Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Is Radio Lab? I'm Latif Naser and I'm Lulu Miller and I am Chad Abelrod here to hang out with Lulu and Latif. Welcome back, old man. Thanks, youngster. Happy to be here. Yeah, where have you been this whole time? I've just been here in Brooklyn, just being a dad, making stuff. So pretty much the first thing that happened when I handed you guys the show. Proudly, as I became a professor, kind of a fake professor at Vanderbilt, but teaching all kinds of things relating to storytelling and interviewing. Dr. Abelrod. Uh, you well, you know, none of the other faculty are fools. But also alongside that, I've been making all kinds of weird music and theater things. We just had a big thing in Brooklyn that launched in May. It's about the Brooklyn Navy Art America's war making engine in a way. And, uh, I don't know, it felt like what if journalism were sung by 60 women? And then somewhere along the way, early, I got into a conversation with, uh, Venadier, old friend who, uh, has been making audio stories as long as I have. He approached me and he was like, "Hey, do you want to do, uh, a podcast about felacuti?" Felacuti, the Nigerian musician who invented a whole new genre of music and started a political movement and toppled a government just with music, I was like, "Cool, that sounds interesting." Um, and I said yes to it in the way that you say yes to things that you know are never going to happen. You know? It's really fun. Sure. I'd love to have dinner at your house. Yeah. Sounds great. Well, I wasn't saying yes in a no, like I don't really want to do it. I was just like, I don't know if I'm doing another podcast. Mm-hmm. You know, let's just explore it, because I knew a bit about felac, I mean, he was sort of the record that came on at a party and everyone was like, "Oh, and it was like the party got started." Mm-hmm. So I knew him from that angle, but I didn't know his backstory at all. So, um, I started making some phone calls and, uh, I know, I just didn't stop. In this series, we're going to look at the life and the music of "Fella Couti." "Fella?" "Anicolapo Couti." "Fella, anicolapo Couti." "Anicopol. " I always get that. My tongue always trips over that. "Anicolapo Couti." The father of Afrobeat. The black president. The chief priest. "I had never heard of "Fella" until you got obsessed with him, um, and I was like, "Who is this guy? Like, and why is Chad spending, like, three years obsessed with this guy?" I mean, yeah, one of the first things that you discover when you're trying to unravel who this man was is that all of these people that you love love him. "Io Adeberi, actor, writer, someone I really respect. She's in the bear. Great show." She carpets somewhere. She was asked. "Oh." Discussion. "A musician I have a cult-like fascination with." Her answer? "Fella Couti, who is, like, Nigerian legend, bear is a very complicated man." "Fella has to be the epicenter." And Quest Love, one of the great musical minds of our time. "I mean, Fella is the one figure whose story resonates with modern American hip-hop culture." "The passion of pain, the strength, the need to get that message out there." Beyonce? "I don't know. It just presents a question. You're like, "Okay, what are they hearing, you know, and can I hear it? Can I make other people hear it?" "Okay, so you dive in. You end up churning out this 12-part series called "Fella Couti, Fear No Man," which people can go listen to right now, anywhere, everywhere, and, you know, "Okay, people clearly love his music, but what drove you to make the series?" "Yeah." "He is the answer to a really important question for me personally, which is, like, right now you're looking out in the world. None of it makes sense. It's all insanity." And if you love music, as I do, and you kind of look around, you're like, "What is the point? What's the point? What's the point of making music? What's it going to do to make our world better?" And then you look at, like, the streaming hellscape that we all live in, and artists are now content creators, and they just sell their content to Spotify for precisely 0.01 cents. And you're like, "What's the point? What's the point? Like, why?" And he answers the question for me, that the music itself, it wasn't just music. It became the catalyst for, like, a political movement that had, you know, many, many tens of thousands of young people ready to march into the streets. And just with the music, he almost toppled a dictatorship. He's like, "This is the point of making music. This is the point of making art is to try and make a new world, try and change the world in some way." And the music itself, though, like, how it functions. How is that change in the world? What's the almost mechanism? Sure. Okay. So here's. So, Lula, I love that question, because the political aspects of his music weren't just lyrical, although they were. It was baked into the very grammar of the music itself. It's like in the notes. It's below the notes. It's in the structure of the music. It's in the impact and sequence of impacts that the music creates. Like, which sounds so pretty, but like, what the echo's that way? Okay. So, how? This is this