Kalakuta Show

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Kalakuta Show album cover
Album Information
ALBUM ONLY

Total Tracks: 2   Total Length: 30:34

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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
Fela Kuti, Kalakuta Show
2009 | Label: Knitting Factory

"Kalakuta Show" details a brutal and bogus 1974 raid on Fela's compound. He delivers a screaming sax solo before slamming into an increasingly impassioned account of this unprecedented attack when the police, for the first time, "Dem-o hire axe-o, dem-o bring cutlass." The day after the attack, 10,000 fans carried the wounded star home from court. Fela's hit 1975 album continues with "Don't Make Garan Garan," an even more musically sophisticated plea for Nigeria's upper class to cool their egotism and help the poor — or at least dig Fela's funky atonal organ.

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Great music - Bad deal

Niles

12 credits for 2 tracks?!?

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They Say All Music Guide

By the time of 1976′s Kalakuta Show, Fela Kuti’s releases were becoming to seem not so much like records as ongoing installments in one long jam, documenting the state of mind of Nigeria’s leading contemporary musician and ideological/political dissenter. Thus, any one album works better on its own than it does when it has to bear comparison with the rest of his mountainous output. The track “Kalakuta Show” was unexceptional by his own standards, though it was a respectable lock-groove song that followed the usual graph of Kuti’s song progressions. The lyrics, at any rate, go far outside the usual funk/pop spectrum, detailing his harassment at the hands of the Nigerian police. “Don’t Make Garan Garan” was musically more effective, particularly in its use of the artist’s characteristically eerie, out-of-sync-sounding electric keyboards. Both songs are on the 2001 MCA CD reissue Ikoyi Blindness/Kalakuta Show, which also includes both songs from the 1976 release Ikoyi Blindness. – Richie Unterberger

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