran into so many people who described listening to Phelah's music at the shrine in the same way. That it had the same effect on them. Which is a little harder to explain. Though I will try in a moment. But first, let's re-enter the shrine from their perspective.

19:23And as you're listening, see if you can let yourself notice, what are you paying attention to? How does that change over time? 1 a.m., Fela arrives on his donkey, takes the stage with 35 other musicians, and he begins a riff that will last most of the night. My experience of being in the shrine was like, like the music was like inside of me, it was all around. It was just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like you're all inside the music. A kind of hypnotic dancing. React to music. Dancing in this way. In this way. I remember being lost in music. All the people are smoking around me and we are in a mist.

20:08So you're in a different world.

20:22This idea of a spiral and circle.

20:37It's another way to deal with time. React to music. I would describe it as a swirl. You know, when you have a cycle, it starts off as this little thing that builds up. and it blows up the more you allow it to circulate it just starts to get bigger get bigger get bigger get bigger very cool get bigger get bigger get bigger very cool get bigger

21:34Fela starts his music to enchant this repetitive pattern, the power of the musical consternato. It's part of that enchanting strategy. You've been captured.

22:14I thought, this is really an amazing new form of music. It was almost like a field of sound that sits there for a long time and you explore it. You kind of enter it and live in it. This is a place. This isn't a song. And meanwhile, the rhythm section's keeping going. Going, going, going, going, going. Going, going.