July 24, 2003 New York Times

Dreaming Between the Grooves in a Futuristic Bubble
By SARAH LYALL

ROSSWAY GREEN, England
IT looked like the midsection of a giant centipede, or a discreet little spaceship, or possibly the natural habitat of Tinky Winky and his Teletubby pals. But the thought that consumed my 6-year-old daughter, Alice, and me as we prepared to spend the night in the futuristic bubble of a house that loomed in front of us was practical rather than aesthetic. Where would we go to the bathroom?
     It turned out that there was indeed a bathroom, complete with tub and sink, although it was for viewing purposes only. The house, designed by Roger Dean, the multitasking painter, graphic designer and architect best known for his exotically surreal album covers for the music groups Yes and Asia in the 1970's and 1980's, is currently a one-of-a-kind nonworking prototype. When it is not on the road, it sits in incongruous splendor in a field on a nature preserve in this Worcestershire hamlet, functioning as a kind of walk-through minimuseum.
      Our mission was to find out what it would be like to sleep there. Forget its underlying philosophy, its cunningly-designed environmental friendliness, its development potential (Mr. Dean hopes to create communities of these houses across Britain). 
      Would we feel weird and claustrophobic or find ourselves inadvertently humming the Yes anthem "Roundabout"? Would we be able to lie in bed and look out the window, and would Alice get to see any rabbits in the field? Although Mr. Dean's houses are meant to be built into the landscape, this one sits on a raised platform so that it can easily be transported, as it often is, to housing and environmental exhibitions. We walked up the curved entrance ramp, looking out for birds' nests (birds love to build in the tucked-away crannies), and made our way, like hobbits, into a hobbit house. 
     The front "hall" was a curvilinear pod connected by a small spiral of stairs to the equally curved bedroom. The windows were large and ovalate, suggesting bigger versions of portholes. The focal point was the bed, enormous and oval, taking up the bulk of the bedroom floor space. Everything was gently curved, without right angles. 
     None of these details were left to chance, Mr. Dean, 58, explained by telephone a few days later. The house, just a bedroom and anteroom, along with the showpiece bathroom, will be bigger and more complete for real living purposes. It is meant, very basically, to appeal to children and to adults' childlike need for safety and security.
    It has its genesis in work Mr. Dean did 40 years ago, while a student at the Royal College of Art in London.
    Back then, he explained, "I asked a bunch of kids, 'What don't you like about where you sleep?' and they were all consistent. They said, `I don't like full-length curtains, hidden spaces under the beds, cupboard doors that are half open so you can't see inside, clothes hanging on the back of doors or chairs that look like something else in the dark.' 
    "Every child had something along those lines," he continued. "They didn't like any space that was ambiguous or in their imagination could contain a threat."
    When he asked them what they did like, they described things like castle turrets, caves and tree houses. Mr. Dean did a full-size mockup of one of the descriptions, from a child who said he wanted his bed "to be up in the air so that no one loomed over him, and if he was in bed he would be eye-level with anyone else." The child windmilled arms, and the space he was describing gave rise to Mr. Dean's notion of curved pods.
    I wasn't sure if I would like the pod concept. Like a lot of people, I have come to equate comfort with space. After spending my formative years in what had once been a maid's room in Manhattan, I had developed an unhappy attitude toward rooms that seem too constricting. Mr. Dean's business partner, John Talbot, who was showing us around, stressed that in the real version of the house, the bedrooms would be bigger. Still I worried. 
    I needn't have. Oddly enough, the bedroom seemed larger than it actually was, in part because the ceiling is built to be wider than the floor, so that the room slightly curves down into itself. Although I had expected it to have the cramped, stuffy feel of a ship's cabin (albeit with none of the sickening motion), it was nothing of the sort. It felt generous rather than miserly.
    Although there was not much in the way of floor space, the bed was set back into the wall with a shelf all around its head, so Alice had plenty of room to lay out the objects she had lovingly brought from home. The house, made of fibrous plaster, with pumice stone bead insulation and several layers of gunite, an especially strong kind of concrete, was snugly insulated and neither too hot nor too cold. Goldilocks herself would have found nothing wrong with the bed. 
