Monster Music & Movies

Reviews:

"Know what Antibalas can do better than Fela Anikulapo Kuti? End songs. On the third album from Brooklyn's 17-piece funk homage to Nigerian Afrobeat, the proud horn charts and rowboat guitars of ""Pay Back Africa"" give way to a face-smacking coda that the late master would never have let pass-a series of single, echoing guitar jabs, rapidly looped, sped-up and sent crashing into the barbed funk intro of the next track, ""Indictment.""

Which brings us to the other thing Antibalas can do better: talk American. Punchier than even the best attempts at hip-hop crossover by Fela's son Femi (the band's only real competition), ""Indictment"" is a comical courtroom jam in the tradition of Jamaican ""Judge Dread"" rude boy tunes or ""F*** tha Police,"" charging the likes of Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush with unspecified crimes and calling to the stand such ""witnesses"" as ""the Saudi Royal family,"" ""the people of Iraq"" and ""the game of baseball."" That this staunchly antiwar band presumes to speak for the second entity on that list, however, suggests the limits of homage and reverent Third Worldism. Antibalas are boilerplate leftists, however multi-ethnic, and while they protest that their music owes as much to Tito Puente as to Fela, I'm waiting on a band that's as versed in either, and doesn't feel it owes anyone anything. These musicians seem to think that ""paying back"" means singing about people besides themselves, ignoring the rich middle ground between carelessly copping international music and religiously copying it. Sure, plundering others to make something your own might be the American thing to do. But it's also what Fela did.

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