Legacy +

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It's wild to think that, back in the '90s, when Femi Kuti first made an impact on the international music scene, the eldest son of Fela was seen as a modernist bent on re-molding his father's afrobeat sound with an unapologetically contemporary approach. His arrival was bracing. Even though Femi's career kicked off at basically the same moment his father's recording career had stopped (but a few years before Fela's death), it was during a time when Fela's prime '70s work was undergoing a broad reassessment and revival of interest; Femi's work seemed like more of a sharp break from his father's than the more gradual evolution that it actually was. Of course, in the three decades since, Femi's approach has gotten more and more "classicist," reveling in backward glances and legacy preservation, and the passage of time has allowed a more reasonable perspective on that father-son succession.

That makes a work like Stop The Hate that much more interesting. While it absolutely sounds like the work of a middle-aged man wrestling with the internal struggle between genre fealty and continued creative evolution, it also rests alongside the blossoming of his own son's career. Stop the Hate is not only being released in tandem with son Made Kuti's debut For(e)ward, but is also being packaged with it as a double album called Legacy+. To be sure, these are very different albums by very different artists, but in the same way that Made will be both aided by and saddled with his family legacy, so was Femi. With Stop the Hate, it's clear that Femi has made peace with settling into a groove that honors and evokes his father's work. Tracks like "You Can't Fight Corruption with Corruption," "Young Boy / Young Girl," and album opener "Pà Pá Pà" are exactly the sort of work one would imagine Fela producing in the year 2021; while shorter and possessed of a buffed-out studio sheen, they balance bristling political energy and languid, loping grooves in a classically afrobeat way. Other cuts though—notably the staccato groove of closing track "Set Your Minds and Souls Free" and the frenetic, anthemic "Land Grab"—show Femi's continued inventiveness and willingness to subvert a genre that is literally his family's legacy.

Just as his father had to deal with the career benefits and limitations of being the scion of an icon, Made Kuti is kicking off his international music career in the position of someone who has to both honor the legacy of his father (and grandfather) and simultaneously forge his own path. Wisely, he is not dodging the issue at all with For(e)ward, which is not only sharing a release date with his father's latest, but also a producer (erstwhile Fela producer Sodi Marciszewer) and album cover artist (Delphine Desane). However, the similarities beyond that are few and far between. Yes, Made is working in an afrobeat heritage, but he is neither explicitly beholden to the style established by his (literal) forebears nor to the more contemporary, hip-hop-indebted permutations recently dominating dancefloors. Instead, Made even explicitly and reverently invokes his grandfather on one song, "Different Streets," about how, as time passes, some things may seem familiar and connected to the past, but there are even more things changing, growing, and evolving into that which will move us into the future. And Made is definitely moving into the future. Rather than utilizing a small army of musicians like his father and grandfather, all of the music here was created by Made himself, and while it shares textural and structural similarities with classic afrobeat—the languid horns, the insistent rhythms, the politicized lyrics—there is a density and complexity to these tunes that is unique. The jagged, interrupted rhythm of album opener "Free Your Mind" does a great job of expectation-setting, making it clear that this won't be another stop on the Kalakuta Express; meanwhile, the scratchy guitar lines and off-kilter drum parts, whispered vocals, synth banks and other unexpected flourishes that make their way into the a packed-full song like "Young Lady" point the way toward many future iterations of highly individualized take on the family tradition. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz