The Afrobeat Aesthetic Of Antibalas

originally published April 4, 2007

"We honor Fela by keeping afrobeat music alive," proclaims Antibalas on its website. Since banding together in the late 1990s, this pack of Brooklyn-based session musicians and groove enthusiasts has come to be recognized as one of afrobeat's finest torchbearers. The only artists who currently receive more attention for playing this music are Femi Kuti and Tony Allen - two men who gigged for years alongside the legendary Fela Kuti, the Nigerian political revolutionary who invented afrobeat and influenced countless other performers. Outside of this handful of noted practitioners and an international smattering of lesser lights, no groups have tried their hands at this incendiary blend of American jazz and funk and African rhythms since Fela's passing in 1997.

In spite of Antibalas' skill, however, the band has convinced few critics to take its music seriously. Detractors often deride Antibalas as a Fela tribute band, arguing that the genre hasn't been popular in its home continent since the 1970s, and therefore exists today as a mere museum piece. The New York band's purist interpretation of Fela's aesthetic (even mimicking the Pidgin English in which he sang) attempts to freeze the genre in time, nay-sayers suggest. And when Antibalas incorporates non-afrobeat flourishes into its music, it still unabashedly mines well-worn territory; for instance. The band's Latin jazz sounds descend directly from the Nixon-era work of Eddie Palmieri, and its more mournful horn lines nod indiscreetly to mid-century Ethiopian jazz.

Schisms In Thought

Embedded in Antibalas' revivalist aesthetic are, however, concepts as subversive and socially relevant as those Fela touted. A look at the birth and defining characteristic of the jam-band scene - the circuit in which, for better or worse, Antibalas, which last month released its new album Security on the Anti/ Epitaph label, has found its greatest success in the United States - illuminates Antibalas' insurgency by revealing the ideology that shapes the context in which they're heard.

So let’s look at late ‘70s Grateful Dead for a moment. Live at the Cow Palace, a recently issued three-CD recording of The Dead's 1976 New Year's Eve concert, not only documents a particularly devastating live set, but signals the close of an epoch. The Dead had until that year continually locked into rock's most exciting developments. When the group formed in the mid-1960s, the bandmembers played a particularly frazzled brand of Nuggets-y garage rock (seriously: check out early demos to hear them in this mode). Shortly thereafter, they pioneered long-form psychedelic rock in both their improvisational concerts and innovative studio albums. In the early '70s, songwriters Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia began composing folksier material, injecting oddball charm into the post-Woodstock acoustic rock popularized by Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. Then, the band's concerts launched into jazz-fusion territory.

But at the crotch of '76 and '77 - the years punk broke in the United Kingdom and the United States - the Dead sounded, for the first time in the band's career, at odds with rock's zeitgeist. One wouldn't have expected these guys to experiment with punk; the Dead had always been fundamentally progressive, and punk was by nature aesthetically regressive. Thing is, the San Francisco collective failed to progress at all after their Cow Palace barnburner - their subsequent studio albums were streaked with dad-rock treacle. The Dead seemed to drop altogether out of the contemporary rock scene once The Ramones' terse pop-punk firebombs began to wow East Coast audiences, and it is at this moment in rock history, one could argue, that the jam-band scene was born.

Sure, the Dead jammed before 1977. But in The Sex Pistols' wake, the Dead's displays of virtuosity and wankery no longer fed off of or inspired the work of progressive contemporaries. But the Dead also didn't mutate into a classic rock dinosaur - the band simply decided to invest its energy in touring religiously rather than breaking new sonic ground. The Dead remained from that point forward essentially the same band; attending a Grateful Dead concert in, say, 1990 was like tripping through a wormhole in the pop world's time-space tapestry.

This sense of ahistoricity defines to this day the jam scene that the Dead birthed. From groove-oriented jazz group Medeski, Martin, and Wood to deep-funk outfit Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings to Laswellian turntablist DJ Logic, the artists who populate the jam circuit play styles of music that no longer thrive in either the mainstream or the underground, and they tend to play the music as though this weren't the case, approaching genres as purists. When a jam band does add, for instance, a contemporary synthesizer to its dub reggae, the gesture towards modern electronica is often merely cosmetic.

Regressive Jamming

Beneath this ahistoricism lies a resistance to narrative. Jam bands eschew the pop world's narrative of Bold New Developments and Next Big Things by playing genres considered widely to be dated, dormant or unhip. They flout rock's archetypal career narratives by thriving without airplay or critical acclaim, touring steadily for decades rather than sputtering out "Behind the Music"-style, and changing little stylistically over time. And they shirk compositional narrative by, well, jamming.

Antibalas builds upon this aesthetic of resistance by deflating America’s narrative of progress. Bandleader Martin Perna recently explained on the music website Tastes Like Chicken that he feels the lyrics to the Fela songs that Antibalas covers in every concert could accurately describe his own country’s present woes: “The strange thing about afrobeat is that a lot of the earliest songs were written during military dictatorships in Nigeria," he said. "And the sad thing about it is that some of the lyrics that we’re singing, about those military dictatorships in Africa in the '70s, are very, very relevant to what we’re living in now in the United States. It definitely shows a regression on the part of the United States. We’re more chaotic, more dictator-like, more fearful, less organized… all conditions that were really characteristic of Nigeria in the '70s.” By confronting American listeners with the injustices of a Third World military regime in its Fela covers and adopting Fela’s poetics in its original songs to critique the Bush administration, Antibalas suggest that the initial otherness we perceive in afrobeat is deceptive. We’d like to think that the problems we face are at least those of an advanced and civil nation, but Antibalas posits otherwise.

Afrobeat Politicism

Antibalas’ project lacks, however, the sense of lose-yourself mania that powered Fela’s art. Whereas Fela’s concerts lasted upwards of eight hours and climaxed with him falling prostrate before a homemade shrine to the souls of great black leaders, Antibalas’ gigs are by comparison professional and restrained. Sure, you’ll encounter at the band’s shows some dancing, a few lengthy solos and maybe a bit of pot smoke, but when aren’t these indulgences present on any downtown Athens night?

The anti-jam contingent might point to Antibalas’ prevailing sense of composure as yet another example of how the jam circuit is a hermetically-sealed, rationalized safe zone in which college students, bohos and pseudo-hippies can get their kicks in judicious doses and return unfazed the next morning to their desks, cubicles and weathered VW buses.

And perhaps the scene’s subversive strains are ultimately subsumed by the concert-going middle class’ endless pursuit of carefree good times. But Antibalas has thus far successfully encouraged voter registration, alerted fans to progressive interest groups, and donated substantial amounts of time and money to charitable causes. By eschewing debauched aesthetics and lifestyles, Antibalas has been able to work practically for causes its members value. Fela would probably dig that.

Phillip Buchan

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. Interested in contributing? Contact music editor Chris Hassiotis with ideas at music@flagpole.com.