Fela Kuti – Alagbon Close (LP Vinyl)
Product Details
Released the same year Nigerian authorities raided his Kalakuta Republic commune, "Alagbon Close" captures Fela Anikulapo Kuti at the precise moment his art and his activism became inseparable. The title track draws directly from his own experience of detention at that Lagos police headquarters, turning personal confrontation into collective testimony. For listeners coming to Fela through the broader boom in Afrobeat appreciation, this is the essential starting point.
Vinyl LP pressing includes digital download. Alagbon Close, originally released on the independent Jofabro label in 1974, marks the first full flowering of Afrobeat, as a music and as a principled political philosophy. Instrumentally, the album brings together the several signature elements of Fela's Afrobeat, which had not previously been molded into such a unified, finely-balanced form on record. Lyrically, it is a full-on confrontation with an enforcing power of the Nigerian state: Alagbon Close in Lagos was the headquarters of the Nigerian Criminal Investigation Department. Many of the musical elements which make Alagbon Closeso compelling can be heard on earlier recordings, but on this album, Fela pulled them all together to devastating effect, in the process creating the classic Afrobeat paradigm.
Tracklist
UPC: 720841207115
Label: Partisan Records
Release Date: 10.23.15
Format: LP Vinyl