The Complete Works of Fela Anikulapo Kuti

It’s never been easy to make a sensible suggestion when asked to nominate the best starting point to the music of Fela Kuti. The sheer number of his records, their generally high consistency and the relatively small stylistic variation – once he’d settled into his trademark Afro-beat groove by the early 1970s – make it fiendishly hard to pick one album as necessarily better than another. More than almost any other artist, there are not really good Fela and bad Fela records. There’s just Fela, doing what he did – and doing it pretty gloriously. We now have the perfect solution for how to choose between Fela’s multiple recordings. You don’t. Instead of weighing the merits of Expensive Shit versus Zombie, or tossing a coin between Shuffering and Shmiling and Coffin For Head of State, here’s the whole caboodle: 46 original LPs plus a DVD on 27 discs, in a box that’s almost large enough to dance in.

We can trace the evolution of Afro-beat and track the cultural revolution which accompanied it, from the 60s recordings with Fela’s early band, Koola Lobitos, through the 1969 sessions he recorded in Los Angeles and on through the prolific output recorded with his bands Africa 70 and Egypt 80. The one criticism here is that better liner notes and a more thoughtful presentation would have made it easier to follow the course of that evolution. If you’re looking for time-lines or links – or even simple details about recording sessions – the general level of information is poor. Even the chronological order of the multiple albums isn’t particularly well signposted. But then again, the compilers would probably argue that so many millions of words have already been written about Fela, that you can find everything you need to know at the click of a mouse anyway.

Clearly, you’re not going to consume everything here in one go. Spend a couple of weeks concentrating on each CD and an entire year will have passed before you get back to the beginning. In the same way that you’d want all nine Beethoven symphonies and every Beatles album rather than edited highlights, this collection compiles an essential body of work. And yes, you really do need it all.