TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. You may know my guest, Jad Abumrad, as the creator and former host of the public radio program and podcast Radiolab and the creator and host of the popular and Peabody Award-winning, nine-episode podcast series Dolly Parton's America. Now Jad has a terrific new series of episodes about the life and music of Fela Kuti. He's known as the father of Afrobeat. But music was also Fela's weapon against the colonial values that tried to civilize Nigerians, erase African culture and inflict punishment, often brutally, to keep Nigerians in line.
With Fela's danceable, almost trance-like grooves and political lyrics, he started a youth movement that rebelled against the repressive postcolonial government and military. For that, he was jailed about 100 times, beaten frequently, enduring multiple broken bones, leaving scars all over his body. The military breached the electric fence that protected his compound, threw his mother out a second-story window and burned his home to the ground. He's also a problematic figure. He fashioned himself into what you might describe as a cult leader.
He had 27 female backup singers and dancers and married all of them in one day. He didn't believe AIDS was real, advised men not to use condoms and even wrote a song about it. And when he contracted AIDS, he denied that was possible. We'll talk about all that and how his music continues to get people listening and dancing and rebelling against injustice.
Jad, welcome back to FRESH AIR. I really love the series. And I really learned a lot from it, so thank you (laughter).
JAD ABUMRAD: Well, it's great to be here. And that means a lot, Terry. Thank you.
GROSS: You know, Fela's music, it was dance music, it was trance music and it was music that creates Afrobeat. And it inspires a rebellious youth movement, rebelling against colonialist thinking, standing up against the authoritarian government, the police, the military. I'd like to ask you to describe those elements of his music.
ABUMRAD: I mean, early on, what he would do is he would build a loop slowly. You know, he would bring in the bass. And then he'd bring in the congas, and then he'd bring in the shaker, and then he'd bring in the rhythm guitars. And sometimes there were three or four rhythm guitars, 30 different people onstage. And he would build the loop very, very slowly. And as a listener, it can be quite monotonous. But then there's this moment where you stop wanting it to change and you just give in, and suddenly you fall out of time. And you could be listening for 4 minutes or 4 hours. You don't know. So there's an element of trance to his work.
Then what will happen, typically, is at some point, when you're deep in the trance, he will break the trance and start singing. And that can happen 15 minutes into a song. Suddenly, his voice drops on you like the voice of God. And he's talking about politics. He's singing about all the injustices of postcolonial Africa. He's calling out dictators by name. He's giving sort of broad history lessons in Pidgin English. And that created - you know, so many people I talked to in reporting the series talked about hearing that, his voice, and it just woke them up, almost, like, woke them out of a slumber.
And if you imagine that happening 1 million times, it created a youth movement that was very, very dangerous to the government. And as you say, in your intro, he was beaten repeatedly, his house was burned down, his mother was thrown out of a window because he was able to use music, just music, to fight back. So, yeah, and it's groovy. It's funky. It's blending in jazz influences. He's got this sort of James Brown, chicken scratch guitar influence. It's all of these things fused together in what he would ultimately call African classical music, but which started out as being named Afrobeat.
GROSS: Yeah. And part of the reason why his music made such a profound effect on young listeners was that this is stuff you weren't taught in school, because the schools didn't emphasize or teach about African history or colonialism.
ABUMRAD: Yeah. I mean, I think, Terry, it wasn't really - it wasn't even until much later, 2025, that history was mandated to be taught in schools. It was always seen as a sort of superfluous subject. You know, our producer, FayFay Odudu, who we used - a field producer in Lagos, after a lot of the interviews would say, I had no idea, because history isn't really taught. And, you know, one of the sort of patented moves of the colonial authorities is to remove the study of history as a way to create the sense in the subjects that their experience, their culture, has no value. And so the long tale of that is still going.
GROSS: So here's what I'd like to do, to give listeners who aren't familiar with Fela's music, I want to play something that will show the repetition, the layering, and then segue into his most political song that got him into the most trouble, which is called "Zombie." So to set it up, we're going to start with "Authority Stealing." And this will show you a very compressed version of the layering in his music. And imagine that - imagine each of those layers spreading out for, like, 5 minutes each or more. And then we'll segue into "Zombie."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AUTHORITY STEALING")
FELA KUTI: (Non-English language spoken).
