A family legacy can be a real bitch. A lot of folks try to ignore or hide from it; others embrace it with the half-heartedness of the heir apparent who really just wants to be left alone. A lot of musicians'children tend toward the latter, but not Seun Kuti. The youngest son of Afrobeat founder and Nigerian pop legend Fela Kuti, Seun began playing alongside his father's band, the Egypt 80, when he was nine, and began leading them following Fela's death in 1997, when Seun was 15.

While his half-brother Femi has found success with a lighter, updated take on Fela's sound, Seun messes very little with the Afrobeat formula. The focus is on bare-knuckle-tense guitar lines from rhythm man Alade Oluwagbemiga and lead player David Obavendo, commanding horn lines alternating with hot, sweet saxophone breaks and mostly English-language lyrics that question society and government in no uncertain terms: Seun's “Don't Give That Shit to Me” and “Many Things” — “All this shitty-shit shooting/ All this shitty-shit killing” — are both clearly indebted to dad's 1975 classic “Expensive Shit.” But Seun's onto something of his own, too. “Think Africa” is dense, swirling near-disco that sounds cognizant of the… read more »