Fela Kuti - Zombie

Perhaps the seminal work of Fela Kuti, Nigeria's cross between James Brown, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, Zombie works on several simultaneous levels: as a hypnotic, trance-inducing meditation; a sharp-tongued but subtle decrying of his country's government and military, a horror story of voodoo re-animation, and a blistering funk record. Four songs, none of them shorter than twelve minutes, flowing together in a liquid bath of horn stabs and poly-rhythms. It functions much like the doom metal albums enshrined herein: as a long-form dark poem which rises and falls but in which the tide never goes all the way out, lapping at the shores of your subconscious. This album, upon release, sparked a series of riots in Lagos in which Kuti's compound was invaded and his elderly mother was defenestrated. In protest, he dragged her coffin to the courthouse and, bizarrely, on the first anniversary of the attack he married 27 women in her remembrance.
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