episode that I think you're going to play. Yeah. And, okay, just for context, the first episode, we met a bandmate of Falas. We got the story through his eyes. Then in the second episode, you traced his evolution into a revolutionary. And then in the third one, the one we're going to play, this is the one where we really get into the music itself. Yeah. It really tries to first give you the experience and then explain what the experience is. Yeah. So, it's called the shrine. Anything else before we walk in to it? I should explain, the shrine is, it's his club in Legos. And it really was sort of the epicenter of his movement. And we interviewed God so many people who described what it was like to be there. People who were once asleep and are now awake. My experience in being in the shrine was like, the music was like inside of me. It was all around. It was just like being hypnotized like you're all inside the music. Enter the shrine. One of the ingredients of a movement. Very ingredients. It's to have a place where you can experience the promise of that movement right here, right now, in the present. Can you tell us about your first visit to the shrine? Yes. Of course. What do you remember about that? Very, very funky. This is Michael Veal, musician, professor of music at Yale. He's also one of our advisors on the project. They hear that music in New York as one thing. You know, you listen to that music in New York, you're like, oh yeah, whatever. Look, the first night I was in Lagos, you know, as you're walking up the shrine, and you hear that. Then you get closer, you started, you know, so you started, you know, I remember that very clearly, but it was at night, and there was no power, every blackout. It's like going to Times Square, but there are people all in the street. Like thousands and thousands of people, a jam-packed model of people, it's total darkness, but thousands of these little sternolamps illuminate in the place, because the power went out all the time in Lagos, but there are thousands of these sternolies. So you imagine the scene, it's like almost like Woodstock, or the kind of thing, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. You're like, oh yeah, whatever. But then if you ever get in a plane and go to Lagos, they open a hatch, and it goes with the humidity in the heat. You know, the mint they open the hatch is like, bam! And then you walk out of the plane, you've got to go down the steps, and you're like, oh, now I get it. Welcome to Nigeria. the way reality feels in this setting. You know what I'm saying? That interview with Michael Veal was one of the many reasons why when we finally got to Legos after a 13-hour flight, the top item on our agenda was to go to the shrine. Michael Veal on a few gaps, 1969. After the whole Sandra Isador experience in LA, Vealah comes back to Nigeria, radicalized, steps off the plane and takes the country by storm. He becomes the massive star that we know him to be, and then between 1973 and 1979, he releases this fire hose of music, something like, by my count, 27 records in six years ish, one hit after another after another. Now the shrine, during that time, early on, he sets up a club that he calls the shrine and it's important to understand where, Legos, Legos City, the most popular city in Africa, Legos is on the coast, the Atlantic Ocean, and it consists of a giant landmass in mainland that curves around this bay, and in the bay are two major islands that connect back to the mainland with bridges. And the islands, this is the sound you hear, peacocks, golf, it's very lush, very beautiful, and the mainland, very different sound. You will find places on the mainland where the sheer density of people is just breathtaking. For example, this audio that you're hearing is from a market that we visited in a neighborhood called Mushine, a poor working class neighborhood where a million people are packed into seven square miles. In this neighborhood, not the island, this spot is where he decided to put the shrine, to say basically, "I am the voice of the people." The sufferheads, as he called them. When we visited the shrine, at night it was more or less, as Michaelville described it. When he was there in '92, we were there in 2024, and the shrine has closed few times and reopened and moved around a bit. But it was kind of the same, it was dark, yet about 50 food sellers lining the block, it's very long block in front of the shrine. People smoked weed openly, which in Nigeria can carry a heavy prison sentence. Our fixer and lego's told us that, even now, 28 years after fella died, this is the one place where that can happen. One of the sellers that was there explained it this way. What you feel like Fella still protects this street, this place? His sense was the ghost of Fella is still there protecting this one block. And as he said that he nodded towards the end of the block where the policeman waiting, standing almost like on the other side of an invisible line. You've done your research. You know that the shrine and also Fella's compound, the Calacute of a Republic, he had kind of declared independent of Nigeria. That's Lisa Lindsay, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in