Afrobeat

London, 1958. Fela Kuti stepped off the plane with a trumpet case and colonial baggage he didn't yet know how to name. Trinity College of Music enrolled him to study composition, but the real education happened in Soho basements where cigarette smoke hung thick and hard bop hit like a fist. He formed Koola Lobitos—a highlife-jazz hybrid that tried to split the difference between the colonizer's music and something his own. It satisfied no one. The band was competent. Directionless. Caught between Lagos and New York, unable to claim either.

Ten years later, Fela toured America with Koola Lobitos for ten months. Los Angeles, 1969. He met Sandra Izsadore at a gig—a singer, former Black Panther, someone who talked about Malcolm X and Angela Davis like they were prophets. She lived in the center of the Black Power movement and invited Fela to stay. Sandra was astonished at how little he knew of his own African culture; at the time Fela didn't believe there was any, as he later admitted in interviews. For weeks he sat in her house absorbing books he'd never read, ideas he'd never considered: that being African wasn't something to apologize for or paper over with European manners. “I realized I was not playing African music,” Fela said later. When he returned to Lagos in 1970, he renamed his band Africa '70, opened a club called the Afro-Spot (soon renamed the Afrika Shrine) in the Empire Hotel on Agege Motor Road, and began calling his music Afrobeat to distinguish it from everything that had come before.