    We ate our picnic dinner, put on our nightgowns and ran around outside in our bare feet. We lay in bed, watching the sun go down as I read aloud to Alice. When she fell asleep I did not worry about freak summer storms or marauding rabid beasts. Darkness descended. I fell asleep, too. 
    Mr. Dean hopes to replicate the prototype, or different forms of it. The components can be mass-produced in factories and customized to fit individual tastes in size and configuration. In a country where housing prices have soared in recent years, Mr. Dean's houses (Homes for Life, he calls them) would be relatively affordable, costing $72,000 to $80,000 to build, Mr. Talbot said.
     In keeping with Mr. Dean's philosophy and with the mood of the times, they would be environmentally friendly, fitting gently into the surrounding area and "earth-sheltered"; that is, built into tufts of land and covered with grass.
    "The idea is that the outside of the house is as close to the countryside as possible, so that you are living in the environment as much as possible," Mr. Talbot said. "They could be built in clusters, without the impact of typical big boxy houses, and without harming the habitat for birds and animals."
     Mr. Dean is a man of extraordinarily varied passions. Some of his paintings were recently exhibited at the Grant Gallery in Manhattan; books of his designs and posters of his work have sold in the tens of millions around the world. "The Sea Urchin Chair," which he designed while a 20-year-old student and which can be sat in from all sides, is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He designed the iconic logos for Yes and Asia, and his souped-up, psychedelic graphics helped set the mood for the generation of teenagers in the 70's, which in periods of lucidity lined basement rec rooms with his album covers. 
   Mr. Dean designs computer software, corporate logos and sets for rock concerts. In 1982, the cover he designed for Asia's "Asia Dragon" album was voted the second favorite album cover of all time by the readers of Rolling Stone magazine (behind "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"); 20 years later, the readers selected his design for the Yes album "Tales From Topographic Oceans" as the best cover art of all time.
    His album covers, with their futuristic landscapes, have always reflected his architectural vision, even if they seemed otherworldly and before their time (or possibly out of time altogether). "It was a way to put out my ideas, to address the public directly," he explained. Many of his actual architectural projects, including plans for a vast marina in Brighton, England, and various theme parks and resorts have come tantalizingly close to fruition before, but have never been built. However, several local governments in Britain have expressed interest in developing his Homes for Life plans, and he is cautiously optimistic. In fact, Mr. Talbot said, plans are under way to build a development of 264 Dean-designed villas, chalets and apartments on a 65-acre site near the town of Stourport on Severn. 
    "Twenty years ago, if you'd said, `You're not going to build anything for 20 years, I would have felt desperate, suicidal," Mr. Dean said. "But now it feels very much like the time has come. I've been talking to bankers and local authorities who say, `When I was at university, I had your posters on my wall.' I'm talking to people who've grown up with my ideas." 
     Mr. Dean was nonplused to discover, in the mid-1980's, that the Teletubbies lived in a house very similar to the ones he had been designing. "The real bad news wasn't that they copied me," he said, "but that because they were so successful people think I copied them." 
    As we prepared to leave his house the next morning, having been woken by the sun and then treated by Mr. Talbot and his wife, Grace, and their two children to an alfresco breakfast of yogurt, strawberries and cereal, Alice and I felt we had both found what we were looking for. Alice had seen some rabbits playing in the field. And I had gotten that rare thing when you are the parent of small children: a good night's sleep, unencumbered by anxiety. 
     Mr. Dean was pleased, because the main goal of a house, in his view, is "to provide a space of security." Which is why he still talks about the housing show some years back, when an earlier version of the prototype first went on display. 
    "We had a huge number of people come through it, including pensioners and mums with kids," he said. "An old lady said, `This feels great; this feels like home.' 
    "That meant a great deal to me, because clearly it didn't look like home at all, but it felt like home." 