GROSS: That was "Authority Stealing." And this is Fela's song "Zombie."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ZOMBIE")
KUTI: (Singing) Zombie, oh, zombie. Zombie, oh, zombie. Tell them to go straight, joro, jara, joro. No break, no job, no sense, joro, jara, joro. Tell them to go kill, joro, jara, joro. No break, no job, no sense, joro, jara, joro. Tell them to go quench, joro, jara, joro. No break, no job, no sense, joro, jara, joro. Go and kill, joro, jara, joro. Go and die. Go and quench. Put them for reverse. Go and quench, go and kill, go and die. Put them for reverse. Go and die, go and quench, go and kill. Put them for reverse.
GROSS: So that was two tracks, two separate tracks, "Authority Stealing" followed by "Zombie." So tell us why "Zombie" was so important and dangerous.
ABUMRAD: I guess every artist has their sort of anthem, and for Fela, "Zombie" is that song. Came out in 1976. And this was at a time when he was getting into repeated clashes with the authority. There was - a few years prior, there was - the dictatorship, the military dictatorship, waged a war on indecency. And under that guise, they would raid his compound repeatedly. And "Zombie" was really the thing that really escalated or caused the government to escalate, I should say. This was a song that - first of all, musically, it's just propulsive. It doesn't do the Fela thing that a lot of his songs do where it builds slowly. This song just comes out of the gate a hundred miles an hour. And when he sings, he sings about how the military and the army and the police are basically brainless zombies.
GROSS: So Fela grows up in a postcolonial environment that still practices a lot of colonial values. His grandfather translated Anglican hymns into Yoruba, the Yoruba language, and Fela's mother and father had a school that basically followed the colonial education practices. And I want to talk a little bit about his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Because before Fela became political, she had a women's club which taught women Christian values and how to be a good Christian wife. But then women from the market who sold fabric started coming, and she realized they don't know how to read. So she organized a literacy class to teach them how to read. And through that, she found out about the problems they were having, including the tax that the government had put on them that they couldn't afford to pay. And so she organizes this protest movement. Fela's mother organizes this tremendously powerful protest movement. Can you describe the movement?
ABUMRAD: Yeah. This is one of the aspects of the history that we dug into that just is so fascinating. He would have been about 8 or 9 at this point, and he's - you know, he's going to these - organizing meetings with his mother. And, you know, the literacy club begins more as sort of a kind of ladies-who-lunch type of situation. Very quickly turns into a full-fledged union, and that becomes thousands of women marching in the streets to protest the taxation policies of the British government and the king, the Alake, as he was called, who was backed by the British. And they essentially lay siege to his palace. So if you can imagine 10,000 women from the markets basically encamped day and night at his palace, and he's trapped inside and he can't leave. And they sing - talk about music as a weapon. They sing these abuse songs to him. And we found hundreds of these songs in Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti's archives that she had handwritten. She had phonetically spelled in English the Yoruba lyrics, and we got a choir to translate them and sing them for us. But they're hilarious songs calling his manhood small, saying that they're going to unleash a lake of fire from their...
GROSS: Genitals.
ABUMRAD: Yeah. There you go - to overwhelm him. Really raunchy, hard-hitting lyrics, and they would sing them one after the other. And Fela was with her, we think. And so it's interesting to think of his later music, that abuse singing that he would direct at the government. Maybe he learned it from her.
But at a pivotal moment in the story of this protest movement, you have the British army amassed just outside town, and you have these, you know, thousands of women. And some number of them stand up and they strip naked, which in many traditions around the world and certainly in West Africa is a kind of spiritual curse or a hex of some sort. It's essentially sort of wielding the spiritual power of women against men, and any man that looks upon them is considered to be cursed. And so they stand up in this very defiant gesture.
And the British - I mean, yeah, and we read the colonial diaries that were written at that time and letters that were flying back and forth. They were really scared that if they come in and meet that symbolic protest with actual violence, it would unleash forces that they could not control. And so they decide to basically sneak the king out of the palace and abdicate the throne. And so it is one of the first colonial revolts prior to the African independence movement that actually was successful. And in some small way, it sort of - it seeded the ground for the African independence movement. And Fela was there.
