"Abumrad, one of our most distinctive podcast-makers, is a natural guide to Fela Kuti's story. On "Radiolab," the public-radio science show that Abumrad founded, co-hosted, and dazzlingly sound-designed for almost two decades, he and his team excelled at making vast amounts of complex information palatable for a general audience, if occasionally overdoing the whizbang. Central to the show's brilliance and excess was Abumrad's zeal for playing with sound, layering and repeating clips to striking effect."
"From the early nineteen-seventies until his death, in 1997, Fela, as everybody in the series calls him, produced hugely popular music with danceable beats and furiously irreverent lyrics, inspiring bravery-irrational bravery, as one interviewee recalls-and political resistance in listeners in and beyond Nigeria. Abumrad and his team spent three years researching the show, travelling to Lagos, L.A., Paris, and London to soak up what remains of Fela's world, including stories and insights from bandmates, friends, and relatives"
Fela Kuti pioneered Afrobeat with long, danceable grooves and fiercely irreverent lyrics that galvanized political resistance across Nigeria and beyond. His career from the early 1970s until his 1997 death combined popular music, theatrical performance, and explicit critiques of post-colonial authoritarian power. Research undertaken in Lagos, L.A., Paris, and London collected testimony from bandmates, friends, and relatives, including Wole Soyinka, to reconstruct Fela's life. The result is an eight-hour sonic immersion that evokes both Fela's musical innovations and the volatile political landscape of post-colonial Nigeria, revealing connections between artistic practice and collective courage in precarious times.
Read at The New Yorker
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