Femi Kuti

Femi Kuti is the faithful yet innovative steward of the rapturously polyrhythmic and politically committed Afrobeat sound pioneered by his father, Fela Kuti. Born in London in 1962, Kuti was raised in Lagos, where he began playing saxophone in his father’s band Egypt 80 in 1979. With Egypt 80 keyboardist Dele Sosimi, Kuti formed his own group, Positive Force, in 1986 to distil Afrobeat’s extended horn riffs and call-and-response vocals into relatively pithy compositions of equal creative potency. Backed by Positive Force, Kuti made his debut in 1989 with No Cause for Alarm? and reached a critically praised peak in 1998 with Shoki Shoki, featuring the controversial “Sorry Sorry”, which equates Nigerian politicians with the military “zombies” his father famously excoriated two decades earlier. Kuti passes the Afrobeat torch on 2021’s Legacy +, a double album containing Kuti’s eleventh release, Stop the Hate, and his son Mádé Kuti’s hip-hop-informed debut, For(e)ward.