GROSS: It's really a remarkable story. And do people remember the role that she played?
ABUMRAD: Well, yes and no. There are - you will find people who know the story. But more often than not, what we found is that people would refer to her simply as Fela's mother. So she has been reduced a bit 'cause, I mean, I think this revolt is one of the great. I mean, it's one of the fiercest things I've ever encountered. And yet, she just gets reduced to being the mother of this famous, consequential but pop star. And one of the saddest moments in our reporting was we were very anxious to find her grave, and we found it on the backside of an Anglican church. And she's buried with her husband, Israel Ransome-Kuti. But there's no mention of her. There's simply a long kind of litany of his accomplishments, and there's no mention of what she did. And it was kind of wild to see the ways in which this incredible, incredible movement was kind of erased, in a way.
GROSS: Well, we need to take a short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jad Abumrad. We're talking about his new podcast about the father of Afrobeat, the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. It's called "Fela: Fear No Man." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF FELA KUTI AND AFRICA '70 SONG, "LADY")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Jad Abumrad, the creator and former host of the public radio program and podcast "Radiolab" and the creator and host of the Peabody Award-winning series "Dolly Parton's America." His new series is about the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. It's called "Fela Kuti: Fear No Man."
Once Fela starts really understanding more about what his music is about, he creates a club called the Shrine, and it's mobbed. I mean, once people hear his music, they want to hear more. And he creates what he calls the Kalakuta Republic, which includes his compound. And by calling it the Kalakuta Republic, it's basically a government-free zone where he - people smoke marijuana, even though there's, like, a steep penalty if you're caught. But it's his compound, and it's his, like, free space, and they get away with it. How did he pull that off?
ABUMRAD: I mean, he is a case study in courage like no other. So I think part of it was just the chutzpah that he brought to the cause. I also think part of it was this is a moment after a brutal civil war that ended right about 1970 - 1969, '70 - where the Nigerian government basically starved an insurgent movement to try and secede from the Biafran Republic. They - it was a horribly brutal war of starvation. And in the wake of that, I think there was a lot of disillusionment on the part of young people. There was kind of, as it was put to me, an eerie calm, and into that walks this guy. You know, as you have millions of young people looking for a new way, a new direction, in walks this guy with otherworldly confidence, making music that is just funky and danceable and trance-inducing and amazing. And he becomes this instant magnet for lost souls and creates a compound. And almost overnight, hundreds of young people flock to him.
And it's really hard to know how he got away with it because to declare your compound a sovereign republic a year after a civil war, when a whole republic tried to secede and that was met with brutal force, it's kind of mind-bogglingly insane and courageous to do it. But it's really hard to know how he got away with it.
GROSS: So one of the things you point out in the podcast is that, you know, his songs got him into a lot of trouble. And what would happen is he'd write a song. Then he'd be, like, jailed or beaten for it. Then he'd write a song about being jailed or beaten or, you know, whatever was done to him. They'd punish him for that song, and then he'd write a song about the punishment. So it was like he - answer songs to the military (laughter), you know?
ABUMRAD: Yeah.
GROSS: They were writing answer songs to each other. Do you have a favorite example of that?
ABUMRAD: You know, one of my favorite Fela trickster song - I think of them as trickster songs, where he was sort of, like, playing tricks on the authority, and then they'd come and raid him, and then he'd make a song about the raid, and then they'd raid him again. One of them is called "Kalakuta Show." I believe this was 1974. It's not only, like, a really great, really funky song, but if you listen to the lyrics, it's almost like a news report, like an eyewitness news report about a raid.
GROSS: So let's hear "Kalakuta Show."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KALAKUTA SHOW")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS: (Singing) Yaya, yaya, yaya, yaya.
KUTI: (Singing) The people wey employ the man give him permit to carry the thing. Wey bad. Them give him permit to carry baton. Them give him permit to carry tear gas. Them give him permit to carry bullet. Him fit carry basket for protection, too. Nah, so we dey see them every day. Nah, so he dey happen every day. One day...
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: Saturday.
KUTI: (Singing) One day...
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: Saturday morning.
KUTI: (Singing) The whole thing change. One day...
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: 5 a.m.
KUTI: (Singing) One day...
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: November 23.
KUTI: (Singing) The whole thing change. One day...
