Fela Kuti -- "Suffering and Smiling, Part 2"
I'm still listening mostly to Best of the Black President -- it might take a year or two to digest what's on here before I can move past it to the albums, to the full-length tracks. Since I can't understand most of Fela Kuti's pidgin English, I have to rely on the title mostly to get a sense of what this song is about. It seems like a good summary of Fela Kuti's music. Granted, the music doesn't really make you smile -- it's got too much attitude, too much fiercenes -- but the experience of music in general is a kind of pleasure, so a kind of figurative smile is not too far off.
The lives of so many modern Africans, however, are filled with suffering. To be able to produce music in the kind of shattered post-colonial landscape that Fela Kuti inhabited is a kind of miracle, or maybe just a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. Regardless, this music is sophisticated and complex but also primal and instinctive. It's everything music could possible be.
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