Fela Kuti’s co-manager from 1982, Rikki Said, said in a 2014 interview, “at one point I went to America and I had appointments with the president or vice president of every major label.” They said, “OK, Rikki, which three minutes out of this 28-minute track do you want me to put on the radio?”
‘Confusion’, recorded in 1974 and released in ’75, wasn’t Fela’s longest track – it was a puny 25 minutes 36 seconds. In the opening, Fela noodles on his electric piano, and Tony Allen seems to play a few false starts, before the pair really get going together around the 4-minute mark. Most pop songs would be over by now.
Then Allen’s razor-sharp snare rolls lead up to a satisfying introduction of the bassline at 4:47. Allen switches to a more laid back hi-hat pattern with the occasional single hit of the snare or tom. Fela now has the bass rhythm to play off and the song (or rather, instrumental so far) seems to have a basis after 5 minutes. Then additional percussion is introduced just before the dual guitars. When the guitars are playing, Fela switches back and forth between two chords, then plays them in a lower register when the horns come in.
The rhythm guitar (right speaker) plays fewer chords, and fewer muted chords, than was often the case in both Fela and James Brown’s music. There’s just a touch more sustain on the last chord of the progression than usual. It’s not too long before the motif is introduced (alright, it’s almost 7 minutes): the horns play drawn out chords then switch to a long stretch of stabs in groups of fours.
Those sustained chords contrast with the picked guitar (left speaker), which keeps each note super tight. Its tone is somewhat dull – it’s not the tenor’s brightness of ‘Open & Close’ (1971) or ‘Gentleman’ (1973), for example.
By 7:05, when the horns settle on a percussive four-note phrase, there’s such a web of jittery polyrhythms that it’s hard to remember the intro’s sparseness. Fela’s ’60s music was inspired in part by Miles Davis. But where Miles or a bandmate might have had the spotlight with other instruments dropping out for a couple of minutes, here the accompanying players—Lekan “Babi Ani” Animashaun on baritone saxophone and Tony Njoku on trumpet—keep grooving. Fela plays his keys off their insistent stabs, and sometimes over them; at other times he plays more minimally and builds anticipation.
After Fela’s soloed for about a minute, the horns switch back to their sustained chords (8:05), which function as a bridge part, before Njoku solos. He gets more space, and wanders through it with a great variety of explorative melodies then variations on the motif (10:29).
After 14 minutes, the singing starts. 1974’s ‘Alagbon Close’ was the first song in which Fela directly criticised the Nigerian government. He was well on his way to decades of explicit criticisms on corrupt governments, politicians, and colonialism. ‘Confusion’ is relatively mild in comparison to what was to come. Fela sings, “When we talk say ‘confusion’, everything out of control”. In Lagos, Nigeria, there were three languages, three currencies, and the worst traffic in the world. If you could navigate the jams, you were worthy of a degree: “You go get PhD for driving for Lagos / You go get MA for driving for Lagos / You go get MSc for driving for Lagos”.
In short, there was confusion.
There’s a call-and-response with his backing singers, then an equally characteristic call-and-response with the horns, starting with a deep sustained chord, which sounds noticeably glum among the high spirits of the other instruments, including the vocals – even when Fela’s describing Lagos’s chaos, he sounds energised rather than downtrodden.
When the singing is complete, Fela plays a gnarly, distorted piano riff, and then syncopated higher pitched chords with his right hand to add to the already hypnotic polyrhythms. When he switches to those lighter, sustained chords (22:50) he played 17 minutes earlier, the rhythm guitar becomes clear again. The horns drop out after one last blast, and Allen carries the now comparatively small band, with just drums, bass, keys, and a touch of additional percussion. We’re reminded of the intro and its spaciousness, and at 24:09, about 20 minutes after the “song” really began, it finally starts to wind down.
Allen returns to those snare rolls and neither he or Fela seem quite ready to let the recording stop. Eventually, the horns return for their final, final chord.
Top image from Discogs.