the history of West Africa, and she brings up an important point. Is it in 1970 when Fella got back to Nigeria, he declared his club the shrine and also his house nearby, which he called the Calacute of a Republic? He declared them a sovereign nation within Nigeria, sort of like the Vatican is to Italy, that he was a country unto himself. Lisa Lindsay visited the shrine in the early 90s. At that time, and there are videos of this on YouTube, the government would hold public executions of criminals and dissidents on the beach. There were soldiers in the streets, it wasn't safe to be out at night, he'd go in. And it's just this alternate universe. Describe what it looks like. It was like a warehouse, sort of. Everybody's smoking. A lot of weed smoking. Giant, giant joints, joints the size of police megafounds. Keep in mind, at that time, people were getting thrown in jail for 10 years for food. I have smoke joint. It's just this massive cloud up at the top of the thing. It's hot, it's humid, there are a lot of people in there. People dancing and people stoned out of their minds, and it was such a contrast to how scared people were outside of the shrine. The shrine was not far from his house, a couple of locks. That's John Darden, full of surprise winning journalists who wrote from New York Times, worked as a foreign correspondent based in Legos in the mid 70s, wrote many, many articles about Fella, including this one where he watched Fella get ready right before he performed at the shrine. Would you mind reading this? This is you. You're reading you. Because Ruby and I have been trying to find as vivid descriptions as we can of the atmosphere, and this is actually one of the more vivid that we've ever read. New York Times. That voices Nina Darden, John's wife, also a long-term journalist. Fella's pre-game ritual. The show begins at 1 a.m. Inside the nearby Calacuda Republic, Fella prepares for it laboriously. From a jar, he spoons up liberal doses, glitter, gooey substance, nicknamed Fella Gold, distilled extract of marijuana. Full-length mirrors are brought before him and held by two young boys. He slowly slips into skin-tight, sequined pants, and a white shirt open to the waist, arranging his strings of beads as if he were smoothing a necktie. Six bodyguards draw near. Let's go, Fella says, and the entourage moves outside where there is a crowd of several hundred people. Some have been waiting for hours, clinging to the barbed wire to catch a glimpse of it. A chant, Fella, Fella rumbles out of the dark. It's really good. And as he walked, and-- Well, that was a second death. As he got in the donkey. Okay, wait, sorry. As he walked. He was a showman. You know, drivers would get out and raise a fist and yell, "Fella, Fella, anyway, then he starts playing, and I have never seen, I think, a performer quite as dynamic as that." He was absolutely incredible. Before we go back into the shrine, well, first, let me give you a picture. It is an open-air club. It's about 500 people. There's this tin roof over the stage, but no roof over the dance floor. And to either side of the stage are four studio 54-ish cages where dancers dance. So to one side, there is an altar where Fella had a picture of his mother, a picture of Malcolm X, and a picture of Kwame and Krumah, the first president of Ghana. But I'll be honest, what's most interesting to me is not so much the shrine itself. I mean, it was a club. But rather, what happened to people when they went inside of it? Because do you know how people talk about psilocybin now? Right? Like, we all have one of those friends who did some mushrooms, and it changed their life, and they can't stop talking about it. And there's a way to explain those experiences, you can say neurochemistry, right? There's something about these drugs. They rewire your brain, fine. We ran into so many people who described listening to Fella's music at the shrine in the same way that it had the same effect on them, which is a little harder to explain, though I will try in a moment. But first, let's re-enter the shrine from their perspective. And as you're listening, see if you can let yourself notice, what are you paying attention to? How does that change over time? One AM Fella arrives on his donkey takes the stage with 35 other musicians, and he begins a riff that will last most of the night. My experience in being in the shrine was like, the music was like inside of me, it was all around, it was just like, you know, being hypnotized, like you're all inside the music. I kind of have not a dancing or oxygen music, dancing in this way, in this way, in this way. I remember being lost in music, all the people I smoking around me are in a mist, so you're in a different world. It's the idea of the spiral in circle. It's another way to deal with time. I always described it as a swirl. You don't know when you have a side group. The start of art has this little thing that feels old. It feels old, the more you allow it to. The secret, it just starts to take bigger. Take bigger. Take bigger. Take bigger. Take cold. Take bigger. Take bigger. Take bigger. Take bigger. Take bigger. Fella starts this music to enchant this repetitive pattern, the power of