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Oluseun Anikulapo Kuti knows better than to even try outrunning a ghost. Seun, pronounced “Sean,” was originally offered to play the role of legendary Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti, in “Fela!” on Broadway. He turned it down because he didn’t want folks comparing him to his father.

Still, Seun, Fela’s youngest son, been the frontman for his father’s band, “Egypt 80” since he was in high school. And as I watch 27 year old Seun shed his button down 3/4’s of the way through his performance, revealing a muscled, wiry frame, and  a tattoo that reads “Fela Lives” across his back, it’s clear that his father’s fame and notoriety really don’t scare him one bit. “I begin every show with one of my father’s songs, to pay respects to the man,” Seun told a packed crowd in Barcelona last week, after a blistering performance of Fela’s “Zombie.”

They say that you cannot understand African music without listening to Fela. It won’t be long until “they” start saying you can’t understand Fela unless you see Seun in concert. Like “the man” once said, “Truth don die.” 

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On the European leg of his tour in support of the release of his sophomore album, “From Africa with Fury-Rise”, Seun is already known for having sharper sax chops than his dad, while proving to be just as outspoken against corrupt leadership and shady political shenanigans.

“From Africa” includes “Mr. Big Thief,” in which Seun lyrically slaughters former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, calling him a traitor for collaborating with neo-colonial powers to keep Africa losing. “Africa is being developed but not by and for Africans,” he laments. “There is no African car manufacturer.” In the introduction to “The Good Leaf”, a song in support of legal status for Mary Jane, he says, “I don’t need the authorities to tell me I can harness nature.”

He encourages the audience to sing along in pidgin English (Plant de seed an mek he grow), then cares for the imaginary seed by pouring actual water out onto the stage. Seun then take his playfulness to the ladies on “You Can Run”, advising us to “get [his] album, and play [it] whenever our men aren’t up to performing their….husbandly duties. “You know what me toto scratch me means?”,  he asks. “It means you are horny…”

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In Afrobeat, lyrics don’t appear until the aural ground is good and laid. Yoruba and Pigdin riffs and chants are cushioned by jazz and highlife horns, melodic big band keys, rock guitar melodies, funk bass, and polyrhythmic African percussion. When words do come, somewhere around the 10 minute mark of any given tune, Seun is the perfect master of ceremonies.

The caustic critiques, the jokes, the crotch grabbing– all are delivered with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Pure Afrobeat, No Bullsh*t”, the band t-shirts read, but I can help but think we’re only scratching the surface with this man.[pagebreak]

Backstage, Seun introduces himself like the whole room doesn’t revolve around him, then hands me a Heineken. He opens it with his teeth. There is talk of him and his dancers accompanying my friends and me to a beach party. When we promise to have him back at his hotel in time to fly out to Sweden by 8am, he’s skeptical, rapping a line out of Jay Z’s “Takeover”: “We don’t believe you, you need more people”. I respond like any self respecting New Yorker: I finish the lyric. Seun laughs and takes a puff of the good stuff lodged between his fingers.

If it were a play, this would be called a foreshadowing. A glimpse into all the possibilities of this young artist-heir, whose presence on the international music scene does more to transport the soul of Fela into the future than anything even the most brilliant of true believers can conjure. “Fela!”ay have completed its run on Broadway, but Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 will “afrobeat” their way east from California this summer on a U.S. tour. Go get lifted.