A lot of big names in music like to work with Seun Kuti, and not just because of whose son he is. Blessed with talent, committed to authenticity, variously given to championing human rights, pan-Africanism and most recently, Movement of the People (MOP), the leftwing organisation originally founded by his father Fela, the 41-year-old Nigerian singer, saxophonist and bandleader carries the Afrobeat legacy like a flaming torch.

Scorching the corrupt. Fanning the embers of revolution. Empowering individuals with the sense that they can – that they must – make a difference.

Oluseun Anikulapo Kuti, Fela’s youngest, was 14 when his iconic paterfamilias died in 1997. He’d already been appearing with the 14-piece Egypt 80, a mini-me in sunglasses and flares, and while some cautioned against his decision to front the ensemble, he went ahead and did it anyway. He lifted his manifesto from Fela’s playbook, where acting for the greater good is sealed with frenetic dancing. Where excoriating lyrics are delivered over a wall of horns, alongside simmering spoken word yabi diatribes and flamboyant bum-whirling choreography. With that road-tested, heady mix of funk, jazz, soul and West African styles that is a Kuti trademark.

Five albums. A Grammy nomination. Sold-out gigs around the world. Kuti is a hugely charismatic frontman, with his cheekbones, low-slung sax and lithe, fizzing energy the spit of his dad. A map of the Motherland is tattooed over his heart. The words ‘FELA LIVES’ are emblazoned across his back. Is it any wonder celebrated US singer/musician Lenny Kravitz offered to executive produce Kuti’s new sixth album Heavier Yet (Lays the Crownless Head)? Or that the likes of Damian Marley and Zambian rapper du jour Sampa The Great put their hands up for guest features?

“I’m open to the world, so the world is receptive to me,” says a genial, bare-chested Kuti, seated at home in Lagos, spliff in hand, a framed poster of Che Guevara on the wall behind him. “Three years ago Lenny and I were following each other on Instagram, so I dropped into his DMs. He gave me his number, then we spoke for two hours. He has brought me to his home and has been by our side.”

“Damian happened because the ancestors said it must. Sampa is an artist I admire, and her enthusiasm for the song” – ‘Emi Aluta’, a homage to revolutionary struggle – “was powerful.”

Heavier Yet… comes six years after Black Times, which featured a Che-style cover photo of a cigar-smoking Kuti, had Carlos Santana playing guitar on its title-track (“He mentioned me and my lyrics in his autobiography, so I called him up”) and was produced by multi-Grammy-winning jazzer Robert Glasper. That project took inspiration from American socialist and Pan-Africanist WEB Du Bois, for whom Black liberation lay in self-knowledge and Black education, and namechecked freedom fighters from Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara to Stokely Carmichael and Shaka Zulu along the way.

“This new album is an extension of Black Times in terms of expanding on my theories of class consciousness as a uniting force for global change,” says Kuti of Heavier Yet…’s six thrilling tracks.

Among them, ‘Dey (feat Damian Marley)’ (“About embracing and championing who we are, regardless”); ‘T.O.P.’, a track that advocates for nature and empathy over money and success (“While I like to chill by relaxing by the beach, I feel most a part of nature when I am marching with the people”); and ‘Love & Revolution’, a tribute to Yeide Kuti, Kuti’s life partner of 17 years, more of whom later.

“I used to think that my father was a revolutionary who fought the government” – Fela’s 1976 opus Zombie provoked a brutal military attack on the Kalakuta Republic commune in which Seun grew up – “but I have realised in my growing years that most of his songs stood against elitism. That they empowered the working class in all their original mess. I saw that he stood on the shoulders of his mother [anti-colonial feminist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti], who stood on the shoulders of Kwame Nkrumah [pan-Africanist and former president of Ghana], who stood on those of Marcus Garvey [the Jamaican-born proponent of Black nationalism], who was inspired by ancient African traditions.”

He pauses for a beat. “It is fascinating to me how, in this modern era, humanity’s ability to achieve, to understand the goals of our natural class, is being increasingly betrayed by huge numbers of people who are buying into elitism and thinking that they’re millionaires-in-waiting.”

Blame capitalist propaganda. “Americans, for example, are only two per cent of the world’s population but they consume about a quarter of the world’s resources. Our Earth cannot sustain that.”