Will Hodgkinson 
Friday July 11, 2003
The Guardian 

Life always seems to be interesting for Super Furry Animals. With their last album, 2001's Rings Around the World, the Welsh band commissioned a video for every song and hired Paul McCartney on celery- and carrot-chewing duties. The year before, they went to Bogota in Colombia to meet Andrew Oldham, the Stones' original manager and image-maker, where they were subject to the mercurial Oldham's whims. "One day he took us to his son's school in the mountains," says Gruff Rhys, Super Furry Animals' lead singer, lyricist and ideas man. "And he made a detour to show us the rebel forces' camps. But we had to leave because everyone kept recognising his wife, Esther, who is the Colombian Bianca Jagger." 
     Now the band has completed Phantom Power, an album, also released as a DVD, which manages to combine British psychedelia, folk music and techno and somehow sound cohesive. 
    This collision of unlikely influences makes sense when you meet Rhys, a charmingly ebullient Welshman overflowing with enthusiasm for the many things he finds interesting. After picking us up from Cardiff station in his battered Vauxhall Corsa, which has a stereo system worth more than the car, he drives us back to his home while telling us about the poetry battles that have been raging for centuries in Welsh villages. "They're like the rapping contests that Eminem does in 8 Mile," says Griff. "The poems follow a mathematical formula called cynghanedd, and each village enters its own poet to represent it." 
     Rhys's Cardiff town house has a room full of records, books and instruments. There are piles of 45s, albums and CDs covering the floor in no apparent order, but from this chaos, Rhys manages to pull out some favourites. One recently purchased single is Fancy by Bobbie Gentry, the country rock singer from Mississippi who had a few hits in the 60s and 70s before disappearing into a self-imposed exile that has lasted to this day. 
    "We always buy loads of records when we go on tour, and then argue about who owns what as [the records] slip into peoples' suitcases," shouts Rhys over Gentry's rough but sophisticated vocal. "This is one I managed to hold on to from our last American tour. Bobbie Gentry is a fantastic singer who was a big star once but seems to have been forgotten. Maybe she wants it that way." 
    The first track on Phantom Power begins with a snippet of a song by Wendy and Bonnie, Californian sisters who were 13 and 17 when they made Genesis, a piece of sunshine pop recorded in 1969. "We've got very different tastes, but all the band members like the Beach Boys, Gene Clark, and things like this," says Rhys, digging out his copy of the album. "It has amazing songs, amazing lyrics and amazing voices." 
    From the same era comes Odessey and Oracle (sic), British beat band the Zombies' polite, melodic, well-crafted foray into psychedelia. "It's one of the best albums ever made," says Rhys. "The first album made in Abbey Road after the Beatles completed Sgt Pepper. I take it everywhere with me and I've got through about five or six copies of it, but it's sadly underrated. It's popular in the States but in this country, it's mostly forgotten. Its certainly been influential on us." 
    In between bringing us numerous trays of tea and Hobnobs, Rhys expounds on his enthusiasm for folk music, including Memories, an album by Richard and Mimi Farina. Richard Farina was an American civil-rights activist, poet and performer who wrote the college-set novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. On the night of its launch in 1966, he was killed in a motorbike accident. He recorded Memories with Mimi, Joan Baez's sister, the year before. "He was an Irish-Cuban who lived a fantasy lifestyle - he claimed that he had to flee Cuba amongst other things." 
    After playing some awful examples of Japanese dancehall music, which covers Jamaican hits and translates them into Japanese ("There's a massive dancehall scene in Osaka, and one of the best things about touring is discovering things like this"), Rhys unearths singles by Meic Stevens, a Welsh folk singer and one-time contemporary of Syd Barrett. "He made an album in England in 1968, but he didn't enjoy the experience of being in the music industry, so he came back to Wales and made about 20 albums in Welsh," says Rhys. "He's a real master of melody." 
     In 1996, Super Furry Animals recorded an album, Mwng, in Welsh, and Stevens helped give them the confidence to do it. "My parents mainly bought Welsh-language music, and he was one of the people I grew up listening to. In the 1960s and 70s he was selling 75,000 records to a population of half a million, so he was an important role model. We speak Welsh every day. I think in Welsh and then have to translate my thoughts into English. It's natural for us to make music in our own language." 
    In the course of the afternoon, Rhys presents a box set of Finnish birdsong he bought in a jazz shop in Helsinki, the terrible disco-synthesiser soundtrack to The Warriors, and albums by Christian rocker Larry Norman and Brazilian superstar Rita Lee. He would happily carry on discovering records in his own house until the early hours, but time is running out, so he ends on Stevens' rousing singalong Y Brawd Houdini. "Everybody in Wales loves this track. A world-class guy singing in Welsh. No wonder he's my hero."

It's a religious sect no one, it seems, can explain. Neil MacFarquhar writes from Bashiqa, Iraq. 
    It is hard to get a straight answer from any Yazidi when it comes to what, exactly, defines their sect. Take their taboo against eating lettuce. 
    A man who teaches the Yazidi equivalent of Sunday school avoids the kind of explanation found in encyclopedias - that the process of fusing a smattering of faiths, including Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam, left the origins of many Yazidi practices obscure. Instead, the teacher, Falah Hassan Juma, links the sect's lettuceless state to its history of persecution by Muslims and Christians.
    The caliphs of the Ottoman empire carried out many massacres against the Yazidis in the 18th and 19th centuries, he explained, with thousands of them killed in the lettuce fields then dotting north-eastern Iraq.
    Watching the blood of innocents gush into the greens prompted a lasting aversion to the vegetable, Mr Juma said. 
    But a sect elder said that was incorrect. The Yazidis were persecuted, he said, and one ruthless potentate, who controlled the nearby city of Mosul in the 13th century, ordered the execution of an early Yazidi saint. The enthusiastic crowd then pelted the corpse with heads of lettuce. There have been sanctions against lettuce ever since, the elder said.
     In the end, it is easier to go along with the strongest Yazidi tradition - there is no clear explanation. The Yazidis, who are ethnically Kurds, maintain one of the most eclectic of faiths. 
    They have adopted Christian such as baptism and a smattering of practices from Islam ranging from circumcision to removal of their shoes inside their temples. The veneration of their saints' tombs means few Yazidis have ever wandered far from their Iraqi roots, although there are branches in Turkey, Syria, Iran, the Caucasus and Germany. Estimates of their numbers swing wildly, but are generally put at about 300,000 in Iraq.
     The sect lacks any written text, which helps account for the tall tales explaining its doctrines.
    Yazidi elders worry about dwindling numbers, since Iraq's desperate economic conditions force the young to emigrate. "The young want a better life," said Prince Tahseen Sayigh Aly, the sect's leader, sitting in a gloomy room dominated by a life-sized picture of Saddam Hussein. "Of course we are worried, especially since the young cannot marry outside the faith."

