Seun Kuti vs Wizkid: There’s No New Fela in Afrobeats

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is generally accepted as the gold standard for excellence in Nigerian music. It’s not an unearned distinction. Fela’s mythos is one of the rare ones that fails to fully capture the true weight of his impact, a merger of true musical ingenuity and staunch sociopolitical ideology. He invented a musical style with an evolving scope, released dozens of albums, and sang some of the most definitive songs in African music canon. A loud and unapologetic critic of the government, he was reportedly arrested hundreds of times, and each assault only seemed to toughen his resolve as a rebel.

Fela’s music remains important within the context of Nigeria’s eternal systemic failings, which means his status as a hero continues to persevere. He’s an aspirational symbol, particularly to many artists who want to assume a similar kind of greatness and lasting cultural influence.

Even though Afrobeats, the controversial catchall term used in describing Nigerian pop music since the early 2010s, has no musical or ideological similarities with Afrobeat, the genre created by Fela in the late 1960s and ‘70s, both have continued to be narratively linked despite little evidence of a bridge between them. Despite the incongruity, many Nigerian pop artists have linked themselves, likened their work to, and generally tried to evoke the memory of Fela for a gilded effect on the significance of their music.

“There shouldn’t even be comparisons amongst artists at all,” Seun Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela’s son, musician, and leader of Egypt ‘80, told OkayAfrica earlier today, Wednesday, January 21. Over the past week-plus, Seun has been airing his annoyance with the constant comparison the Afrobeats superstar Wizkid has drawn to his father, considering it a denigration of Fela’s legacy. “Music is not sports; nobody enters music to compete. So, what we must ask is that why do people bring competitive spirit into art?”

A day after his January 11 birthday, Seun made an appearance on The Morayo Show, a nationally syndicated variety talk show, and he shared his disapproval of Nigerian pop music fans seemingly undercutting the greatness of Fela to prop up and elevate the prominence of their favorite artists.

“I can say Wizkid is the greatest artist of all time; it carries weight. Why must you add ‘more than Fela’?” he asked rhetorically early into the interview. Seun went on to add that artists beloved in their home countries don’t face the same disrespect, name-checking Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley, South African jazz luminary Hugh Masekela, and several other iconic artists. “You will not hear anyone say they’re the new Bob Marley, and you will never hear anybody comparing any artists today to Bob Marley,” he said.

Later in the rant, he added, “If you want Wizkid to be great, he’s the greatest, I agree with you. Leave my father’s name out of [it].”

Wizkid’s reverence for Fela is well-known, so much so that he has the Afrobeat inventor tattooed on his body. One of the most beloved songs from earlier in his career, “Jaiye Jaiye,” features Fela’s son and afrobeat musician Femi Kuti, and he’s performed more than once at Felabration, the annual week-long programming of artists' performances in honor of Fela. By the late 2010s, when he was at the forefront of charting the course of global success for Afrobeats, many in his infamous Wizkid FC fanbase started referring to Wizkid as the modern-day Fela. The premise was that Wizkid’s undeniable superstardom in Nigeria and across Africa, coupled with his global commercial success, is analogous to Fela’s impact during his heyday.

Around the same time, Burna Boy was coming on strong with his agenda as something of an heir apparent to Fela. To some, Burna’s claim had more validity: His grandfather Benson Idonije managed Fela for a few years, he performed at Felabration in 2013 with only a pair of briefs on — an all-too explicit nod to Fela’s fashion choice at home — and his 2018 smash hit “YE” interpolated Fela’s “Sorrow, Tears & Blood.” On his 2019 album African Giant, he sang of political ills on “Another Story” and “Collateral Damage,” burnishing his image as a consciously aware artist.

From Seyi Vibez cribbing the style and look of one of Fela’s most famous pictures to Bella Shmurda explicitly calling himself the “New Born Fela,” there’s no shortage of Fela co-opting in Nigerian pop music. At the same time, there’s a severe shortage of his spirit amidst the aspirational namechecks. For instance, Shmurda’s glitzy, catchy track is a boastful celebration of being rich enough to woo almost any woman, solely leaning into the ultra-libidinous element of Fela’s life.

According to lore, Fela had a lot of sex – some of it risqué and problematic. He married 27 wives in one day in 1978, and he regularly had a lot of women around him. That hedonistic aspect of his life clearly appeals to many Afrobeats artists, a subset that is overwhelmingly male, which means their depictions of ravenous pleasure spiritually place them in Fela’s lineage. However, what makes Fela as great in death, or perhaps greater than, as he was in life, is the simple, unassailable fact that he was one of Nigeria’s greatest activists.

Fela was obsessed with the sociopolitical bent of his music. He routinely refused to perform outside Africa at the peak of his popularity, insisting that his music wasn’t just for entertainment, but as a tool to liberate Nigerians and Africans from the political ills of the present and the future. He repeatedly insulted government officials on wax at great risk to his life. He turned down record deals worth millions of dollars because they would infringe on his creative rights to make songs that lasted the length of an EP or album. He went to prison for 20 months and returned to expand the scope of his music to be even more scathing.

Afrobeat, which merges Yoruba folk, highlife, funk, and jazz, is so synonymous with activism that it’s not hard to scoff when most Afrobeats artists are mentioned in the same breath as Fela beyond pure adulation. Like in Burna Boy’s case, where activism is sometimes conditioned based on superiority, moral, and other factors. On “Collateral Damage,” he once again quotes from “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” – “My people sef dey fear too much, we fear the thing we no see” – but where Fela’s accusation was rooted in lived experiences, Burna’s was caustic just for the sake of it.

Fela did more than walk the talk, not so much for Burna Boy, which means the former had some justification to call out cowardice, and the other did not. In recent years, Burna’s activism has come off as spurious, from discounting the value of streaming revenue in Nigeria to treating concertgoers with utmost disrespect at home and abroad. Burna Boy is a pop artist; it just happened that being perceived as a freedom fighter at a time played a role in his commercial appeal.

Wizkid has never claimed to try to change the political landscape with his music. He’s the starboy for Afrobeats as a commercially-driven scene, dating all the way back to when he namechecked several political and social elites on his 2014 hit song “In My Bed,” an acknowledgement of the patronage system that has always kept popular music viable in Nigeria. To be fair, the modern Fela thing for Wizkid is rooted in commercial success. But here’s the thing: comparisons that leave out elemental tenets on either side of the equation will always be ill-fitting.

Fela made socially conscious music in an era of cassette players; Wizkid makes colorful pop music that has spanned the days of Bluetooth file sharing and streaming. The nuances make it almost impossible to discuss a one-to-one comparison about greatness.

At its core, Seun’s stance is simply a son protecting his father’s legacy from what he deems unnecessary disrespect. In his taunting of Wizkid FC over the past week, there hasn’t been much chance for the conversation to be constructive. If there’s anything to know about the FC, they will take any disrespect further than any (perceived) opponent. Wizkid himself joined the conversation yesterday with choice words for Seun on both X and Instagram. In an IG story, he asserted that “I big pass your papa,” a statement that will only embolden his fans to not only double down but be even more disrespectful to both Seun and Fela.

This entire situation is being fueled by a cocktail of ignoring nuance, arrogance, ego, and the social media-driven need to have the definitive word. What shouldn’t be lost in all of this is that there’s no modern Fela, in the same way that there likely won’t be a modern Wizkid three decades from now.