the musical oscillator. It's part of that enchanting strategy. You've been captured. I thought this is really an amazing new form of music. It was almost like a field of sound that sits there for a long time and you explore it. You kind of enter it and live in it. This is a place. This isn't a song. And meanwhile, the rhythm section's keeping going. Going. Going. Going. This is a place. And when you start listening to it, you're entering into that place. The music is inside of me, it's all around. It's just like hypnotized. It's like a bird. It's like a bird. And so you could tell that there was a different kind of intention behind this paradigm of groove. The music is so nasty. You have to dance. But that's just the ground level. Because why would you play a song for 30 minutes or 40 minutes, unless you really have something to say? OK. OK. Unless you really have something to say. OK. OK. OK. The rhythm section. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. And then suddenly, after half an hour, 40 minutes, he starts singing. Yeah. When his voice came in, I was like, what the hell. There are words, too. How long for them to be gay? Then to 15 years in jail. After one year, he's like, hold up. What is this? He sings in a gravely low-pitched voice. And sings about things that no one else ever even mentioned. Any newspaper, any columnist. He talks about the United Nations. He talks about thatcher. He talks about Reagan. It's really everything. It's like a history lesson. You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage, like thought balloons and then sinking into somebody's skull. I just felt when has my mind been all you know, all my life? Complete surprise, like. I was immediately captivated. Why did we not notice? Why aren't we thinking about this stuff? When I fell out singing to a microphone, I saw the lights. I was just like, you know what I mean? He sucks you in. And then he has that light bulb effect on you. You come into yourself. It's a moment of introspection, too, because you realize that you haven't been as attuned as you probably should have. All this stuff he was singing was just new to me. You know, I was just learning so much about Nigerian history through fellow that I had not learned in school. Before we go on, the voices you just heard, in addition to Michael Veel and John Darden, were Stephanie Shonekahn and Boide Omujola, both professors of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland and Mount Holyoke, respectively. Afrobeat musicians, Dele Shoshimi and Duro Iku Genio, activists of film-maker musician, Saul Williams, musician and producer Brian Eno, artists Lemmy Garriolcu, photographer Marilyn Nance, designer Lorraine Anamosen, and our advisor, Moses Ochuno, who is a professor of history in my colleague at Vanderbilt University. He was one of the last voices you heard, and I asked him. He said the music made you feel like you needed to tune in to things you hadn't been tuning into. Like what? When I was growing up in Nigeria, we would hear about corruption, about townsans of Nigeria being embezzled by some politician or governmental official. And we would open our mouth in shock, because our brains couldn't compute how one person would make off with townsans of Nigeria. How would the person carry this money? What would they put it in? In some boxes, in some cars? You know, physically, how would they move this money? You know, we just couldn't fathom it. And then, over time, we started hearing about millions, not townsans anymore. Then, billions. And now, as we speak, the corruption numbers have entered the trillions. To that, over time, has had enormous effects, the shock value, the kind of shock that I felt, as a child grew up in Nigeria, the moral outreach that I felt. That's gone. That's long gone. And that is what would come back when you heard a song. Right, exactly. Moses said that Phyllis' music would remind him of the insanity that he had been sane-washed into believing was normal. And I think that there's something really interesting about how the music can move him to that thought. Music is all about structure, right? Structuring the relationship between notes and chords and melodies. But here you have structure on an entirely different level, almost like a phenomenological structure. For the first 15 minutes, it's just loops. Austinato is going round and round. The power of the musical Austinato. Austinato, in Italian, by the way, means basically stubborn. The loops stubbornly repeat. And at first, it's not so bad. It's kind of grounding, actually. But then, the natural response is then to want some change. Like, can we go to the next section now? Please? Please? No? This is what the Buddhists call our monkey mind. Our monkey mind wants distraction. It wants anything to keep us from having to live with our own thoughts. But the music doesn't give us that. It doesn't change. It only builds layers, get added, piece by piece, instrument by instrument. And at some point, a few minutes in, you arrive at this mysterious moment where you stop wanting it to change. This is phase two. Now that part of you, the once novelty, starts to notice things, like, whoa, listen to all the interlocking