Lightning hits preacher after call to God

A congregation in the United States was left stunned when lightning struck a church moments after a visiting preacher asked God for a sign. Church members in the town of Forest in the state of Ohio said the preacher had been emphasising the importance of penance when, in the course of his prayers, he called on the heavens above. 
     The lightning struck the steeple, then hit the preacher himself when it travelled through electrical wiring to his microphone. 
    Local authorities said he was not injured. 
    "It was awesome, just awesome," said church member Ronnie Cheney, who was among
the congregation when the strike hit, told the Findlay Courier newspaper. 
    "You could hear the storm building outside... he just kept asking God what else he needed to say. 
     "He was asking for a sign and he got one." 
    Afterwards services resumed, however churchgoers realised after 20 minutes that the building was on fire and evacuated. 
    "It was kind of interesting hearing the preacher talk about what had happened," Forest Fire Chief Doug Hawkin admitted. 
    The fire was put out after three hours, but damage to the church is estimated at around $20,000.

November 7, 1986 

Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nigeria's Musical Activist
By JON PARELES

THE Nigerian band leader Fela Anikulapo Kuti has been writing and singing angry political songs since the early 1970's. He calls his music Afro-Beat; it uses saxophone and brass-section vamps that suggest a rawer version of James Brown as well as African percussion, call-and-response singing and Mr. Kuti's own saxophone solos and gruff voice; the lyrics are in pidgin English and African. Tomorrow, along with the 26 musicians and 6 dancers of his band, Egypt 80, Mr. Kuti will perform at the Felt Forum - a concert that is two years and two months overdue. 
      On Sept. 4, 1984, Mr. Kuti and his band were boarding a plane to New York from Lagos; he was stopped at the airport, arrested and imprisoned for 20 months. Amnesty International, investigating the charges of currency-smuggling against Mr. Kuti, declared him a ''prisoner of conscience.'' ''They know my political views will destroy the image of this country much more than anybody else,'' Mr. Kuti said at the time, ''because I know what I am talking about.'' 
        After a change of ruler and an international effort to free Mr. Kuti, he was released in April of this year. The judge who had pronounced the original five-year sentence apologized to the singer. And after regrouping his band, Mr. Kuti proceeded with a European and American tour. ''I didn't expect that they were still so low in their minds,'' Mr Kuti said this week about the arrest. ''It just shows how low the mentality of my country's leaders was. I thought they had developed a little bit of sense.'' 

Unendearing, to Some 
It was not Mr. Kuti's first encounter with government authority. His songs denouncing corruption, multinational corporations, police brutality and ''V.I.P.-ism'' had brought him a large audience, but they did not endear him to Nigeria's former leaders; nor did such actions as declaring his house an independent republic (it was attacked and destroyed by Nigerian soldiers) or starting a political party and running for president of Nigeria in 1979 (the party was eventually banned). 
     At the same time, Mr. Kuti was creating and refining Afro-Beat, the result of an education on three continents. Born in 1938 in Abeokuta, Nigeria, he grew up in that country, where he led a school choir and played piano and percussion. In 1959, he went to study classical music in London, where he also played trumpet and keyboards in jazz and funk bands. He returned to Nigeria in 1963 and started his first band, Koola Lobitos, influenced by jazz and James Brown. 
       The group came to the United States in the late 1960's, and ended up in Los Angeles. There, Mr. Kuti was deeply impressed by the Black Panthers and ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X.'' ''The whole concept of my life changed in a political direction,'' he said. ''The beginning was quite heavy because the change was a shock to friends at home.'' 
   When he returned to Nigeria, he began recording politicized dance music, still steeped in James Brown but increasingly laced with African elements. He called the band Afrika 70; in 1981, he changed the name to Egypt 80 as a statement of pan-African unity. ''I'm playing deep African music,'' he said. ''I've studied my culture deeply and I'm very aware of my tradition. The rhythm, the sounds, the tonality, the chord sequences, the individual effect of each instrument and each section of the band - I'm talking about a whole continent in my music.''