“So the title of the album plays on the idea that the crownless head is heavier than the heads who wear the crowns. The ones who sit on boards of corporations and push their greed and class interests forward, who prevent the people from having a say in democracy, in their own lives.”

Kuti’s rage has often felt sharper than that of his 22-year-older musician half-brother Femi, becoming even more steely over time. He emphasises how phenomenal it is that his father’s band, despite line-up changes, is still firing on all cylinders as an entity, 27 years after his death. “Five albums in they are still proving that they are not just a memorial band,” says Kuti, a graduate in music and sound technology from the UK’s Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, who did all the arranging on Heavier Yet…. “They are keeping the energy alive, making music at the forefront of the art.”

This is what Kuti has always set out to do, from albums including 2011’s Brian Eno-produced From Africa With Fury: Rise to his guest spots with Egypt 80 on Janelle Monáe’s party-fied 2023 album Age of Pleasure. “I met Janelle at the Hollywood Bowl years ago, maybe 2016, and we stayed in touch. When she was making this record her people reached out to say that she would love to work on it with me.”

The good times are there, too, on Heavier Yet…, notably on the aforementioned ‘Love & Revolution’ and the groove-laden closer, ‘Move’. “I want people to know that liberation work is joyful work,” says Kuti, who has a ten-year-old daughter Adara with his wife Yeide, a TV chef and former Egypt 80 dancer, and has another daughter, also ten (and allegedly estranged), who lives in Lagos with her mother.

“My daughter [Adara] is at the age where she just wants to be famous without doing all the work,” he says with a grin. “I’m being forced right now to write her a song.”

Unlike Fela, who was given to macho posturing – in 1976 he famously married all 27 of his backing dancers – Seun seems aware of issues around gender and feminism. Recently asked by a panel of female hosts on Nigerian TV whether he planned to continue the Kuti line by having a son, he clapped back, replying that the line was perfectly able to continue through his daughter. Of his relationship with Yeide, whom he married in 2020, he says, “She challenges me to be better. Love for me is a force that can change the world. It’s not just about going on holidays and making babies and buying gifts in the way the capitalists want you to think. It is a decision more powerful than that.”

The pair have plans to open another, larger Kuti’s Bistro in Lagos after the pandemic sent their last restaurant venture under, and Kuti is to revive his rant-a-minute YouTube series Birds Eye View as a podcast later in the year.

Indeed, while considered a problematic rabble-rouser by those in power in Nigeria, Seun Kuti is beloved in turn by a huge army of Nigerian fans, a fact evidenced during his eight-day imprisonment in May 2023 after being charged with assaulting/slapping a police officer during a driving offence. “Crowds of people were outside all day and all night. It is not easy to be in jail; they knew my innocence and they supported me, screaming my name, giving me strength. It was like a carnival outside the police station sometimes.”

“The Movement of the People is a necessary step for me to take in terms of organising, finding direct representation for the people politically,” he says of MOP, which he revived following the Nigerian #EndSARS (a social movement against police brutality) protests of October 2020. “Our country’s elites are not interested in development. There must be drastic change in the relationship between the elite of Africa, the resources of Africa and the African people. That is the message of the MOP.”

It’s also the message of Heavier Yet (Lays the Crownless Head), a masterwork that looks set to garner him the recognition within Nigeria, long overdue, purposefully withheld, that he deserves.

“What’s incredible for me is that my Nigerian numbers are growing exponentially, so I must be speaking in a voice that my people are understanding. This is not easy in a country where everything is so privatised, where reaching the people without the mainstream is not easy. Even when I was nominated for a Grammy in 2018 not a single African ceremony gave us a nomination. Not one.”

He shrugs and smiles again. “But things are changing in terms of my career at home,” says Seun Kuti, “and that brings so much joy to my heart.”

'EMI ALUTA' VIDEO PREMIERE

Check out the video premiere for an extraordinary live video for 'Emi Aluta', off Heavier Yet (Lays the Crownless Head). The video was filmed at Galpão Ladeira das Artes in Rio de Janeiro by French film-maker Vincent Moon, and captures the raw energy of the band at intimate quarters. The video will be officially released on October 28. Seun says that the track is “a song about struggle (Aluta means struggle) that pays homage to all the great revolutionaries.”

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today