‘Mr Follow Follow’: The most hypnotic track from Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat empire
Having spent the 1960s slowly pioneering Afrobeat by melding Western funk and jazz stylings with traditional Yoruba music, Fela Kuti entered the 1970s at the peak of his creative powers. Releasing 1973’s Gentleman with his Africa ’70 backing band, Kuti became Nigeria’s most recognised music star both internationally and domestically.
An encounter with the Black Power movement while touring America—coupled with the colonial dissidence instilled in him by his feminist mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti—saw Kuti’s classic run of LPs charged with an immersion into African cultural primacy and a growing critique of the country’s rotation of ruling military regimes.
Naturally, the juntas saw Kuti and his populist influence as a threat. Following a police raid on his home under the half-specious suspicions of marijuana possession and three days in a cell the prisoners jokingly called “Kalakuta Republic”, Kuti’s thematic and lyrical attack on the political class’ authoritarian abuse would only sharpen fiercer—Alagbon Close and Expensive Shit taking incendiary aim at General Yakubu Gowon and successor Murtala Muhammed’s oppressive governance.
State persecution didn’t stop Kuti’s evolving cultural command. Painting an entire fleet of cars and buses with the renamed Afrika 70 logo and filling out Ikeja’s Shrine club and base of operations nightly with eager Afrobeat devotees, his national tours were hugely successful and unlike anything seen by any other Nigerian ‘entertainer’.
Rousing African consciousness away from the years of post-colonial inferiority complex that had plagued the nation, Kuti sought to cut a record that also would implore fellow Nigerians to scrutinise the actions and rhetoric of the latest corrupt army general Olusegun Obasanjo.
Released on Coconut Records in 1976, Zombie was Kuti’s most excoriating attack yet. Likening the Nigerian military forces to the obedient and unthinking cadavers that shuffle in horror fiction and voodoo tradition, the country’s ruling class was outraged at this offensive slur, as well as terrified that the cut’s seditious lyrics—”No break, no job, no sense / A joro, jara, joro”—might well inspire mutiny among the troops.
While the title track has proved the album’s most viscerally memorable, ‘Mr Follow Follow’s broader encouragement to think critically in the face of Nigerian propaganda and official party lines stands as Kuti’s most hypnotic in his vast Afrobeat oeuvre.
Skulking with a slithering groove like the spell that’s captured his countrymen, Kuti conjures a slice of political bite with trance-like fervour. Built around Nweke Atifoh’s hissing bass and drumming legend Tony Allen’s irresistible percussion, ‘Mr Follow Follow’ swells and breathes like an awakening phoenix snapping the nation out of a government-imposed fug. It’s an Afrika 70 piece one gets inexorably lost in, both possessed with meditative power that sparks quiet introspection yet wields guts and heft to stir as a rallying cry.
The Nigerian authorities were spooked. On February 17th 1977, 1,000 soldiers seized Kuti’s Kalakuta recording studio and commune—a “republic” he had declared independent from the Nigerian state—beat and sexually assaulted numerous occupants, destroyed all master tapes and band equipment, and fatally threw his mother out a window. Devastated and demoralised, Kuti departed for Ghana to recuperate.
Presidential posturing and tours with James Brown would follow before his death in 1997, but Kuti’s Zombie and the eternal ‘Mr Follow Follow’ stands as the pinnacle of his musical innovations and political bite.