parts of this groove. Ooh, the Austin marbles, like machine gears, they don't grind, the gears are timed in between each other so they just softly fit onto the little gaps and holes like that. The way that the Konga plays off the shaker, calling response, the way that the three guitar lines spin around endlessly like gears and higher level clock. My god, this groove is a whole world. This is the trance state. Usually when we talk about trance, we mean a kind of dulling of our senses, but actually it's the opposite. It's a state of hyper-focus, you are noticing things, you're hearing things you've never heard before because your neurons are rewired. You are open, and it is at this very moment that fella begins to sing. I was like, "What the hell? There are words too?" In comes his voice, booming, like the voice of God. This is phase three, and because you are open, you really hear what he is saying. You see it sinking in, you could see ideas in the air floating from the stage like thought balloons and then sinking into somebody's skull. In that way, as the final piece of this progression, he gives you a new conception of what your life can be. I saw the lights that you can now dance to. My music, my main preoccupation right now, music is a small part of it. This is a clip from an interview fella gave in 1988 where he describes his musical form almost as this vehicle, designed to move people step by step by step so that they can hear what he has to say. This is your music kind of a tool. It's a weapon. It's a weapon to say so I can talk when I have the chance to consider music to be effective like a weapon to inform people. My music is like an attraction to inform people. It is an information side of the music that is important. In that same interview, he suggests that there is something else going on here too. It has to do with time itself. Coming up, that idea of cycles is going to become not just about the music, but so much more, cycles of history, of violence, of resistance. We're going to follow all of the interlocking ostinatos of Fellaz Groove, cross time and space, into the deep past, to an incredible story of a rebellion that deposed a king that created a sound. They continue to echo to this day on the streets of Legos and the world. That's next. Okay, so, Chad, thank you. The series is so special. It is so good. It is. And yet there will be another magnum because you know he'll keep going despite trying to leave, but it is so special, it's amazing. This might be the last time we'll see. Where else is the series going, and where can people find it? What's it called? So the series is going to go all kinds of places. It's called "Fella Kutti, Fear No Man." The next one is my fave. It's a story about Fellaz Mom. Oh yeah. Who is so good. Who is so extraordinary that it immediately made me be like, "Wait, why are we talking about him?" It felt like you could flip it. You could do the 12 episodes series about her and then one episode about him in the middle of it. Exactly. Because what she accomplished is so bananas, and again, just with music. So yeah, that episode is next. Wait, and can you share the title of that episode? It's called "Vengeance of the vagina head." It's not a title we made up. It was what the newspapers called the revolt that she led at the time. They called it "Vengeance of the vagina head." Just let that be a tease. This has been a "Hireground in Audible" original produced by Audible, "Hireground Audio, Western Sound, and Talk House." The series was created and executed produced by me, Chad Ebbomrod, Van A Dare, and Ian Wheeler, written and hosted by yours truly. "Hireground executive producers were Nick White, Muk Tamohan, and Dan Fehrman, Jenna Levin was creative executive, and Corinne Billiard Fisher was executive producer. Executive producers for Audible were Anne Hepramin, Glenn Pogue, and Nick DiAngelo. Our senior producer was Goffan Uttwale, Ruby Herron-Walsh, was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Fei-Fei Odu-Doo, and Borlokemi, Alessui, Van A Dare was our editor with editing help Carla Murthy. Consulting producers were Bolo Bapalola, Dottun Ayubade, Niq Abdul-Aki, Michael Veal, Moses Petunu, and Judith Baifil. Our fact checker was Jimmy La Wilkinson, Alex McKinnis was the mix engineer, also special thanks too. Knitting factory records and BMG, to the Kooti family, Melissa O'Donnell, who inside projects Magtaylor, and big thanks to Carla Murthy, Leah Friedman, and Shoshana Scholar. The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Naven, chief content officer, Rachel Piazza, copyright 2025 by Hireground Audio LLC, sound recording copyright 2025 by Hireground Audio LLC. Hi, I'm Shivant Ramuri, and I'm from Mumbai, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasar. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyana Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgaukar, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Anisa Vizza, Rian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini, and Natalie Middleton. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Simon Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. 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