The room › Artists › Fela Kuti

Where to start with Fela Kuti

Start with Fefe Naa Efe — Gentleman, 1973. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 15 Fela Kuti tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.

This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 15 Fela Kuti tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 15 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.

The dates here run from 1973 to 2019. They are the dates attached to the releases in this room rather than recording dates, so the later ones are likely reissues — but 46 years is still more than one version of the artist.

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

Fefe Naa Efe — Gentleman, 1973. Of the 15 Fela Kuti tracks here, this one sits closest to the average of all of them across the four knobs the room runs on. It is the least surprising thing in the collection, which is exactly what an entry point should be.

If you want the cerebral end

Gentleman — Gentleman, 1973. The lowest head/body reading of any Fela Kuti track in the room (60 out of 100). This is as far towards cerebral as the collection goes.

If you want the groove end

Water No Get Enemy — Expensive Shit / He Miss Road, 1975. The highest head/body reading here, at 92 out of 100 — a 32-point swing across the collection towards groove.

Where Fela Kuti sits in the room

Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Fela Kuti's average coordinates and the range they cover.

All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.

What is here, record by record

Every Fela Kuti track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Fela Kuti's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.

• Where to start with James Brown — funk, 57 tracks
• Where to start with The Rapture — dance-punk, 11 tracks
• Where to start with Billy Cobham — jazz fusion, 11 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Fela Kuti as a solo artist, from Ogun, Nigeria and born in 1938. Its contributors tag the artist jazz, world, afrobeat, nigerian and african. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Fela Kuti tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 15, across 5 albums. 15 of them carry a date, running from 1973 to 2019. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.

Is this a best-of, or a ranking?

No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.

Where do the knob numbers come from?

They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. All 15 of these tracks have been read individually — nothing on this page is running on a default.

Can I listen to these here?

Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 15 of these 15 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.