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: 1974.
KUTI: (Singing) One day, Kalakuta Show.
GROSS: That was Fela Kuti, his song, "Kalakuta Show." OK, we have to take a short break here, and then we'll get back to my interview with Jad Abumrad, the creator and host of the new series "Fela Kuti: Fear No Man." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF FELA KUTI AND AFRICA '70 SONG, "EXPENSIVE S***")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Jad Abumrad, the creator and former host of the public radio program and podcast Radiolab, and the creator and host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast series Dolly Parton's America. Now he's the creator and host of a new podcast series about the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, who became the father of Afrobeat in the 1970s. The series is called "Fela Kuti: Fear No Man." His music was catchy. And his brave political lyrics about Nigeria's repressive government and military inspired a youth movement to rebel.
He paid a huge price for this. The police and military repeatedly jailed him, beat him, left scars all over his body, burned down his home and threw his mother out a second-story window. Fela was also a problematic figure who turned himself into what you might call a cult leader, thought he was invulnerable, married in one day 27 of his backup singers and dancers and didn't believe AIDS was real, even when he was dying of it.
So here's where Fela loses me. He puts together a group of fantastic women dancers and backup singers. And that's part of the reason why people want to see him perform, because it means seeing these women sing and dance and their elaborate makeup and face paint and costumes. But he eventually marries 27 of them in one day. I want to play an excerpt from the podcast in which several people talk about how they felt about the 27 wives.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "FELA KUTI: FEAR NO MAN")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: His wives were trophies.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: When it came to women, he was just total [expletive].
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: There are pictures of him sitting in his underwear.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: And he's sitting there with kind of oil on his body.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: And the women are surrounding him.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Everything about it just looks like a throwback.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: The fact that...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: He violated women. He broke laws.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: ...These women, young women, girls and women were with Fela Kuti and living in Kalakuta Republic.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: They know, but they don't want to talk about it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: There was all of this moral controversy about what these women's relationship with Fela was. Just the speculation alone produced controversy. And then there were court cases that amplified publicity for Fela's work. Like, that's my point. We wouldn't have Afrobeat music, the phenomenon that it became, without the influx and the injection of the women's creativity and their passion and their voices.
GROSS: What do you make of that?
ABUMRAD: I mean, it's really - Fela's relationship with women is hard to wrap your mind around. All I can say is that it was very important for us when we were reporting this series to speak with those women. And by the way, I mean, I see that particular marriage as a PR stunt and also kind of as an HR move, because he was bleeding talent at that moment. This was after the house was burned down.
A lot of his band were like, this is ridiculous - we're out. A lot of his backup dancers were coming to the same conclusion. And so I think the idea of marrying them was as much about trying to make sure people don't leave as it was anything else. That's not to excuse it at all. But I see that much more as a stunt and as an act of desperation, frankly.
GROSS: So you spoke to, I think, a couple of the women who used to be in the band and married to him. And one of them said, he didn't marry the women, he married the women to his band, which is like what you were saying. What else did you hear from the women you spoke to who had been in his band and married to him?
ABUMRAD: Right. Yeah, we spoke to three of the four that are still alive, as far as we can tell. And what was really interesting is that they all insisted that they were there by choice, however we might judge them. They did not want to be seen as political objects. Each of them got there for their own reasons. One of them, Laide, wanted to travel and see the world. She had always dreamed of being an air hostess, and there was no way for her to be that. But along comes this guy who is traveling, and it does allow her to see the world. \
Another, Lara, wanted to fight back politically, and this was the only guy doing that. A third person, Chineri (ph), talked about how in Nigeria, you have an amalgam of ethnic groups and an incredible amount of tension. That's what led to the civil war. And one of the rules of Fela's compound was that there can be no ethnicity. You cannot refer to each other as Yoruba or Igbo. You're simply people. And that was why she went there. So each of them had a reason. And as they spoke about him, they acknowledged some of the excess, but they also spoke about him with incredible fondness.
And that was complicated. It was complicated to hear that, that, you know, he did things that I think we would all condemn. And yet the feeling I had leaving was that he was partially - he was an abuser at times, but also a liberator in a weird way. You have to kind of understand him as being both at once. That's certainly the picture that they painted.
