Talk about perfect timing. The Broadway musical “Fela,” about celebrated 1970s Nigerian afro-beat musician Fela Kuti just swept up and received 11 Tony nominations this morning, and now comes more word on the gestating biopic set up over at Focus Features.
And the creative team around this one is tops. Last we reported, “Hunger” director Steve McQueen was set to direct, and to co-write with playwright Biyi Bandele based off Michael Veal’s book “Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon.”
And now, the logical choice for the lead role, English Actor born to Nigerian parents Chiwetel Ejiofor, is formally attached to star according to Deadline.
In recent years, the Playlist has grown tired of writing about and watching rather humdrum music biopics about figures who sometimes barely even deserve their own film. And with good reason, many of them have just been rather uninspired lately. However, if there is a musical figure who is an underappreciated genius with a juicy story just ripe to tell, Fela is the icon worth tackling.
Ejiofor seemed like the right choice from day one. We swear one of our writers mentioned that in a previous post and evidently he’s been learning to play piano and saxophone to prepare for the role and is apparently becoming pretty good.
Fela originated the Afrobeat genre, a mix of traditional African music, jazz and funk, a style which has, with its appropriation by bands like Vampire Weekend, gained new popularity in recent years and has been called by figures like Brian Eno one of the most important musical genres ever invented.
Kuti was also a political and human rights activist, discovering the Black Power movement while studying in London, and frequently aggravated the ruling Nigerian regime, culminating in an attack on his commune in 1977, during which Kuti’s mother was thrown from a window and killed. The confrontational musician’s response? Leaving her coffin on the doorstep of the Nigerian leader’s residence. He was married frequently, with up to 27 wives at one time, and eventually died of an AIDS related illness in 1997.
All the stories revolving around Kuti’s run-ins with the Nigerian military are nearly the stuff of legend and the stuff you can’t even dream up for a screenplay. The song “Expensive Shit,” was based off a real life incident where in which the Nigerian police tried to arrest the musician by planting a marijuana joint on him. Kuti managed to eat it and police put him into custody in hopes of finding the evidence in his excrement. The myth goes that he traded feces with another inmate and got off, but suffice to say this is a rock biopic full of drama and much more than music hagiography.
–Written by Edward Davis
“Expensive Shit”