Fela SHOUTS!!!

So I think I finally got this whole recording from vinyl thing figured out... I'm not yet in possession of the best hardware I could possibly have, but I have a more or less functional setup for now. What I have found myself lacking now, though, is the time. Denis and I have been sliding back into serious pre-production on Phase II of TOO MUCH BEAUTIFUL WOMAN (ha! must be a millennium since your man typed that majestically majuscular marquee-filler 'pon this page!) so setting up the turntable, making sure the records play through without skips, then editing the AIFFs and converting them to mp3s is just not something I can dedicate myself to at the moment.

Thank God for John B.

Our man has been lacing me up with a steady stream of music to post up here (did I just say "lacing me up"? Does anybody actually still use that term? Man, the 90s feel like such a long time ago!) and today we have another Fela rarity: 1986's I GO SHOUT PLENTY!!!

You'll notice that despite being released during the Egypt 80 era, the record is credited to "Fela and Afrika '70"... That's because the I GO SHOUT PLENTY!!! LP was actually recorded in 1977 (with "Frustration of My Lady" on the B side) but went unreleased for nine years until Decca chose to put it out without Fela's permission. The new B side, "Why Black Man Dey Suffer" was recorded for a 1977 album of the same name (with "Male" on the B side) but was also shelved by Decca.

(You might have seen a slightly bootleg-looking CD in the market called Why Black Man Dey Suffer, with "Ikoyi Mentality Versus Mushin Mentality " on the B side. That's a completely different version on a different LP recorded in 1971 for EMI; they didn't release it, so it came out under the African Songs label. Confusion break bone!)

Anyway, here's a clip from Jeremy Marre's Konkombe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene:



I uploaded this clip yesterday because I had planned to talk up this theory Denis has about Fela and politics: He says that while Fela was generally thought of by most people (including himself) as a "political" artist, he was really more of a satirist, and the deeper he got into politics, the more detrimental it was to his music. It alienated a lot of his fans in the 80s, and it definitely pushed away his musicians, leading to the Afrika 70 mutiny.

We'll talk about that later, though.

Interesting thing, though: When I uploaded this clip, Dele Sosimi, with whom I had been chatting online earlier that day, messaged me to tell me that he was the skinny youth you see sitting in a chair leafing through a book. I asked him what the hell he was doing flipping through the pages so fast, like, was he really reading it or just playing to the camera? Turns out it was a book on jazz improvisation and he was trying to memorize some licks! That kinda surprised me because I really didn't know that any of Fela's musicians were, you know, musically literate (especially not the Egypt 80 players, who were generally younger and less experienced than the Afrika 70).



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