Femi Kuti at World Cafe Live

On Friday, Catharine, Matt, and I went to World Café Live and saw Femi Kuti and his band. (Femi’s father was Fela Kuti, the late, great star of Nigerian afrobeat.) Also happening in Philly on Friday, Beyonce played at the Wachovia Center. I wish that I could have seen Beyonce, too, because I imagine she puts on a great show, even if I’ve been less than impressed with anything on I Am . . . Sasha Fierce. WCL is a lot closer to my apartment (and within my price range), so we went there instead.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a fairly large and diverse crowd at Femi’s show. There were West Africans in their 20s and 30s, African Americans, middle aged white people, and the usual assortment of hipster white dudes in their 20s with cool sneakers.* Throw in some $3 bottles of Yuengling, and you’ve got a recipe for a party. And it was nice to see people actually filling up World Café Live, since the last time I was there for a Halloween night performance of DJ Spooky and King Britt, there were about 12 people there—not including the half dozen of us who had free tickets WCL had given the music department.

Anyway, Friday was a really fun show. They played mostly tunes from Femi’s most recent album, Day By Day. (The title track isn’t a Godspell cover.) I had heard this album on Rhapsody, but I’ll submit that music (particularly afrobeat) is always more fun to hear live. Femi’s band has 14 people in it: the usual keys, bass, guitar, drummer, and percussionist, plus 5 horns, Femi himself on organ/sax/trumpet, and 3 female back-up singers/dancers. A word about these women. Their occasional back-up choruses weren’t terribly audible or frequent. What was more frequent/visible was their nearly non-stop dancing for the entire two hour concert. And when I say dancing, what I really mean is ass-shaking, because that’s what these women did. Faces pointed 180 degrees from the audience, beads dangling from their short yellow skirts, shaking their asses—especially when the drummer played his snare or closed hi-hat, which seemed to be a cue. I’m saying. If hip-hop is criticized for sexualizing and demeaning women on the account of fleeting images in a video, don’t let Stanley Crouch come to a Femi Kuti concert.

On the walk back to Center City in search of sustenance, Catharine tried to do a feminist reading of the dancers, arguing that the dance was a kind of virtuosic display of female dancing prowess, power, and sexuality. And it is true that these women could shake it. Old man that I am, I get tired of standing for two hours and busting out a few modest dance moves. These women were working it for two hours straight. So, credit is definitely due for that. But I can’t really salvage anything progressive about their performance. It’s hard for me to see their performance as being anything other than for the benefit of the gaze of the male members of the audience.

Femi made a couple of strange choices as well, including ending his set (before the encore) with a song titled, I think, “Don’t Come Too Fast”—at least this was his repeated refrain. This was a song about sex, that had a long interlude in the middle where Femi proceeded to instruct the audience in the ways of love. At one point, he even said that when you’re a real good lover, you’ll be like his father, Fela, and start at 10 p.m. and not finish until 4 in the morning.

Now, let’s talk about this. First of all, and maybe I’m just showing some latent Puritanical roots here, but it is weird to talk about the sexual abilities of your parents. Who wants to think about that stuff, talk about it, or lecture an audience about it? Second. Earlier in the night, Femi performed a song with the lyrics, “Fight AIDS, Stop AIDS.” Perhaps not the most artful lyrics, but certainly a good message. You might think that a song about sex would also include something about the need to protect oneself and one’s partners. You might also think that bragging about your father’s abilities as a lover is kind of ironic given the fact that he died of AIDS. It’s a little bit like having a father who died of cirrhosis and bragging about how great a drinker he was. I mean, I’m sure it’s true and all, but it seems like it’s in bad taste to do such a thing.

Nevertheless, despite these two bizarre things, I had a great time at the show. I’m a sucker for big horn sections with loud bari sax lines, and really, who among us isn’t?

*There will be a future post discussing hipster white dudes in their 20s with cool sneakers.