Lagos Afrobeat

Not a style you drop into a funk set for flavour — a working method from a specific city under a specific government. One chord held for fifteen minutes, horns arranged in blocks, a drummer playing four independent limbs, and lyrics in pidgin aimed at people with guns.

The records are long because the band played them long, in a Lagos club, most nights of the week.

Lagos, late 1960s. Fela Ransome-Kuti came back from London and then a 1969 American trip with a new word for what his band was doing, and Sierra Leonean bandleader Geraldo Pino's James Brown–styled Lagos residencies had already shown the city what hard funk felt like.

Highlife was the base layer; Orlando Julius had been welding it to American soul since 1966. Through the 1970s the records came off Lagos studio floors — Decca's 16-track at Abule-Oja, EMI's Apapa room, Phonogram at Ikeja, and ARC in Ikeja, the studio Ginger Baker helped put up.

Labels: EMI Nigeria, Decca's Afrodisia imprint, Coconut, Soundworkshop. Then February 1977: a thousand soldiers burned Kalakuta, Fela's compound.

By 1979 Tony Allen had left Africa 70, taking many of the band with him.

Who: Fela and Africa 70 at the Afrika Shrine; Tony Allen behind them, then in front of them on his own records; Orlando Julius and the Modern Aces; the Lijadu twins Taiwo and Kehinde with producer Biddy Wright; Monomono's Joni Haastrup; arrangers and session horn players moving between all of it.

What: one vamp, call-and-response vocals, tenor and baritone riffing in unison, congas and shekere under a kit pattern that never resolves where you expect. Rules: no fade-outs, no verse-chorus, side-long tracks, lyrics in pidgin so everyone understands.

How a record gets in: it was cut in Lagos between roughly 1966 and 1980, it holds the groove past ten minutes, and somebody in the room could have walked to the Shrine afterwards.