The impetus behind Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti’s 1975 album Expensive Shit is legendary. It’s the ultimate act of revenge and provocation. The cover reads, “The men in uniform alleged I swallowed some quantity of hemp. My shit was sent for lab test. Result negative with brings us to…Expensive Shit.” Hilarious. Aside from the joy of making his backup singers repeatedly offer ‘because the shit de smell,” and suggesting it was the last thing he would want to smell, let alone analyze, it’s actually a tongue in cheek tale of the authorities attempt to entrap him. The story goes that upon finding nothing in their raid the police planted a stick of marijuana. Fela promptly grabbed it and ate it. So they locked him up and waited for it to pass through his system. It took three days, and finally, with some tampering of the evidence, when it all came out the results were clean. It’s pretty indicative of Fela that there could be such a humorous, yet potentially deadly premise to the song, that he then uses as a tool to wave provocatively in the face of the establishment. And it’s such a good song too, thirteen minutes long, tough, taut, with an urgent tempo and damaging brass. Despite the tomfoolery you’re left with no uncertainty. Fela is angry, humiliated and lashing out, making for some incredibly passionate music. The second eleven minute piece from this album, Water Get No Enemy is a jazzier more relaxed jam that has a slight Afro-Cuban feel with the keys providing a certain centre to the tune in which Fela uses water as a metaphor to suggest that the government should go with the flow of the people.
Produced by Ginger Baker (Cream), He Miss Road is perhaps the closest that Fela ever came to psychedelia. His organ work in particular on the title track has a distinctly marijuana soaked drone whilst the brass has a kind of crunchiness, a slightly different feel to the way his horns come across on previous albums. There is something quite different and unique about this album. It still retains Fela’s Afrobeat framework, the driving groove, stabbing horns, extended instrumentation before the vocals appear and the multiple female backing vocals, yet there’s a peculiar dreamy, almost cocktail feel to the music. It’s less urgent and political than Expensive Shit, more a sociological statement, lamenting people who have lost their way and can’t find the road, such as a musician who sings for the deaf. Monday Morning Lagos tackles the difficulty of transitioning from the carefree joy of the weekend to a working week with a peculiar stilted groove and repeated tempo shifts making everything feel awkward and uncomfortable. It’s really quite different to Fela’s oeuvre, a little more rhythmically complex, where everything is a little more stripped back, and it feels like there are gaps in the music. It’s Not Possible, a seventeen and a half minute opus again begins with a Cuban percussive feel and the organ takes on Iron Butterfly style free associations. It’s like nothing you’ve heard Fela do before and all you can attribute it to is Baker’s psychedelic influence as there are new genres being created on this song. There’s featured hand drumming that is crazily panned between the stereo field, then the keys have this bizarre cold crystal reverb feel. Whilst it ultimately ends up being the kind of call and response Afrobeat tune that Fela knows and loves, these slight departures make this album a really unique listen.
The two albums collected here on this single disc could scarcely be more different in terms of style and content, yet they’re only two of the six albums this crazily prolific band made in 1975. They stand as two of the more groundbreaking documents of a tremendously fertile period for a group that were intent on blurring the boundaries between music and political agitation.
Bob Baker Fish
