World Music 101: Femi Kuti @ The Showbox

But alas, we've been around the block enough times to know that mostly, the above is BS. Yes, Fela Kuti was an icon and a voice of the oppressed. But like most political icons who make their name opposing oppressive regimes, the story relies on the convenient fact that Fela never became the president of Nigeria, despite several attempts, and thus never met the same fate as Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel or Léopold Sédar Senghor, who had the misfortune of actually having to try to run a country, their dissident credentials tarnished by years of politics and the attendant shortcomings, disappointments, and failures.

Furthermore, while Femi's music gets pseudo-indie cred by virtue of being international, we have to remember that fundamentally, it's mainstream pop back in Nigeria. While Femi hits all the right political notes--a song about fighting AIDS, a spoken-word discourse on the evils of European colonialism--is it any more credible coming from him than Madonna or Kanye West? Or is it a sign of how we continue to fetishize Africans who puppet the rhetoric Westerners like to hear that keeps us from lumping Femi Kuti in with the Live Eight crowd? Surely his non-threatening music and politically correct sentiments coupled with the fact he's a true-blue African could add some badly needed credibility to bloated big-budget celebrity affairs simulcast globally on network television and MTV.

So what can we really say here about Femi's show? It was good--talented musicians, charismatic lead man, a solid stage show with scantily clad back-up singers. He packed the Showbox fuller than we've, well, ever seen. And he got the crowd going. College kids awkwardly gyrating, hippies doing that flailing-arm dance-thing they do, clouds of pot smoke hazily rising from crowd. Femi demonstrated he's a talented multi-instrumentalism, switching fluidly between sax, guitar, and keyboard. People cheered when exhorted, listened attentatively when he discoursed. But quite honestly, we left wondering if Femi's appeal is the same back in Nigeria. All too often when it comes to culture, whether it's movies or books or music, when America imports from overseas, it says a lot more about what we want to think about them than who they really are.

For the cutting edge to break into the American market, it either has to be sufficiently non-threatening to please the moderate liberal middle-class culture consumers, or demonstrate enough mass appeal or street credibility to overcome negative responses. Think Reggaetón, which took 30 years before it was sufficiently pop music enough to make the grade, or how dancehall superstar Buju Banton's refusal to reject the gay-bashing of songs like "Boom Bye Bye" gets shows cancelled on Seattle's gay-friendly Capitol Hill. On the streets of Lagos, does Femi have the same credibility his father once enjoyed, or is he more akin to Jakob Dylan, an uninspired musician whose career was jump-started by an anachronistic attachment to what his dad did, and whose own music was never as innovative?

Somehow, we're guessing that in the gritty slums of Lagos, the real au courant music is much more in the hip-hop vein (as it is everywhere), where kids who can't afford two drummers, keyboards and a horn section are spilling their hearts out on dubbed tapes, surely posturing in imitation of American rappers, but at the same time telling it like it is, or at least what they think about the world and their own hard-scrabble lives. In a country still mired in corruption, the airwaves and recording studios are probably still off limits to them. And even if they weren't, would Americans like what they have to say as much as Femi's retro Third World liberation rhetoric, that hippies old and young can get behind? If we heard what the kids in the ghetto thought about women and AIDS and America and gays, would it still be getting promoed as part of "All Songs Considered"? We're not so sure.

We don't mean to tear Femi down here--like we said, frankly, we don't know what to think of him or his music, aside from the fact it was fairly danceable and everyone seemed to have a reasonably good time at the show. But for a musician whose name and career are so intertwined with his father and with politics and a certain American market segment's tastes and preferences, it's impossible to avoid trying to talk about what we're supposed to take away from the show. To give Femi his due, he was there to educate as much as to entertain, which leaves us asking the very legitimate question as to whether he's really more credible a source for political commentary than Cypress Hill, whose album liner notes frequently provided primary source material for those stoners we knew in high school writing inevitable pro-legalization essays. Not to ask such questions is really to help suppress and constrain Femi's message by framing him in such a manner as to dissociate him from the very real problems he describes. Is Femi a real activist pushing difficult issues that make us ask difficult questions about our own culture, or is his music another consumable object, an ethnicky trinket picked up from Pier 1 to give a touch of exotic color to a living room? Gino understood this precisely, and that's why he utterly rejected the World Music racket.

And here we are, semi-pro music critics faced with either puppeting sweet nothings about Femi we got off the Internet and heard on NPR, or trying to grapple with the limitations of our own understanding of the still-quite-large (whatever Internet idealists like to think) world in which we live. In the end, that's probably the best Femi can hope for--we may not truly be able to understand the world he comes from or how he fits into it, but he made us ask questions without easy answer, which is a good deal more an achievement than getting a crowd of a couple hundred nodding along to socio-political slogans, never certain whether that's a sign of agreement or merely moving to a beat.

Image from Femi Kuti's Myspace page.