Sunday Music: The Most “Expensive S***” In Musical History
January 4, 2026·0 comments·zg
In 1974, Fela Kuti took the most expensive s*** in Nigerian history. It’s not in the Guinness Book, but it ought to be. It makes for not just a wacky (if not slightly debatable) world record, but it’s an amazing story - and, since this is a Sunday music post, there’s a great song in here too.
Fela’s a complicated guy - musically, politically, personally. All the wives, the cult energy, the “but what are your politics” politics. You will wrestle with that. It’s worth it. If you don’t know him, I have to warn you. If you do know him, I have to signal that I know this too.
In case you weren’t waiting for this to come out for forever too, The audiobook, Fela Kuti: Fear Not Man, by Jad Abumrad (and team) is excellent. It gives Fela an arc beyond his lifetime and stitches the music, the man, and the movement together in a way no docu-series really has. If you want the long, weird, beautifully constructed version of his complicated existence in audio-only format, start there.
The best new material for me, that this series gets pretty deep into, is his mother - how she was raised, and how she behaved while raising him. Think Riot grrl meets Malcolm X meets Yoruba chaos agent, both as his mom and as a (literal) local revolutionary. You also get why his symbolic popularity has surged again over the past few decades, even as his actual life only looks more intense in hindsight.
If you loved James Brown and Dilla in the 90s, as I did, you eventually end up in Fela’s Afrobeat rabbithole. But the punk energy is what sets it apart, mostly because it’s just so undeniable - the politics, the edge, the audacity. Think the sneer of “God Save the Queen” with the paranoid theorizing of “California Über Alles,” peppered with an “I Give You Nothing”-style refusal to play nice. But with, like, Public Enemy on the top and Parliament Funkadelic underneath.
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