this is an idea on Cohost and i think it’d be fun to port over every wednesday. post your non-anglophone music of all varieties (bonus points if they’re not necessarily well known international artists) and anything you’d like to say about that music or its artist(s)
my submission here: Fela Kuti’s Zombie:
https://youtu.be/Qj5x6pbJMyU
this song (and the eponymous album it’s from, Zombie) constitute a major addition to Fela Kuti’s discography, primarily because of its immense success and the consequences of that success. Zombie makes a mockery of the Nigerian government and specifically its military, and is widely assumed to have been the catalyst for the authoritarian military government of Olusegun Obasanjo to raid Fela’s Kalakuta Republic commune/compound. that raid, conducted by over a thousand soldiers, resulted in the destruction of the commune, the murder of Fela’s mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (one of Nigeria’s first feminist activists and suffragists(, the near murder of Fela himself, and grotesque acts of physical and sexual brutality against members of the commune.
the experiences of the raid would prompt two further Fela albums, Coffin for Head of State (referring to Fela delivering his mother’s coffin to an army barracks in Lagos) and Unknown Soldier (referring to the findings of the official inquiry into the Kalakuta raid, which found an “unknown soldier” responsible), both master works in their own rights. (Zombie would also, allegedly, go on to get Fela banned from entering neighboring Ghana after it caused a riot in Accra.)