Jad Abumrad

And he plays zombie down at the police on his saxophone.

And they fly into a rage.

They pour gasoline over everything.

And they basically burn the house to the ground.

And they storm the compound while it's burning.

And some pretty awful things happen because a lot of Fela's wives were inside the compound at that point.

There was...

some very upsetting sexual violence that occurs.

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.