‘Expensive Shit’: How did the classic Fela Kuti album get its name?
Fela Kuti might now be regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Nigerian music, but at the time when he was at his most active, he was far from appreciated by everyone in his own country. At his creative peak, while there was a period of political turmoil in his home nation, Kuti released dozens of albums alongside his bands Africa ‘70 and Egypt ‘80 and is credited with having pioneered the Afrobeat genre and popularised it within a Western context.
Due to the strict impositions of the military dictatorship in Nigeria that ran from 1966 to 1999, Kuti’s political views, lifestyle and lawless living were severely frowned upon by the junta. In 1970, he declared that the compound that he, his family and band members lived on to be independent from the state of Nigeria, and the Kalakuta Republic was reported to have had not just a recording facility on it, but a free healthcare clinic.
The police knew that they could not control what happened within the compound but had been desperate to apprehend the musician for many years, resorting to raiding the premises on multiple occasions. They were aware of Kuti’s rampant marijuana use, and since the punishment for possession in Nigeria carried a sentence of up to ten years in prison, and cultivation was punishable by death, they realised that the best way of stopping him in his tracks was to frame him for his cannabis consumption.
On one afternoon in May 1974, the police raided Kuti’s home in the hope that they’d be able to successfully find some of the drugs that would lead to his imprisonment, but when they came in, they realised nothing could be found – due to the fact that Kuti had washed the last of his grass down the sink. In an attempt to frame him, one of the officers planted a joint and thought they had him in their grasp at that point, yet inexplicably, Kuti chose to destroy the evidence, not by the same method as before, but by eating it.
Still, the police took Kuti into custody and demanded that he stay there until he could ‘produce’ the offending evidence, which came after several rounds of interrogation and police suggesting that they would pump his stomach to retrieve the drugs. Refusing to take a dump on the police’s terms, Kuti held back from providing a stool sample that they could take from him for the next three days until a fellow inmate told him that they could swap their slop buckets for a drug-free sample. The police, unaware of the exchange that had taken place, were amazed to see what he had given them, which Kuti described in his account of the story in Carlos Moore’s book, Fela: This Bitch of A Life, as being “clean as a baby’s shit”.
Kuti, much to the chagrin of the police who had strived to keep him in jail, got off scot-free, and he would revisit this amusing incident on multiple occasions in his songs. While ‘Alagbon Close’ details the raids on his home and the corrupt systems used by the hypocritical and violently oppressive forces in power, the more notable and humourous retelling of the story comes from ‘Expensive Shit’.
The title track to his 1975 album sees him declare to the police in an insulting fashion that they can’t take his shit, both in a literal and figurative sense, and he goes on to gloat about how they wasted so much money attempting to capture him only for him to not be able to produce what they wanted from him, stating that his shit is “too expensive”. Much like the rest of his 1970s output, Expensive Shit, which also features ‘Water No Get Enemy’ is Kuti at his most resplendent yet vital, and as it has such a personal tale of his encounters with the law behind it, it reinforces the political beliefs that he so ardently pushed in his music.
