"Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Nigerian Blues" (Various Artists)
I just opened my new copy of this album, and am about to order the second volume.
An elder gentleman from Lagos broke it down for me once. "Fela is a religion," he said with reverence. "Some people went to church. We went to Fela." Unlike the Chinese guy I met on the same trip who equated Mao to Jesus, Afrobeat was dogma a whiteboy could get with—ask anyone in a "Music Is a Weapon" tee. While the reigning viewpoint remains of that monotheistic sort, Soundway's two-disc set, Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-6, and its follow-up, Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound of the Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-79, suggest that in the halcyon first half of that decade (after the end of the Nigerian civil war), there was once a pantheon.
[From village voice > music > Two New Afrobeat Compilations by ANDY BETA ]
There aren't many musicians that who tap so deeply into the muse that they become religious (quasi-religious at least) figures. John Coltrane (there's a church in the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco that I'll go to one day), Bob Marley, even Bob Dylan (in a faux-Kabbalistic religion of the Word and its permutations). And Fela Kuti. Fela, in his best tracks, lays out such a deep groove a listener cannot help but join in the ceremony.