'More Spiritually Aware' 
Mr. Kuti said he had not written music while in jail. ''I wanted to conquer the bottom,'' he said. ''Now, my mind is cleared up better, I am more spiritually aware, and I can face tragic things with less fear. My analysis of things I want to express is deeper. 
      ''I didn't expect to have a band by the time I left prison,'' Mr. Kuti said. ''But my younger brother did a lot to keep the band together for me. The musicians must believe in something to stay.'' The group also includes dancers, some of whom are Mr. Kuti's wives, married in a traditional ceremony in 1979. 
      Mr. Kuti has not given up his politics or his political ambitions; a new song he will be performing tomorrow attacks ''the atrocities of our leaders today,'' he said. Its title, ''Beasts of No Nation,'' came from a speech by the South African Prime Minister P. W. Botha, who threatened that June uprisings would bring out ''the beast in us.'' And Mr. Kuti, who made an album called ''Black President,'' still wants to lead Nigeria. ''I will be president of my country one day,'' he said. ''There is no doubt about that.'' 
    ''My country will be a symbol of free human society,'' he said. ''Now, there is a lot of violence between the armed forces, the police and the citizens. If I became president now I would immediately pass a law that makes every citizen a policeman or a soldier. Today's society has so many laws and so many institutions, but Africa needs a different approach before it can develop as a continent.''

=======
November 18, 1988 

LAGOS JOURNAL 
Army's No Fan, but Singer Has an Army of Fans
By JAMES BROOKE

It is well past midnight when the chief priest of the Africa Shrine struts on stage here, dressed in a body-hugging blue satin jump suit. 
   With a blast of brass from his band, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti kicks into the rocking, radical songs that have made him Nigeria's most popular singer: ''I.T.T.-International Thief Thief,'' ''C.O.P.-Country of Pain'' and ''V.I.P.-Vagabonds in Power.'' 
    ''The longer the military stay in power, the more they fill their pockets,'' he shouts in pidgin English, eliciting enough hoots and whistles to rattle the corrugated iron roof of his ramshackle nightclub. 
    Most African radicals assail their governments from a safe distance -usually London, Paris or New York. Nigeria is different. In Nigeria, anyone can join the Friday night pilgrimage to the Shrine, standing on a suburban Lagos side street. For a $2 admission fee, pilgrims get six hours of music, five stages with beautiful dancing girls, vendors selling cold beer and strong marijuana, and an earful of anti-establishment cabaret banter from one of Africa's most provocative voices. Praise on His Birthday 
    ''Nigerians like to fight,'' the sweat-soaked singer said, collapsing on a plastic chair as his band took over for a set. ''That's why they like me.'' 
    To mark Fela's 50th birthday Oct. 15, two Nigerian magazines placed his demonic visage on their covers and The Sunday Times, a Government-controlled newspaper, ran a five-page spread. 
     In a birthday message, the Student Union of Obafemi Awolowo University declared, ''Fela's saxophone has been terrific and his voice has served as a bayonet against the 'animals in human skin' that have turned Nigeria and Africa into a plunderers' land.'' 
    Relaxing recently in his house in his standard press interview attire -mustard-colored bikini underwear and a thumb-sized marijuana cigar - Fela bristled at the idea that he might be softening at 50. 
    ''I'm not looking about for any nonharassment,'' he said of his relations with Nigeria's military Government. ''I don't want any favors from them.'' In a recent song, ''Teacher, Don't Teach Me Nonsense,'' Fela sings about Nigeria's military Government: ''Who is the Government's teacher? Corruption and tradition.'' 
    Songs like that have endeared Fela to many Nigerians, but not to the soldiers who have ruled black Africa's most populous nation for 18 of the last 22 years. In April 1974, the police raided his communal household in Lagos, the Kalakuta Republic. He was jailed for two weeks. In November of that year, policemen attacked the Shrine with tear gas and axes. The attack left Fela with a broken arm and with cuts that required 11 stitches. 
     Unbowed, the musician put up a 10-foot electrified barbed-wire fence around the Kalakuta Republic. In 1977, soldiers attacked. They burned down his home, destroyed the only print of his movie, ''The Black President,'' and threw his 77-year-old mother out of a second-story window. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a prominent Nigerian women's rights campaigner, died of her injuries the next year. 