GROSS: So we have to talk about FESTAC. FESTAC was supposed to be a joyous festival, basically, I think, like, uniting Black people from around the world.
ABUMRAD: Yeah, it was sort of the - if you imagine Woodstock, but thinking of it as a cultural festival focused on the sort of diaspora. Nigeria, at that point, was flush in oil money. And they wanted to sort of come out as the center of the Black world. And so they invited Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra, Audre Lorde, all of these different cultural icons from every different discipline to come to gather in Lagos for an extended cultural festival. And it's one of those - it's one of the most amazing gatherings. And it's really hard to summarize because it was so many things at once. It was beautiful and joyful. It was also kind of a sham. There was a ton of fraud, but yeah.
GROSS: And this festival of joy is run by a dictator (laughter).
ABUMRAD: And it's run by a dictator for, you know, I think what some would say, the wrong reasons.
GROSS: So, Fela was put on the planning committee. And then he made a list of demands. Tell us about a couple of the demands.
ABUMRAD: Yeah. He had a nine-point list that he presented to the committee. I think the committee brought him on because they really couldn't not have him on it. He was the most popular Nigerian musician, most popular African musician at that point. So they had to include him in some way. He comes in and basically says, here are the nine things I need to be in place if I'm going to participate. One of them was to feature Nigerian artists. Another was to create a kind of educational curriculum around FESTAC that was all about African pride and African history. There were all of these things that were basically around educating the people. Not simply making this a good time, a good dance party, but let's actually make this an educational teaching moment about sort of African history. And of course, the committee said, no, we just want you to play. And so he stormed out, and he created very famously a counter-FESTAC so that as FESTAC was happening across town, he would play every night at the Shrine.
And, you know, if you are a Black intellectual or a Black musician at this moment and you're coming to Nigeria, the person you want to see is Fela Kuti. And so you had all of these people coming to the Shrine. They had been flown in on the government's dime, and they were suddenly going to Fela's Shrine, where he was talking badly about the government. So from the dictator's point of view, this was beyond enraging. And it was only a day or two after the festival closed that you had this incredibly violent conflict between Fela and the authorities. And many people that we spoke to point to that moment as a turning point, not just for Fela Kuti but for Nigeria as a country.
GROSS: So what's the short version of how Fela's counter-festival to FESTAC led to the burning of his house?
ABUMRAD: The short version is that a few days after the festival closed, one of Fela's boys - one of the area boys, as they were called - gets into a minor traffic conflict with a policeman. He flees to Fela's compound. The policeman chases him. This leads to a standoff. Fast-forward, there are hundreds and then a thousand soldiers surrounding the compound. Apparently, Fela gets on top of the roof, and he plays "Zombie" down at the police on his saxophone, and they fly into a rage. They pour gasoline over everything, and they basically burn the house to the ground. And they storm the compound while it's burning, and some pretty awful things happen 'cause a lot of Fela's wives were inside the compound at that point. There was some very upsetting sexual violence that occurs, and that really was kind of the end of a certain era of Fela's career.
GROSS: The military threw his mother during this raid out a second-story window. Amazingly, she survived - first, in a coma, and she was never herself again. She died a year later. It's so horrible to think about. And Fela wrote a song that's basically about his mother and being thrown out the window. So I want to play an excerpt of that. It's called "Unknown Soldier."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNKNOWN SOLDIER")
KUTI: (Singing) Influential mama. Them throw my mama out from window. Them kill my mama. Them kill my mama. Them kill my mama. Them kill my mama. Them kill my mama. Them carry everybody. Them carry everybody. Go inside jail. Fall out.
GROSS: So that was Fela doing his song "Unknown Soldier" about his mother being thrown out the second-story window by the military, who raided the compound and burned Fela's home down. So after his mother dies, it transforms him. He misses her so much. She was the person who really supported his vision of change. And like you said earlier, he lost a lot of his following because people didn't want to be exposed to this kind of brutality and death. And his music changed. He became more spiritual. His music became more spiritual or ambient. I don't know what - how you'd describe it exactly. So...
ABUMRAD: I'd say slower, you know?
GROSS: Slower.
ABUMRAD: Slower and heavier, yeah.
GROSS: What kind of spirituality did he pursue?
