Seun Kuti Premieres A New Song at the Shrine

Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 performed last night at the New Africa Shrine in Lagos, their first Shrine appearance in 2013. The performance was sparsely attended; probably only 100 or so in the audience, baffling for a band that toured all over the globe last year including sell-out performances in the US, UK, Australia, and Japan. It wasn't because the tickets were outpriced either. I hardly spent ten bucks including my gate fees, drinks, and taxi money in a city known for high prices. 

Egypt 80 led off a bit after 11:00 pm with Fela’s Dog Eat Dog and then proceeded through a warm-up set of an hour and a quarter, with Showboy vocalizing and directing the horns. Seun came on at about 12:30 am dressed in red pants. The crowd was..shall we say…interesting? First a big rat ran across the dance floor, then an older woman in full-length local garb and high headdress got out front and danced wildly, at one point flinging her headdress, bag, and shoes onto the middle of the floor, collapsing, then getting back up and continuing to dance for the rest of the night. A whole lot of people were taking poor quality hand phone videos of the show, which never cases to baffle me since the quality is worse than a 1980s VHS camcorder, but nobody seems to care. 

Highlights of the set included the frenetic and always-crowd-pleasing Zombie, then Seun’s rap preceding Slave Masters, where he compared locals working for multinationals down in Lekki with slaves living in master’s house in exchange for an easier life than their brethren. 3% of Nigerians thinking everything is fine. About 2:00 am Seun rapped about Kalakuta; this week was the anniversary of the 1977 police attack on Fela’s compound that left Fela with broken bones and his mother beaten so badly that she would ultimately die from her injuries. That led into the première of a new composition dedicated to Kalakuta. Here is a somewhat fuzzy Zoom recording of the world première piece, which hopefully will spur you on both to see Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 live on tour and to buy their next recording.