The story of Afrobeats king, Femi Kuti is often never complete without the mention of his late father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Though Femi has been mostly seen as the one who’s carried on the mantle; speaking against the bad and evil of the government through his songs, he’s described his approach as totally not like his father’s.
On a recent edition of CNN’s Inside Africa, Vladimir Duthiers had a chat with Femi Kuti as he shares his thought about the Nigerian music, methodology and approach to write the wrongs in our society.
“You cannot expect anybody to be like my father. I am not even like my father, although most of my songs are more political because of my own upbringing. Now, you cannot expect a 2Face, for instance, not to sing many love songs and one Political song. You have to understand that if everybody did this, it’d become monotonous and maybe too much, so variety too is nice in a country like ours. If everybody was on the case, we would be in war and too unhappy. I am not singing for people to be unhappy. You need to be very sensitive; Do I want war, Do I want blood shed? These are not the answers I want. I want the leaders to quickly change so we can find a peaceful way so we can have a good life. So we need to be very understanding of the situation that what somebody like me can say, can lead to a revolution and we don’t want that. We need to put all these into perspective!”