Director Alex Gibney’s documentary “Finding Fela,” hits theaters this Friday, August 1.
We had the opportunity to sit down with Fela’s son Seun Kuti who released his latest album “A Long Way To The Beginning,” with his father’s band Egypt 80 in May. Read our exclusive interview below:
How did you feel about the movie?
Well I just saw it last week and you know it’s really good. For me it’s the most accurate representation of Fela’s struggle that’s out there today.
During the movie you said he would just write write write his music and lyrics, how do you think that influenced Fela’s music?
Well it was just the fact that he had written so many songs and his style of music writing was already second nature to him … For me when I write my songs and I’m writing lyrics, you know you write your lyrics and you read it, you stop, you read it, you try again; Fela didn’t have that, his mind had what it wanted to say and it just came out. He did not freestyle because he didn’t just get on stage and just say it but it’s like free-writing you know.
How would you describe your writing process?
For me I can’t write lyrics that way, I am not yet that great, I have to say. You know but for me I believe being a musician is 20 percent talent and 80 percent hard work. It’s really true because as a musician you need to have inspiration to make songs. Your sound has to come to you; you have to be walking down the streets and hear your music in your head from nothing. That’s the only way to make originality. Most people today that make music, are not really musicians, they just in the studio cut and paste and chop people’s things together then come up with a track and act like it’s their track. If you’re a good student of music that has a big repertoire you find that most things on mainstream music are songs that have been made before. So yeah that is basically what I see and for me as musicians will tell you that as you are walking on the street that original sound has to come to you. You have to hear maybe it’s a baseline or a horn section, guitar rift, it’s something you hear it back and go “this is good, it’s good progression, I’m going to keep that.” Then making that sound into music, making that sound into a song is the 80 percent hard work. But yeah that’s the process for me I hear my sound then get in the studio and make my music.
Describe Nigerian culture.
Nigerian culture doesn’t exist. There is no Nigerian culture because Nigeria itself is a British invention. There’s nothing like Nigeria; it has no meaning in any African language. My culture is Yoruba. I’m Yoruba and my culture is very beautiful and very rich we’re quite growing. We were in the middle of a civil war when the white people arrived and we were just about to become a nation and our growth was stalled. We were forced into this unhealthy relationship with our competitors in the east and north of this area forced together and called Nigeria. There’s nothing great about representing ourselves as Nigerians. We have to realize all the borders in Africa are artificial; these are not borders that determine nations.
If you look in the dictionary, the definition of a nation is not just a place. The definition of a nation is a group of people that share the same culture, history and language! It’s very important that’s what they don’t tell you in the west and teach you in schools … How important language is in unity. That we should understand each other when we speak, in England they speak “English” in France they speak “French” and in Germany they speak “German” and they have a different dialects of it. Yes, just the way Yoruba has a bunch of different dialects but in Nigeria we have 272 languages and they tell us we have to be united. How is that going to happen? It’s absolutely impossible!
If you leave New York and go to LA and you cannot understand what they are saying in LA. trust me America would not have the unity that they have today. The fact that you can travel from east coast to west coast and communicate and understand what everybody says to you is what gives you that ability to grow, to explore and relate. But we all over Africa have these artificial borderlines that divide us and don’t allow us to see ourselves for who we really are as Nigerians. Our history is 100 years old and I refuse to accept a hundred year old history because my people have existed 500 b.c. I have over three to four thousand years of existence in this place called Nigeria. In that land my people have existed for over four thousand years why do you give me a hundred year history and expect me to be proudly Naija. I believe that is kind of backwards and it’s not actually one of the things making Africa move forward, because we are not actually seeing ourselves for how great we are.
Nobody is telling us our history of things that great men from our tribes have been able to achieve from even before we had connection with white people. We are not taught that in schools, these are things we have to come out of school and decide to find out ourselves. And not a lot of people have that time to read more books because they leave school they are in poverty and they need to do something to feed their families. They never have a true representation or true idea of who they really are. So my culture as a Yoruba man is very beautiful, my language is great, I respect my traditions you know I believe in it. Nothing is set in stone, I don’t believe every aspect of my tradition because I’m not religious, but I practice my religion of “Ifa” not as a believer but as a cultural necessity.
Tell us about your new album.
My new album is my best album. I have to say the new album is the best thing we’ve done since we started making records without my dad. I feel it stands on par to my dads works as well. I think with this album I’m more confident, with every album, I’m expressing myself a lot more. So I think this album is a great experience. It’s one if the best ways to spend fifty minutes.
Do you have a favorite song on the album?
