Hail to the chief of funk
Artists from around the world pay tribute to Afrobeat superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in "Black President."

By J.H. Tompkins

YOU'VE GOT TO love the incongruity of shining up anything related to visionary musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and putting it in a museum. Take, for instance, "Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti" – an ambitious, seditious, and sometimes outstanding exhibit that opened April 17 and runs through June 4 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Not that Fela would have minded; before he died – in 1997 at 59 – he led a flamboyant, over-the-top life. But he was explosive, insatiably horny, and contrary, and were he alive, he would have rolled into the opening-night party holding a foot-long spliff with a posse of bodyguards, 10 or 15 wives, and a handful of newfound Frisco players. Someone would have pegged them as trouble and called the cops, and after the melee, Fela – if he hadn't gotten busted – would have led a state-of-the-art 20-piece band through a smoking version of "Zombie" that lasted until dawn.

Fela's gift was to fuse traditional African rhythms and contemporary African pop with the music developed by James Brown in the '60s and early '70s. The result was funky, sexy, bottom-heavy Afrobeat – a liberating, defiant sound that defined a crucial moment in African history. He was a musician-activist, influenced in no small measure by a trip to the United States in 1969, during which he met Black Panthers in Los Angeles, and was turned on to Brown's funky dance music. During the 1970s, he became a superstar in Africa, famous for weaving his musical and political vision into the fabric of his life; he was a hedonist with 28 wives, an anticolonialist who casually flipped off Nigeria's military rulers, an antimaterialist who declared his compound a separate country (and all-purpose nightclub), and a musician who absorbed and adapted new influences and brought them to his hugely influential band.

Fela did more than rock the party, he started it – embracing the outlaw existence he wrote about in his songs. Only in death did he become part of history, a legend as real as anyone needed him to be. Of course, it's tough to trust history once historians get their hands on it, taking incomprehensible, contradictory, impossibly dense episodes and playing a real-life game of connect the dots – put the "official" stamp on something and suddenly a shit-storm becomes a tea party, mass murder becomes mercy killing. History is – please excuse my vulgarity, but I really mean this – a lot of bullshit.

It's easier to trust art because, like Fela's music, it comes from the soul and can be measured in feelings rather than facts. "Black President" consists of multidisciplinary visual art created by artists who were inspired by Fela's music; as far as I'm concerned, that makes it twice virtuous. Give me a band, a record, a dancer, and a few dance steps and my body will tell me what I want to know about the past. Where history demands a lockstep march through time, art loosens one's defenses and invites the insides out. "Zombie" – perhaps Fela's best-known song – is pure, sustained exhilaration; musicians enter and climb aboard, each adding a new voice to an age-old human dialogue. It's nothing less than humanity itself energizing those drums, a force as powerful and dangerous as a call to arms, as joyous as a mother's love, and as essentially sexual as human flesh permits. "Zombie" stands as testimony to what music can be, a great, rollicking, sorrowful, agonizing, and ultimately ecstatic conversation that transcends spoken or written language.

"Zombie" has its own history, one that is unique in popular music. Released at a moment when the corrupt, desperate Nigerian government was particularly vulnerable, the song slipped from the world of art – where overt political statements are rare and more rarely effective – into the world of politics. "Zombie" became a weapon in the struggle against the ruling regime, inspiring resistance and giving strength to an angry, brutalized people who were ready to stand up to Nigeria's zombies – government soldiers who without thought or compassion did the bidding of their masters. There were victories, and in this case, the payback was devastating: a thousand-strong group of soldiers and police attacked Fela's compound, destroying it, fatally injuring his mother, jailing the musician, and driving him further outside the law.

"Black President," which got its start when Trevor Schoonmaker, an art history major from New York via North Carolina, heard one of Fela's songs playing in a bar one night. He liked it enough to look for more. "The thing that really got me," Schoonmaker told me, "when I found out about Fela, was his political stance. He spoke truth to power, and he lived it. That part was so important; he lived it. And combined with the fact that his music is absolutely fabulous, that's just everything."

Schoonmaker founded the Fela Project, and in 1999 he began putting together what became "Black President." He approached artists joined only by their affection for the musician – which meant a cross-section of nationalities, ethnicities, ages, colors, sexual orientations, disciplines, and political beliefs that is so far-flung that to call it diverse is confining. "Fela's music hits you in your body," he told me, "and art is a medium that you shape with your hands. I wanted to find the connection there. I gave the artists a lot of license in terms of how they would delve into their work. It's not overwhelmingly political in any kind of didactic sense – even in the way that Fela's sometimes was. So it's really interesting as far as what was created and the different ways that Fela moved them. He was so many things: a master musician, a rock star, a sex symbol, and outlaw. It's also why I'm glad that there are the artists' statements in the catalog, because it shows how politically minded many of these artists are."

It could be said that the gap between the work exhibited in "Black President" and Fela's music is literally one of life and death – because the murderous, mindless army in "Zombie" was all too real. While that's true, one needs to approach that idea with caution; it's common – and very wrong – to claim that the comfort levels American artists grow up with render their work irrelevant, and that even foreign-born artists need to wear their politics on their art. This train of thought, taken further, ends up dismissing less-overtly political art and artists who are more than capable of contributing to change. The catalog is full of intelligent essays exploring the evolution of Fela's music and politics; but as Schoonmaker points out, the artists' statements bring into focus concerns that are only hinted at in the exhibit, underscoring the complex relationship between politics and art.

The Bay Area's relationship to political activism explains, in part, why Fela's reputation emerged earlier here than in most places in the United States. World music found a home when reggae stars Jimmy Cliff (in The Harder They Come) and Bob Marley came to town in the early '70s. English punk bands brought dub, ska, and reggae to town a few years later, and left-of-the-dial radio stations, along with visionary DJs – Jonathan E, Tony Kilbert, and Doug Wendt among others – who dropped Afrobeat and soca into their shows. Disciples of teacher-percussionist C.K. Ledzepko flooded a music scene looking for direction as the punk upsurge ebbed. Some – guitarist Joe Gore and bassist Robin Balliger among them – worked in O.J. Ekamode's bands and in Kenneth Okulolo's Katoja. Fela's albums were sometimes available in the first-rate international section at Leopold's Records in Berkeley (courtesy of buyer David McBirney), although they disappeared as fast as they arrived.

The past merely sets the stage for "Black President." The thrust of the exhibit is art that lives and breathes in today's world. A number of artists spoke against the voracious forces of globalization, a sentiment they share in many cases with Fela's newest fans, many of them born into the hip-hop generation: history, when properly understood, is not about yesterday but tomorrow.

'Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti' runs through June 4. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. (first Thurs., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, S.F. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free for members (free first Tues.). (415) 978-ARTS.