A Five-Year Sentence 
On Sept. 30, 1979, the day before a civilian Government took power in Nigeria, Fela and his many wives carried a mock coffin to Dodan Barracks, the headquarters of the military Government. He composed a song marking the event: ''Coffin for Head of State.'' 
    Fela's problems returned with the return of military rule in 1984. In November of that year he was arrested at the Lagos airport on his way to the United States for a concert tour. Convicted of illegally exporting foreign currency, 1,500 British pounds, he was sentenced to five years in jail. 
    ''Nigerian prisons are the worst in the world,'' the musician said. ''Even South African prisons are not as bad.'' 
     In 1985, a new military leader, Gen. Ibrahim B. Babangida, came to power in a coup and Fela was released, having served 18 months. Since then the authorities have generally avoided tangling with him. 
     Part of Fela's wide appeal stems from his use of pidgin, or broken, English, a dialect that has spread steadily in Nigeria as links have faded with the old colonial power, Britain. ''You cannot sing African music in proper English,'' Fela said. ''Broken English has been completely broken into the African way of talking, our rhythm, our intonation.'' 
    To keep a finger on the popular pulse, Fela receives a steady stream of visitors and maintains a large household. In 1978 he married 27 of his dancing girls in a single ceremony. All but eight left him during his time in jail. 
    ''I get my information mostly from women,'' he said about composing lyrics. ''When you have as many women as I do, you don't need newspapers.'' 

Back to His People's Roots 
The son of an Anglican priest, Fela says he has made a conscious effort to return to Africa's pre-Christian and pre-Islamic roots. 
     ''When you are a colonial boy, you don't know anything about your own culture,'' he said. 
     Returning to the ancestral worship traditions of his people, the Yoruba, Fela worships an eclectic assemblage at his shrine - his mother, an ancient Egyptian god named Khuti, Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae singer, and Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian leader and apostle of Pan-Africanism.
     Detractors say Fela preaches anarchism and that his open and heavy marijuana smoking encourages drug use among young Nigerians. 
     In reply, Fela said he opposes ''foreign'' drugs. Indeed, the interview at his house was briefly delayed because Fela took time out to whip a young man who had brought smokable heroin into his household. 
     ''You will never bring drugs into my house again!'' the wiry musician roared, lashing the man repeatedly with a leather belt. 

 ============
July 28, 1989 

POP REVIEW 
Fela Offers a Mosaic of Music and Politics
By PETER WATROUS

A typical piece by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the Nigerian left-wing political advocate and musician who is to perform tonight at the Apollo Theater in a benefit for James Brown, plans to start out slowly, with just the chattering of percussion. He will add layer after layer of instruments, brilliant saxophone and horn lines that magically interlock with the bass, drums and keyboards, or guitar lines. Singers will sing, dancers will dance and after 20 minutes, his 35-piece band, called Egypt 80, will have taken the audience on a musical and political journey. 
     ''The music of Africa is big sound: it's the sound of a community,'' said the musician, who is widely known as Fela, in an interview the other day. . ''A lot of people play African music. It's music of the people. It's music of togetherness. The tonalities, the rhythms of the songs, it's all African. We have 43 people on the tour, and a full show uses 35 of them. People tell me my band is too big, that I can't go on tour. They try to use economics to destroy the culture of my people. Why should money get in the way when I'm promoting greatness?'' Fela, who is in his early 50's and who was reared in a prominent upper-class Nigerian family, is probably Africa's most famous contemporary musician. After being radicalized on a trip to Los Angeles in 1969, where he was introduced to the politics of Malcolm X, he has spent most of the last 20 years playing music and putting up resistance to the various regimes, democratic and military, that have been in place in Nigeria ever since. 
     His music is inseparable from his politics, and he said it has cost him dearly: his house - a communal compound called the Kalakuta Republic - and a club called the Shrine have been raided many times. 
    He said he has been beaten severely and has been imprisoned. During recent anti-Government riots in Lagos, several people were shot in front of Fela's house, a reminder, he says, that the Government was watching. 
    ''I've been beaten nearly to death,'' Fela said. ''The Government put me in prison. I went through 20 years of suffering, so it's not pleasant to do what I'm doing. 
    ''Look, we're very backward. The African continent is degenerating into what I call the era of second slavery. And it's caused by a conspiracy of Western Governments on one side and illegal African Governments on the other side, operating without a constitution. My Government is like that, a military Government that runs the country by decree.'' 
    ''Privatization in Nigeria is selling the Government to individuals,'' he continued. ''And with the debt equity swap, the World Bank is ruining my country with what it owns; it means my country is on the market. I've never seen that before, historically. It's happening in Nigeria, Ghana, and these leaders accept this arrangement. Which makes me feel that they are agents for the Western system: they do everything, they have the guns to persecute, and people become poorer and poorer, which is making life difficult for Africans. 
     ''That's why I use politics in my music. That's the only way a wider audience will get acquainted with the important issues. It makes sense culturally as well. In Africa, we don't sing really about love. We sing about happenings. That's the tradition: there are no love songs like 'Darling, Kiss Me.' '' 
     When he was a teen-ager, he studied jazz, listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and in his saxophone improvisations, harsh and brittle, one hears traces of the great masters of the American jazz world. ''I played a lot of jazz in the beginning of my career because it had cultural information that enriched my mind,'' he said. ''Coltrane, Miles, Sonny Rollins, that era, because I found a heavy relationship between that music and my culture. That influenced me a bit, at the beginning of my career. When I changed, I used this knowledge to penetrate into the culture of my people. 
   "'When I lived in Los Angeles, I went to hear people like King Pleasure, but when I came home, I didn't listen to much Western music. Instead, I listened to mostly traditional music of my country. When I came here, I tuned into a jazz station, which refreshed me about what my African-American brother has been doing.'' 
    The benefit will be at the historic Apollo theater, a place where many of America's greatest musicians have performed, including James Brown. ''James contributed to African music in America,'' Fela said. ''He's African, and though he's not as political as I'd like him to be, this is a good place to start telling African-Americans about how desperate the situation is in Africa - not just in South Africa, but all over. I don't usually play benefits, not even for Africa: we need good progressive ideas instead of benefits. But James should have been treated with much more respect in considering his offense. The penalty was too high. It needs to be protested.'' In December, Mr. Brown was sentenced to a six-year prison term in South Carolina after failing to stop for the police in a two-state car chase. 
     ''I love his music,'' Fela said. ''And I love the idea that I'll be able to help him in a place where the black groups I love have made their greatest impression.''

