A Fela Kuti revival book misses.

Six years after his death from AIDS, Nigerian musician, revolutionary and all-around iconoclast Fela Anikulapo Kuti is experiencing a full-blown renaissance in the United States. Unfortunately this contribution is disappointingly literal-minded and plodding. The majority of the essays try to twist Anikulapo Kuti into designs of the writers' making, revealing more in their apologetics about their own prejudices than the man himself. The result is a slew of pseudo-academic, bloodless studies of Fela's music, personal life and religious practice, the totality of which lacks one-tenth the insight and intellect of a Fela song like "Gentleman" or "Coffin for Head of State."

It is a particularly exquisite brand of missing the point to write essays of this nature about Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who sang in Nigerian-creolized English in order to better reach his intended audience. Fela, while middle-class by Nigerian standards, established his compound and self-proclaimed independent country, the Kalakuta Republic, in a working-class neighborhood. Fela was a prophet of populist agitation. He was neither a plaster saint nor an internally coherent thinker. The efforts made here to turn him into such are unnecessary and ignore the obvious fact that Fela's legacy lives on in spite of his contradictions.

Fela was a great believer in freedom and self-respect who held paternalist views of women's roles. He was a crusader for African self-governance whose own household was run as a benevolent dictatorship. In short, he was an artist, and a decidedly self-conflicted one at that; thus, attempts to neatly package his life and thought are destined to fail. In order for political music to speak to its intended audience, it does not have to be a logical, well-argued policy tract. Rather, it must capture the essence of people's anger, or fear, or pride. At its best, the music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti did just that.