Coffin for Head of State / Unknown Soldier

Fela Kuti made some frantic albums in his career--ones that popped with his enthusiastic political disobedience and ones that roared with fury at the Nigerian system and Africa's disadvantaged position in the late-20th century. But Coffin for Head of State is a different tiger. It's a downturned, sad, melancholic 22-minute work that signaled how Fela would make his previously general criticisms of Nigerian politics very specific. He recorded the album in 1981, several years after the Nigerian military's destruction of his self-declared Kalakuta Republic (a residential compound, in truth) and the ensuing, relentlessly violent assault on its residents, including his mother, who later died as a result of her injuries. Coffin finds Fela castigating Muslim and Christian leaders for idling while the government raped and pillaged, and it boasts a visionary quality in the antiphonal "Amens" that gets bounced through the band. Filling out this double-length CD is Unknown Soldier, a pointed musical assault on the government's position that "unknown soldiers" had perpetrated the Kalakuta attack, when Fela well knew that the 1,000-man rampage was officially sanctioned. The 30-minute track that comprises Unknown is still Fela in a keyed-down mode, railing against the attackers with his customary electric keyboard, a battery of percussionists, all of it stewing for 15 minutes before he bellows in with bright backing vocal chants. After Coffin's melancholy, this is uplifting enough to make you share in his indignation. These sessions mark an unparalleled peak for the musical display of fury and political criticism. --Andrew Bartlett