Everything Scatter

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ALBUM ONLY

Total Tracks: 2   Total Length: 25:47

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Richard Gehr

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Richard Gehr has been writing about international music -- and many other things -- for more than two decades. After moving to Los Angeles from Portland, OR, vi...more »

12.01.09
A concise vision of chaos control
2009 | Label: Knitting Factory

Many of Fela's best tracks are musical meditations on confusion — both civic and private — and 1975's "Everything Scatter," a relatively concise ten-minute exercise in chaos control featuring one of Afrika 70's more monstrous horn riffs, is among the best of these. Lyrically, the scene involves bus riders arguing about Fela's controversial rock-star life-style. Some accuse him of being a pot-smoking, anarchy-spreading libertine; others defend him. Drummer Tony Allen is at his jazziest on the B-side, "Who No Know Go Know." Fela praises Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, and even Idi Amin as numbering among Africa's most respectable advocates of black unity and emancipation. His second keyboard solo, meanwhile, gazes optimistically toward Sun Ra's spaceways.

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Perhaps one risks charges of artistic insensitivity by saying so, but by the mid-1970s Kuti’s records were becoming predictable and formulaic to an extent. It was a good formula, played and sung with conviction, and if any individual record or two were the only evidence of his work, they would be properly respected as important music. However, it isn’t too easy to differentiate, in large degrees, between his numerous releases of the era that comprised two (and exactly two) ten-to-15-minute songs. These built from several minutes of instrumental interplay between electric keyboards, horns, and percussion to a vocal declaiming general platitudes about injustice and African identity, with energetic contributions from backup singers. Everything Scatter has two such songs. The ten-minute title track posits Kuti and his followers versus the status quo. The 15-minute “Who No Know Go Knows” strikes a more relaxed groove in its call for African unity. Both tracks are available on a two-for-one MCA CD reissue of two 1975 albums, Everything Scatter and Noise for Vendor Mouth. – Richie Unterberger

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