The other day I picked up a used copy of Fela Kuti's Monkey Banana / Excuse O. Fela was a musician and composer from Nigeria partly responsible for creating "afrobeat", a style of music combining jazz, funk, highlife and traditional African music. After living in the US and being influenced by Black Panthers Fela became an activist within his own country, opposing its government and police. Many of his populhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifar songs were protests the sometimes lead to riots at his performances. Today he influences a many artists including his son Femi Kuti, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, The Budos Band, Nomo, Wale Oyejide and more who wish to carry on the tradition.
Monkey Banana's cover is what pushed me to choose it over his popular Zombie album. It reminds me of the crazy psychedelic Funkadelic sleeves, but obviously with more African influence. The credits fail to mention who the artist was, but I figured it was interesting enough to post.
I guess this is the closest he has to a website.
Update: After looking around I found the artist. His name is Ghariokqu Lemi, an illustrator and designer from Nigeria. He is responsible for a lot of Fela's album covers. He has a MySpace page featuring tons of album covers he's done for Fela and others, including Antibalas' Talkatif! Nice!
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