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about. People are getting really fed up. They want that change, but there’s nothing to really make us forge ahead for it.”
The title track is a response to the resignation of others. “In it I’m saying that I’m determined to find that answer. Everyone’s say- ing ‘Forget it, corruption will always be here’ but I’m determined to keep looking for ways to bring about change, even though peo- ple tell me ‘there’s no place for your dream’.”
T
Taking individual responsibility for bringing about social change is a theme which runs throughout the album. “The song One Man Show is saying that if you take this on, you take it on alone,” Femi explains. “When the police come, you’re going to stand alone. It’s all to make people think. Because they know we’re at this stage, but they don’t want to accept it. So this is my way of saying ‘Look, it’s right in front of us and we can’t run away from the facts anymore.’”
he album features Femi’s regular band and was record- ed by long-time producer Sodi Marciswewer (who pre- viously worked with Femi’s dad, Les Negresses Vertes and Mano Negra and more recently produced most of Femi’s albums and the latest from Rachid Taha) at his
Zarma Studio in Paris. “Firstly, as you know, there is no money in the business at the moment, so it was easier to use his studio,” says Femi, of the choice to record there. “Which is quite small, but it made the music tighter. He first came to Lagos and listened to and recorded what I had, took it back to his studio, acclima- tised himself to what I was doing, then we went back into the studio, found the tempo that we wanted, which was really upbeat, because I wanted to make it all danceable. We recorded everybody and then I did my overdubs.”
Overdubs notwithstanding, the album offers a fair reflection of Femi and Positive Force’s live show. “Yes, it was more of a live take,” he agrees. “But made tighter, because I wanted it to stand out with any other great album out there. And if we just did the usual kind of thin it wouldn’t be an A-plus. We needed to make the drum pattern very tight… everything had to be really on point and very structured. Whereas usually I would say, look, my kind of music doesn’t have rules, with this album it was ‘We must keep these twelve bars here, four bars before the next solo’ and it’s all really well organised.”
Such discipline is rarely found in Afrobeat, and neither is the brevity of the songs. Tracks clock in at four, three, even two min- utes. Most Afrobeat artists (Kuti Senior especially) wouldn’t have even got through the introductory keyboard solo in that time. “I’m proving that Afrobeat can compete with the best of music that’s out there. What I really love most is that when it finishes,
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