Fela Kuti Beasts Of Nation/O.D.O.O. CD

2 LPs on 1 CD: BEASTS OF NO NATION (1989)/O.D.O.O. (1990).
Producer: Fela Kuti
Reissue producer: Jean-Pierre Haie
Includes liner notes by Jacqueline Grandchamp-Thiam, Rikki Stein and Mabinuori Kayode Idowu.
Digitally remastered by Pompon (Translab Paris, Paris, France).
Liner Note Author: Rikki Stein.
Photographer: Bernard Matussiere.
By time of the two half-hour tracks on this CD reissue, Kuti's lyrics were as confrontational and critical of government behavior as ever. The revolutionary aspects of his music, however, had been dulled by the repetition of his formula over many years. "Beasts of No Nation," a half-hour track from 1989, is not one of his more memorable grooves or sequences of interchanges among instruments and lead-backup vocals. The lyrics were characteristic comments on his personal situation, though. The first song he wrote in 1986 after leaving prison, it comments on the behavior of the judge (who apologized to him in a prison hospital for his conviction), and also weaves critique of the United Nations into the tune. "O.D.O.O. (Overtake Don Overtake Overtake)," from 1990, protests the negative effects of military regimes in Africa -- not a new theme for his work, though certainly one worthy of ongoing concern. Percussive prominence and variation plays a stronger role in this cut than it does in some of Fela's other work. Yet structurally, his music's navigation through numerous instrumental passages and sequencing of instrumental and vocal parts is almost as predictable as a graph of the temperature rising as water is boiled. ~ Richie Unterberger