Hit play to start listening: Nigerian, African Funky Music from Fela Kuti.
These are both about 10 minute long sweeping African funk songs in the very traditional Nigerian style (at least as I know it).

If you check out an earlier post titled Blaxploitation, Afrique, funky tunes, and early 70’s film, I posted up a pretty funky “old analog” song from Fela Kuti, an African.  Boy did I have that wrong, check out his wikipedia page. For about 20 years I’ve been hearing really funky Nigerian tunes mostly from tapes my old man has brought back.

It turns out the Fela Kuti, this hip little artist I thought “I’d discovered” (I mostly liked his songs of some random compilations out there) is actually sort of a big deal, including his major human rights work.  He’s also not only a lot older than I thought he was, he’s also unfortunately dead having been born in 1938.   I’ve heard a lot of his style music from a band called Groove Collective that I’ve been listening to high school and saw a couple times in college.  In college they were pretty unimpressive but a bunch of their tunes are actually pretty good.

Anyway, a lot of what I mentioned holds true. I just had the era long but a lot of really good music is still coming out of Nigeria. There is still a wave, that’s a lot like the early reggae and the best of the music that came out of Jamaica.

It’s kind of a nice sigh of release. I have always had the spam problem under control until just a couple months ago I somehow made it on some sort of list where started receiving “Dear Mr. Shoumatoff, my name is barrister…” (and you know how the rest goes, if not read about it hear). So it’s nice to see so some good stuff from this country that now has such a bad name, via it’s crap that’s coming out of its Internet cafes.