Well yeah I do. Before I had a kid I didn’t used to choose. I have a daughter now but before my songs used to be my kids, so I didn’t used to say I had a favorite one because it’s bad parenting. But now that I have a real kid I can say on this album I can say my favorite track is “Higher Consciousness”. I really believe the message I think it’s just my favorite track, the mood and everything. I finished the track and I was like “How did I write this song?” “What was I smoking?”
You inherited the bad from Fela, is that true?
I always say “no, I didn’t inherit, we just kept playing.” You know inherit sounds like my dad wrote it down somewhere that when I die Seun will carry the band. The only reason I kept playing with the band is because we didn’t want to stop. We all believed in what Fela was doing and when the family said the band had to go, I was the only Fela child in the bad, so therefore I was the only one that could keep the band going legitimately … and trying to keep the family off, trying to close the band down by force. I said “I want to keep playing with the band” and they said “well don’t come to us for help! You keep what you make”. Ok.
How is it touring?
I’ve been touring, well I been touring since 2007. We’ve been touring -not constantly, but we’ve had the experience. This is our third album and our fifth world tour. But this our biggest world tour. We’ve been around the world, we’ve don’t that three times all continents playing but we’ve never had the tour so proper world tour like this year. Where we are 24 weeks at once on the road going everywhere and we’ve done nine weeks already in march. We started this 24 week one in May, so you know this is the first time we are actually doing it in one stretch. It’s usually like 3 months… 3 months… 3 months but then we are doing more C.Ds because our profile has grown, so we can link the shows up together better.
When Fela was on broadway did you go see that?
Yeah I’ve seen the show about 20 times in three different continents. In a real fan of the show, not because I’m Fela’s son but because the show is a really good show. As an artist I have to appreciate the work that I see on stage in that show. I’ve seen in it in Europe, I’ve seen it in America and I’ve seen it in Africa.
Did you see any of the other stars like Will Smith and Jay-Z?
No, no I didn’t come for the opening so I didn’t meet them. That was photo op. I’m not really a photo op kind of guy. You know if I meet them I want it to be substantial not just take pictures and be like “hey”. That is not not style.
What do you want listeners to take from your album?
Well the message you know I believe that the message of the album is the most important thing on the album. For me I want people to listen to my record and have it impact their lives in a positive way. And have them be able to tell their kids as well to make them better parents and impact their knowledge on their kids. You know because I believe as Africans, or anywhere you’re from your music has to represent the majority of people in your environment.
My father says this all the time, but I will expand on it. Music is a gift, it’s a very special gift and it’s special because it’s one of the few gifts you have that people love you for. People that don’t know you will put your picture in their house, they argue about you, they sleep with your picture, you know they come to your show, they buy your record, they make you rich and they are happy. This is a pure kind of love because it’s difficult to love someone you don’t know just because of something he does, but music gives us that opportunity.
Music is perverse today in that mainstream music takes that love and returns it with vanity and says that “I’m better than you, I’m richer than you, you cannot afford my kind of house” and takes these peoples love and twists it in to something so perverse for me. It’s kind of weird because I believe that the only way we can pay back this gift is to use our music to also represent the realities of the lives of the people that love us. This is for me is the essence of the gift; this is why the gift exists. There can be certain groups of people that can share the pains of the majority to the world, to each other and find a way to link us up to make life better for everybody.
You know it’s difficult because if politicians are on the radio and the tv and they are spewing their propaganda and all the rubbish that they say, the only other group of people that have a chance are artists. And if you also go and start spewing superficial nonsense we are condemning the people to a very difficult existence … You see how bad mainstream music is for the mind of young people. I saw a picture of a black Marilyn Monroe that this guy wants to do a song about now. Everybody is happy that this is a black Marilyn Monroe; I mean Angelica Davis is already black and Nina Simone is black you know put some real black women with some real substance so young black women can have a good role model to watch. You know they have Rihanna now they are going to have Marilyn Monroe who was cheating with the president …. These things are just real capitalism commercial nonsense that people really have to go beyond.
We as black people, we have a responsibility, we are the most suffering race in the world. We are the only ones with nowhere to go back to. A Chinese man right now can go back to china … No African can go back – Africa right now is messed up. We are the only ones all over the world where our own motherland is not a place to go back to. The French man can be pissed off any day and say “I’m going back to France”. The Japanese man can go back to Japan. Every continent has moved ahead of us. And yet the black people who have the opportunity to create that awareness and create that … just see the superficial nonsense that they can achieve and make one hundred million dollars and go broke before you die anyway. If Michael Jackson can go broke, what are we doing all this rubbish commercial nonsense for? What we can do is create a long lasting legacy that can benefit the majority of our young ones because that is really what is going to make us strong. That is really what is going to make us happy not just because we want to sing the song.
-Toyibat Oridami
