Review: Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
Seun Kuti is talking about a revolution — and he always has been.
Like the musical legacy he carries forward, Seun was born into revolution. As the youngest son of Nigerian Afrobeat legend and activist Fela Kuti, the 42-year-old began playing music with his father’s band Egypt 80 before he was 10 and has the chemistry of social change and revolution running through his veins. Now leading that same band (albeit with some lineup changes), he still has plenty to say. And on April 27, the group said it all with a charging, rousing, fierce set at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s High Gravity Room.
“I will give you some ammo for the coming class warfare,” Seun pronounced during a late-set song break. “The solution for assholes is revolutionary organization. All the elite are criminals, and there is no bigger criminal than the benevolent king.”
This is an artist who does not mince words, not in his asides or in his lyrics. Afrobeat is, after all, unblushingly and uncompromisingly political. It is a delivery mechanism — the persistent rhythm, the repeated bouncing guitar riff, the high quick staccato or low blares of the horns, the songs that run to and above the seven-minute mark — all of this is a means to a message and maybe even an uprising.
But let’s not blow past those horns — or bass, or drums, or guitar — because that’s how the show began. Following a warmup set by the djembe-centered, Greensboro-based band Africa Unplugged, the six members of Egypt 80 (an international lineup hailing from Nigeria, the West Indies, and France) emerged to spin together all the elements that make up the Afrobeat sound — one that is upbeat but urgent, lively but insistent, joyful but furious. With that musical groundwork laid, Seun himself emerged with a cool, smiling confidence, joining in on his saxophone for a few measures, then starting into Fela’s 1975 song “Everything Scatter (Rere Run).”
“Everything Scatter” is a 10-minute song, but it didn’t take many of those minutes for many of those in the High Gravity Room to get to dancing. This is not a band that has to ask the crowd to get up front and move, and the dancing didn’t stop until the show was done. Afrobeat isn’t built of crashes and crescendos. It is persistent, layered, energetic — hypnotic even, and it would seem unnatural to stand still with such a thing going on. Seun himself was an animated force, gesturing to the crowd, pacing, crouching, bending as if he was wringing the lyrics out of his body, and it became quickly apparent that Afrobeat is in good and very capable hands.
Switching from saxophone to keyboard, Seun then led the band into “Dey” from their latest release, 2024’s Heaver Yet (Lays the Crownless Head), with the brass section firing on all cylinders and Seun chanting about “Love, love, love.” But in “Dey,” Seun was also making an appeal — one that emerges often in his music — that people wake up and pay attention, taking to task human superficiality and the vapid pursuit of status: “No dey play dem games, the game for likes and comments.”
Seun has found a place in his songs to lament social media’s dulling effect on true connection. And indeed, it seems like much of his charge is for people to look up from their phones and get to work on something genuine. It is a theme he visited again in “Stand Well Well”:
“Everybody wan flashy/Na so dem be/Everybody wan trend/Na so dem be/They wan go viral/Na so dem be.”
These swipes at online swagger seem to be part of a larger war on distraction and the things that hold us back from true action and organization, but he comes to it from seeing the rewards on the other side. In “Love and Revolution,” a song he wrote for his wife, he paints this image: “She no come for my looks/She come for my books/She want love and revolution/She no want no fashion accessories/We only talk revolutionary strategy.”
I don’t know how those lyrics landed on the crowd that evening. Maybe for many it was just a fun night of dancing and pretty amazing music. But I feel certain few were disappointed, as Egypt 80 kept a tight handle on the driving force of Afrobeat.
Even after seven studio releases and nearly two decades touring with his band, it still seems impossible to read or write about Seun Kuti without mentioning his father. Every album review and concert write up (see this review for instance) — and even Seun’s own marketing — puts Fela up high in the text. And Fela certainly did cast a long shadow to walk in. But from the performance Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 delivered, it’s safe to say that Afrobeat is alive and well. And Seun most of all does not seem to mind the references to his father. Noting that he opened the show with one of Fela’s tunes “to show respect,” he also closed out the night with “Zombie,” — perhaps one of Fela’s best-known songs and a manifesto against mindless military obedience.
Whether standing at attention or staring at phones, Seun is using joy and love to try to crack the nut of compliance and apathy. “I love people that love music,” he said, smiling at the crowd. In Seun’s hands, as it was in Fela’s, as it always has been, Afrobeat — the music, the dance, the sweat — is a nudge, maybe even a shove, to look up, claim your agency and move. The message is meant for people, not kings. Seun doesn’t seem to want to waste his breath on kings, whom he views as a lost cause. His message is intended for the people. Power belongs to them — if only they would claim it.
(Photo by Kola Oshalusi)
