Dennis Hollingsworth

Fela Kuti, Thanks to Henry

Henry Taylor played Fela Kuti's "Coffin for Head of State" on my first visit to his Ali Baba Cave of a studio. I downloaded it immediately after into my iTunes.

I tend to listen to a specific song repeatedly and mine it for gold. Here, I'm thinking about the influence of James Brown's "the one" beat and Coltrane type ecstatic riffs of abandon and the hard thread between musical form and content. This song is -for me- a possible key between the two.

Lyrics in music is quite an advantage that can blast content down hard. Unless a painter is actually writing on a canvas (Twombly, for example) or devoting the title to a cause as in Motherwell's Elegy... all we have is an intended correspondance between paint-as-form and intention-as-thought.

Maybe, that's enough.

Talking Drum provides a few more notes:

Coffin for Head of State- Explanation??A criticism of arbitrary/artificial religious & ethnic boundaries, and of religious hypocrisy- people who invoke god, but then commit atrocities, including Obasanjo (General) & Y?aradua (Leiutentent Colonel), two of Fela?s attackers.??The poor live in squalor while the pastor lives in luxury. Fela walks (waka), & sees the unhappiness of his people,and the corruption & greed of the colonial-influenced Nigerian government. Colonial culture confuses the African people.??In 1979, when Fela?s mother (a government official & activist) dies from injuries inflicted by the Army during an attack on Fela?s compound, Fela and his Movement of the People Carry his mother?s coffin to the barracks of two noted Fela enemies, Gen. Obasanjo & Lt.Crnl. Y?aradua. As a protest, Fela & MOP put the coffin down, and force the army to take it. Obasanjo & Yaradua eventually help to carry it (out of respect for the dead, and fear of angering ancestoral spirits). ?It remains there. ?