15th November 2009

Video

I watched Music is the Weapon, a documentary on Nigerian afrobeat pioneer/political radical Fela Kuti, this morning, and this scene is how the movie ends.

“Music is the weapon. Music is the thing of the future. Music is the weapon of the future.”

Kuti tried to use his music as a vehicle for change; much of his lyrics were political in nature, commenting on the politics and societal structures of his country, and the world as a whole. Kuti was a brilliant musician and political mind, but, if music was really “the weapon of the future,” shouldn’t he have had a greater impact on his society? Shouldn’t he have actually become president? It would be difficult to imagine someone who should have been able to utilize this weapon better than Kuti, a man of great skill in lyrical and musical composition and performance. It’s been just under 28 years since he said “music is the weapon of the future.” But he did not become president, and in 2007, Yeni Kuti, Fela’s daughter, said “the things he used to sing about are 100 times worse now.” Was he wrong? Is music not a weapon? Or is it a weapon he failed to utilize fully? Despite the current situation, I can’t help but think he was still correct. Listening to his music, and the music of others working in a similar, philosophically important manner, one can’t help but feel the power of it all. But why, then, do things still get worse?

It seems to me that popular American culture is a pervasive, numbing force. It can be found almost anywhere in the world, and American pop music is a part of it. If it’s a weapon, mainstream American music might be a sort of tranquilizer-dart, though one with the range to reach anywhere in the globe, quickly and throughly. Music like Fela Kuti’s can be a strong antidote to this numbing agent, but it often must exist outside of the powerful machine that brings American pop music so far around the globe, requiring the listener to do much more work to find exposure.