Oct 15, 2026 · 1 hr 27 min · 14 segments
For Fela Kuti’s 88th birthday, we’re joined by our first-ever guest—Nick Alt of Vinyl Me, Please—to Felabrate the man who reminded us that “music must be for revolution,” to unpack VMP’s beautiful new…
aspects of Fela's life and specifically his ideals and treatment of women that is...
And I say quite possibly not because I'm really running interference, but just because, I don't know, we consumed a lot of content about this and the way that people talked about it was it wasn't okay, but we're not entirely sure the extent of it.
And so I think that's worth keeping in mind here because I mean, especially this day and age, this whole idea of like, can we carry a person forward who did things that weren't okay? Is that something that's even we're talking about or platforming? So I think probably what we can say here is you will be able to see through some of the context and story here.
Why? this story is worth telling, why Fela Kuti is worth talking about, specifically why Africa 70 is worth talking about, why this record is worth talking about, why Nigerian corruption is worth talking about, and why many of the things that he did do, though fucking crazy, were good, benefited people in a lot of ways, made a lot of change happen.
And no one has to take the perspective in a life of saying all the good things that happened are moot.
What we're going to talk about instead is just how absolutely nuts and relentlessly he was pursued by his own government just for calling out corruption.
And then how he started especially digging in after some monumental situations and just flipped the entire thing all the way over into, yeah, I'm literally going to say your name now.
And so when, like, to me, that's an important kind of ball to try to wrap up because, you know, you talked about how he approached music and how this, you know, I mean, his band is huge, right? This whole collective of people.
And then he lived in a commune on top of that, that he ran like, so he's always in a community and in collective with other folks, uh, And so I think it's important to be able to see all of those pieces and understand that context so you can really fully appreciate the absolute magnitude of this person's influence, but then the influence of the people that he influenced all the way from his parents and their influence on him all the way down to how he influenced everybody else, got influenced by James Brown, influenced by Black Panthers, and then went on to influence people for decades on.
aspects of Fela's life and specifically his ideals and treatment of women that is...
And I say quite possibly not because I'm really running interference, but just because, I don't know, we consumed a lot of content about this and the way that people talked about it was it wasn't okay, but we're not entirely sure the extent of it.
And so I think that's worth keeping in mind here because I mean, especially this day and age, this whole idea of like, can we carry a person forward who did things that weren't okay? Is that something that's even we're talking about or platforming? So I think probably what we can say here is you will be able to see through some of the context and story here.
Why? this story is worth telling, why Fela Kuti is worth talking about, specifically why Africa 70 is worth talking about, why this record is worth talking about, why Nigerian corruption is worth talking about, and why many of the things that he did do, though fucking crazy, were good, benefited people in a lot of ways, made a lot of change happen.
And no one has to take the perspective in a life of saying all the good things that happened are moot.
What we're going to talk about instead is just how absolutely nuts and relentlessly he was pursued by his own government just for calling out corruption.
And then how he started especially digging in after some monumental situations and just flipped the entire thing all the way over into, yeah, I'm literally going to say your name now.
And so when, like, to me, that's an important kind of ball to try to wrap up because, you know, you talked about how he approached music and how this, you know, I mean, his band is huge, right? This whole collective of people.
And then he lived in a commune on top of that, that he ran like, so he's always in a community and in collective with other folks, uh, And so I think it's important to be able to see all of those pieces and understand that context so you can really fully appreciate the absolute magnitude of this person's influence, but then the influence of the people that he influenced all the way from his parents and their influence on him all the way down to how he influenced everybody else, got influenced by James Brown, influenced by Black Panthers, and then went on to influence people for decades on.
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