ABUMRAD: You know, from somebody who was so outward-looking and so intensely political, he kind of turned inward. And what you hear in his music, it's much more story-based. You know, he would tell stories of ordinary people, you know. But the spiritualism became almost a kind of occult spiritualism. He began to believe that he could communicate with his deceased mother through some of the women that lived with him. So they would hold kind of seances where he would talk to his mom through her. It really was a spiritualism born, I think, of grief. And increasingly, he let go of the - I mean, it took a while, so I don't want to say it was instantaneous, but he began to turn away from politics entirely. And that sort of fierce optimism or hope or whatever you call it, you begin to see that ebb. And you can hear it in the music.
GROSS: Well, let's take a break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jad Abumrad. We're talking about his new podcast limited series about the father of Afrobeat, the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. It's called "Fela Kuti: Fear No Man." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF FELA KUTI AND EGYPT 80 SONG, "O.D.O.O. (OVERTAKE DON OVERTAKE OVERTAKE)")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Jad Abumrad, the creator and former host of the public radio program and podcast "Radiolab" and the creator and host of the Peabody Award-winning series "Dolly Parton's America." Now he's the creator and host of a new series, a limited series about the father of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti.
Another place where Fela really loses me, he's an AIDS denier. You know, AIDS is kind of raging in Africa at the time, and he doesn't believe it's real. And then he contracts AIDS himself and won't admit that he has it.
ABUMRAD: Yeah. It is upsetting. But, you know, if there's a silver lining in that particular anecdote - I mean, you have to dig a little bit to get to it - when he died, Yeni and Femi initially were very reluctant to declare to the public that he died of AIDS, but they were eventually convinced to sort of come out and say this was AIDS. It becomes the first public discussion of AIDS in Nigeria and in much of Africa and leads to a lot of positive change. So even while he denied it himself, that information about him was used, I think, for mostly positive impact.
GROSS: So his children were - his oldest children weren't sure whether they should have a big, public funeral or not because he had lost a lot of his popularity, and, you know, he died of AIDS. So they decide finally to hold a big funeral, and, like, tens of thousands of people show up.
ABUMRAD: Yeah. I mean, reports are anywhere from 200,000 to 2 million.
GROSS: Wow. That much?
ABUMRAD: Yeah. It completely shut down the city for days. And a massive crowd marches from Tafawa Balewa Square where there was a wake, to the shrine, where the family was paying their last respects, and then to where he's now buried. And there's footage of this on YouTube. It's really kind of an amazing thing to behold, even from afar, the idea that this is a people's burial. This is an entire country coming together to mourn the loss of this one man.
GROSS: Your series made me think about how art, in some ways, has a lot more power in authoritarian governments that want to ban art because when something is taboo and you're not allowed to hear it, creating it and hearing it are very subversive acts.
ABUMRAD: Yeah.
GROSS: Like, in America, in the U.S., we're maybe heading in that direction.
ABUMRAD: Yeah. I mean, you know, you and I are having this conversation the day after the Super Bowl, and Bad Bunny, you know, gets out there, and he ends his performance marching with people holding a series of flags from South America. And I and everybody that was watching teared up because it was such a simple but powerful statement, given what's happening in Minnesota. And there is some way in which these horrible times, just to state it plainly, do reinvest music with the power it should have had - and should have - all along. And so I take that with me. The art that we create, the culture that we create, it matters. It's not just a thing that we use to escape and to divert our attention, but it can actually do something real in the world.
GROSS: Well, it's been great to talk with you, Jad. Thank you so much, and congratulations on the series. And I want to say to our listeners, we covered, you know, several aspects of Fela's life in this interview, but there's really so much more and so much, like, fascinating detail that we couldn't possibly fit into one less-than-an-hour episode when Jad's series is, what, 12 episodes?
ABUMRAD: Yeah, it's quite a deep dive, but worth it, I hope.
GROSS: To me, certainly. So thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk with you again.
ABUMRAD: Yeah. Thank you so much, Terry, for having me on.
GROSS: Jad Abumrad's new podcast is called "Fela Kuti: Fear No Man." After we take a short break, we reluctantly say goodbye to our long-term executive producer, Danny Miller. He's retiring. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF FELA KUTI'S "BEASTS OF NO NATION") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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