In Queens of Afrobeat, the women of Afrobeat music—a unique blend of jazz, soul, highlife, and West African rhythms—are finally given the recognition they deserve. This extensive study takes a multifaceted view of the storied lives of the women behind Fela Kuti’s activist music.
Dotun Ayobade’s wide-ranging research pulls from interviews with surviving queens, ethnographic narratives, the exploration of newspaper archives, and close readings of album covers, photographs, and promotional materials to help us see and understand the women who surrounded Fela Kuti on stage and in everyday life. Not only were these artists crucial performers and backup singers for Kuti’s most important compositions, they also played key roles in his activism and campaigns of social protest against the Nigerian government in the 1970s.
Drawing on previously untapped material, Queens of Afrobeat weaves together an intricate narrative of women’s participation in popular music. The stories of these remarkable women transform and uniquely personalize our understanding of the politics and performance of one of the major modern musical traditions in Africa.
Cuprins
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Birth of a Restless Collective: How the ‘Girls’ Converged
2. From FRK to ‘Lady’: A Revised Genealogy of the Music’s Other Women
3. To Improvise a Precarious Freedom: Before FESTAC 77
4. Unknown Soldier: The 1977 Kalakuta Invasion and the Geopolitics of Intimacy
5. ‘Spirit Catch Am’: Possessions, Paranoia, and the Tumultuous Egypt 80
6. Facing the Music: AIDS and Alienation after Fela
7. ‘Where We Fall Is Where We Pick Ourselves Up From’: A Legacy in Fragments
Conclusion: What Afrobeat Owes Women It May Never Repay
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Despre autor
Dotun Ayobade is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He studies how embodied forms of popular culture shape the meanings of community, justice, and activism in postcolonial West Africa. His writing covers late twentieth century dance, performance, and popular music in Anglophone West Africa, with an interest in the impact and trajectories of Afrobeat music.
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