Terry Gross

He had 27 female backup singers and dancers and married all of them in one day.

He didn't believe AIDS was real, advised men not to use condoms, and even wrote a song about it.

And when he contracted AIDS, he denied that was possible.

We'll talk about all that and how his music continues to get people listening and dancing and rebelling against injustice.

Chad, welcome back to Fresh Air.

I really love this series, and I really learned a lot from it, so thank you.

You know, Phelous music was dance music, it was trance music, and it was music that creates Afrobeat, and it inspires a rebellious youth movement, rebelling against colonialist thinking, standing up against the authoritarian government, the police, the military.

I'd like to ask you to describe those elements of his music.

Yeah.

And part of the reason why his music made such a profound effect on young listeners was that this is stuff you weren't taught in school because the schools didn't emphasize or teach about African history or colonialism.

So here's what I'd like to do.

To give listeners who aren't familiar with Fela's music, I want to play something that will show the repetition, the layering, and then segue into his most political song that got him into the most trouble, which is called Zombie.

So to set it up, we're going to start with authority stealing.

And this will show you a very compressed version of the layering in his music.

And imagine each of those layers spreading out for like five minutes each or more.

And then we'll segue into Zombie.

That was Authority Stealing, and this is Phela's song, Zombie.

So tell us why Zombie was so important and dangerous.

So, Fela grows up in a post-colonial environment that still practices a lot of colonial values.

His grandfather translated Anglican hymns into Yoruba, the Yoruba language, and Fela's mother and father had a school that basically followed the colonial education practices.