Expensive Shit

People always ask us what our music is about or where it comes from, so we'll just explain it once and for all. Antibalas means bulletproof, or anti-bullets. We are an African funk group made up of Latinos, Africans, Asian Americans and straight-up honkies. We are a thirteen to fifteen-piece afrobeat orchestra with inflections of dub and boogaloo who deliver riot-inciting lyrics in English, Yoruba and Spanish.

Perhaps a lot of the confusion about us stems from the fact that most people are not familiar with afrobeat. Afrobeat was started in the late 60s, primarily by Fela Kuti. Simply put, afrobeat is a mixture of Nigerian high-life music with total James Brown funk. Before Fela, Orlando Julius Ekemote did a brand of super afro-soul, mixing traditional aspects and high-life with soul, setting the foundation for Fela to bring in a modern musical vision with elements of pan-Africanism and Black Power. That's how this music started. Baando, a friend of ours from France who writes, used to do live graffiti painting when Fela played shows in Paris. Baando is the guy who introduced Antibalas to Fela and afrobeat. Our lineup is roughly modeled after Fela's Africa 70 band, with bass, drums, two guitars, an organ, a four-piece horn section, a big percussion section and a massive weed consumption section. Before Fela started getting high, he would stand on stage stiff as a stick with his feet planted on the ground and just blow. The night he first got high, he just took off. He was dancing around and jumping and shouting and the music was just pouring out of him. That's when he said "OK, from now on, we all get high." That's an inspiration for us. We have secret recipes and formulas for weed. If it didn't cost $5 000 in New York City, we'd make real goro. Goro is Fela's marijuana recipe. Take five pounds of NNG (Nigerian Natural Grass) or any five pounds of serious weed you have lying around and put it in a big pot and soak it with honey and oils and different herbs and shit.  Put it on a low flame and just bring it up to a simmer. Then put it on a whisper and cook it all the way for like a week. Just cook that shit until it slowly reduces. After a week, take it out and press it in a sieve. Then cook it again until there's a quart left, like about enough to fit in a big coffee mug. It'll be all black and sticky, and thicker than molasses. Fela's son Femi was authorized to get everybody high before Fela's shows so he used to take a spoonful of goro and give everybody some. That little spoonful is so strong that you stay high for days. It kicks in even more when you drink water. So you're all high and shit and then hours later you're still high and then the next day you have a glass of water and you get so high you think it's never gonna end. Antibalas has never consciously tried smoking pot to bring the ancestors down, although maybe we have without knowing that we were doing it. That would explain a lot. We are involved in Vodun (also known as Voodoo), which is about worshiping traditional African spirits that have transmogrified into a Haitian popular religion. Vodun is a mix between Christian beliefs, Masonic imagery and African elemental spirits. It's really a consciousness-raising thing. It's about inviting the spirit down and into the drum, to invoke the ancestors in an unorthodox way. There's definitely a supernatural presence when Antibalas performs. A lot of us have relationships with different spirits. All sorts of things fall over and fly across the stage when we play. The power goes out and comes back on. Lots of things happen that can only really be attributed to spirits. Fela's spirit even came to visit us one night. Dele Sosimi (Fela and Femi's keyboard player) came to play a series of shows with us, and the first show we played together, the spirit was so strong that night that all of us were really feeling it, even the audience. The vibe in the room, the electricity was completely off the hook. It was really heavy. Dele was saying that Fela must have come by, just to kind of check it out. Martin and Phillip are from the band Antibalas. Their album, Liberation Afrobeat is out now on Afrosound Recordings and Strut UK. Check out the Daktaris' Soul Explosion (featuring a gaggle of Antibalas members) on Desco for another dose of monstrous afrobeat.