========
July 17, 1991 

POP REVIEW 
Fela Spreads the Word in Song and Sermon at the Apollo
By JON PARELES

Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who is one of the most important public figures in African music, likes to preach. On Monday night at the Apollo Theater, an introduction to a song stretched into a 30-minute lecture touching on African medicine, the Gulf war ("When Iran ran, Kuwait was waiting, so Iraq rocked them too"), sex, pollution, Black Muslims, poverty and his own remarkable physical condition ("I am 53, but I never get tired and my wrinkles are healing. I'm getting younger."). 
     But the song that followed, "M.A.S.S." (Music Against Second Slavery) was in proportion; it lasted more than an hour as members of the 30-person troupe, Egypt 80, took instrumental and dance solos. And the inspired music was as confident, eccentric and earthy as the speech. It was a leisurely concert, with Mr. Anikulapo Kuti -- universally known as Fela -- leading the band for three hours, following a half-hour of warmup, including a tune sung by the bandleader's young son, Olaweseun. 
   Fela, a Nigerian, is a lifelong dissident who has bluntly denounced corruption in Nigeria's Government. His defiant acts -- in the late 1970's, he declared his estate a republic independent from Nigeria, and was attacked by government forces in a bloody battle -- have led to harrassment and, in the early 1980's, imprisonment. But he continues to make music that not only carries his messages, but has its own bruising power. Fela is a great musician, a disciplined band leader and a riveting performer. 
    In its three-and-a-half hours of music, the concert offered an unusual chance to hear old and new material. After he records a song, Fela stops performing it, so most of his concerts introduce new material. But for his final piece, he reached back to the late 1970's for a song he said he had not recorded, and it showed how much his music has changed. The song, "Palsa Palsa," started with a James Brown-style guitar lick and layered on percussion, horns, lead and call-and-response vocals. Although Fela's keyboard parts added dissonance, "Palsa Palsa" still sounded like modal funk. 
    The new "M.A.S.S." used similar methods, layering riff on riff as Fela declaimed lyrics in his emphatic baritone and cued sections of his 16-piece band, 6 female singers and 7 dancers. But the musical substance was radically different, a dense, brawny, implacable march. Like Ornette Coleman, Fela has decided that melodic riffs and insistent rhythm don't need to fit conventional harmony; "M.A.S.S." went beyond dissonance to something like atonality. Its opening guitar line was a chromatic zig-zag, and the intersecting riffs piled atop it didn't share any prevailing key. With Fela striding and dancing, catlike, across the stage, and the troupe's women shaking their bottoms, it was a wall of sound as Phil Spector never imagined it. 
    The other songs -- "A.S.B.O.P.," based on a rhythm Fela said he heard in prison, and "B.B.C." ("Big Blind Country"), with Roy Ayers sitting in on vibraphone -- created grooves of their own, from rippling to bustling, as Fela sang and chanted about police brutality, African unity and a dozen other topics. Unlike much other African rock, Fela's Afro-beat is not sweet or seductive. It gruffly stands its ground, sure of its righteousness. 

