No need to "review" the awesome Fela Kuti & musicians. But another item to be aware of is that this download is not 230 minutes in length. Many of the tracks are edits from the original albums. In particular, tracks 9 and 10 are just over 12 and 13 minutes, not 21 and 22 minutes long, and tracks 12 and 13 are 17 and 7 minutes respectively, not a half hour long each. So far, I have found that you can never have enough Fela Kuti, so I would have liked the too-good-to-be-true-tracks-this-long-for-this-price, but I am sure I will eventually download the full length tracks someday.
Go ahead and download the whole album. It is the definitive collection from the Father of Afrobeat, and an incredible value (over 2-1/2 hours of music)
Undeniably great. But just know these songs, in the same order, were released with a different cover under the title "The Best Best of Fela Kuti" in 2000 by MCA/Universal.
It took more than six years and three crate diggers par excellence for T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou's brilliant, yet virtually forgotten, Benin brand of Afro funk to reach a roiling boil for a new generation of listeners.
German collector Günter Gretz sampled three of the group's 50 to 100 albums (depending on who's counting) for his 1973 Reminiscin 'in Tempo compilation. The following year, Miles Cleret's Soundway label released The Kings of Benin Urban Groove… more »
The incontestable king of Afrobeat, with a career that spanned over 30 years, Fela Anikulapo (née Ransome) Kuti's prodigious musical output is overshadowed to the point of cliché by the stuff that's made him such a mythical figure. A bramble in the claw of Nigeria's ruling dictatorship; a total dickweed who might have outdone both Miles Davis and Pablo Picasso for total dickweediness; a cult leader with his own compound, the Kalakuta Republic, and a… more »
One figure stands off to the side and slightly obscured amid the pantheon of African bandleaders. The Congolese superstar Franco - christened François Luambo Makiadi in 1938, dead of AIDS in 1989 - is the least internationally-acclaimed among afropop giants such as Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, and Youssou N'Dour. With a biography at least as tragically complex as Fela's, Franco lived large, died sadly, and left hundreds of hours of some of the world's… more »
