Jad Abumrad

And that really was kind of the end of a certain era of Fela's career.

I'd say slower, slower and heavier.

You know, from somebody who was so outward looking and so intensely political, he kind of turned inward.

And what you hear in his music, it's much more story based.

You know, he would tell stories of ordinary people, you know.

But the spiritualism became almost a kind of occult spiritualism.

He began to believe that he could communicate with his deceased mother through some of the women that lived with him.

So they would hold kind of seances where he would talk to his mom through her.

It really was a spiritualism born, I think, of grief.

And increasingly, he let go of the

I mean, it took a while, so I don't want to say it was instantaneous, but he began to turn away from politics entirely.

And that sort of fierce optimism or hope or whatever you call it, you begin to see that ebb and you can hear it in the music.

Yeah, it is upsetting.

But, you know, if there's a silver lining in that particular anecdote, I mean, you have to dig a little bit to get to it.

When he died, Yeni and Femi initially were very reluctant to declare to the public that he died of AIDS, but they were eventually convinced to sort of come out and say this was AIDS.

It becomes the first public discussion of AIDS in Nigeria and in much of Africa and leads to a lot of positive change.

So even while he denied it himself, that information about him was used, I think, for mostly positive impact.

Yeah.

I mean reports are anywhere from 200,000 to 2 million.

Wow.