====
August 16, 1993 

Nigerian Star Blames Politics for Murder Charge
By KENNETH B. NOBLE
Special to The New York Times 

LAGOS, Nigeria, Aug. 15 

About the only facts on which all sides in the case agree is that the body of a man was found here in January, not far from the house of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Nigeria's most popular musician and an outspoken critic of the military Government. 
    Fela, as the 54-year-old singer and saxophonist is known, has since been arrested, jailed, charged with murder and released on bond. He vigorously denies any involvement in the killing, and he calls the charges ludicrous and politically motivated. 
     "These people aren't serious," he said of his prosecutors the other day. "It's just another one of their ploys to trap me." 
    "This is how the military works in this country," Fela added as he relaxed at his home here in his standard press interview attire -- bikini underwear. "They make things up. They'll try anything to get you." 

Family Under Pressure 
The question of Fela's guilt or innocence is not likely to be resolved soon. His lawyer, Femi Falana, was arrested last month and charged with sedition, an offense that carries the death penalty. So too, has Beko Ransome-Kuti, Fela's younger brother, a doctor and former chairman of the local medical society who is among the musician's closest advisers. 
     About the same time, Gani Fawehinmi, another lawyer and a prominent civil rights advocate who has often advised Fela, was also arrested for sedition and held without bail. And even Fela's wife, Fehintola, was arrested last week in a roundup of dissidents although she was released the next day. 
    What members of Fela's large extended family -- which includes relatives by blood and marriage and an assortment of lawyers, accountants, musicians and political figures -- have in common is their highly vocal and persistent opposition to Nigeria's military Government. 
     Many of them are leaders in the Campaign for Democracy, a coalition of about 40 trade unions and civil rights groups that has emerged as the leading opposition to the military rule of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida. 

Campaign for Democracy
It was the Campaign for Democracy that brought Nigeria's largest cities, including Lagos, to a standstill on Thursday, Friday and Saturday with three days of civil disobedience to protest the Government's decision to annul presidential elections held in June. 
    In turn, the soldiers who have ruled black Africa's most populous country for 24 of the 33 years since it gained independence from Britain have made no secret of their distaste for Fela or his friends and colleagues. 
    Fela's former communal compound, called the kalakuta, was raided countless times, most notably in 1977, when soldiers destroyed the building and threw his 77-year-old mother out of a second-story window. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a prominent campaigner for women's rights, died of her injuries the next year. 
     One of the most publicized conflicts between the authorities and Fela, who has been imprisoned many times, occurred in 1984. In November of that year he was arrested at the Lagos airport on his way to the United States for a concert tour. Convicted of exporting foreign currency -- 1,500 British pounds -- he was sentenced to five years in jail. In 1985, when General Babangida, came to power in a coup, Fela was released, having served 18 months, and until the last year or so, the authorities had generally left him alone. During most of that period, one of Fela's brothers, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti served as Minister of Health in General Babangida's Government. 
     In the meantime, many of Fela's relatives and associates, particularly his brother Beko, have stepped up their attacks against General Babangida's increasingly authoritarian rule. Indeed, last year Beko Ransome-Kuti became the chairman of the Campaign for Democracy. 

Getting Back at Fela? 
Then came the death of Adesanwo Shokoya. According to the authorities, Mr. Shokoya, was a technician with Egypt 80, Fela's band. Last January some band members accused Mr. Shokoya of embezzling money, and Fela ordered that he be punished, police testified in court. Mr. Shokoya reportedly died from blows he received from two men who whipped him until he collapsed, the police said. 
     No one has accused Fela of witnessing the incident or being near the scene, but he was later arrested and charged with conspiracy and murder. As many Nigerians see it, the case is being used by the authorities as a way of getting back at Fela, his brother, Beko, and other dissidents who have formed the core of an increasingly effective opposition movement. 
    The Campaign for Democracy has planned another general protest for the period leading up to Aug. 27, the date General Babangida has said he will step down. 
    "Fela is certainly a nuisance, but he's no murderer," said a newspaper editor here, who emphasized that he is no admirer of the man or his music. "He's being punished not for what he's done, but for who he is." 
     Fela said he had been advised not to talk about the specifics of the case and declined to discuss the incident. But Beko Ransome-Kuti's daughter, Morenike Ransome-Kuti, a Lagos lawyer, said being harassed by the military authorities "is almost a way of life in our family, you're used to it after a while." 
     She added, "It's the price you have to pay when you're fighting for certain things."