The Best Afrobeat Albums of the '70s

Nigeria's army answered this record by burning Fela's Kalakuta commune in February 1977 and throwing his mother from a window; she never recovered. Zombie itself is the tightest thing Africa 70 ever cut — horns barking drill commands, Tony Allen double-timing underneath the mocking chant. The linked Knitting Factory edition adds two extra cuts, including a 1978 Berlin live take of Mistake.

Lagos police planted a joint on Fela; he swallowed it, and the title mocks the officers who waited around to examine the evidence. The A-side seethes, but Water No Get Enemy is the keeper — horns rising in slow, gospel-weight fanfares over Allen's patient shuffle. Spotify types this two-track release as a single; those two tracks are the complete original 1975 LP.

When tenor player Igo Chico quit in 1973, Fela taught himself saxophone rather than replace him, and Gentleman opens with his squalling, self-taught solo, unaccompanied at first, before the band drops in behind it. The lyric skewers Africans sweating inside colonial three-piece suits. Three tracks, exactly the original LP — for once, no packaging games.

Yoruba slang gives the record its name — a roforofo fight is a scuffle in the mud — and the title cut spends a quarter of an hour goading two brawlers through call-and-response. Go Slow is the sly one, a groove that idles and lurches like the Lagos traffic jams it is named for. Four tracks from 1972, including Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am, his tenderest melody.

Two side-long grooves make up the whole 1972 LP, exactly as linked: Lady on one face, Shakara (Oloje) on the other. Lady struts on a clipped, hi-hat-forward Allen break while Fela needles the Westernized woman who won't answer to African woman — a lyric that has aged badly, and a groove that keeps arguing on its behalf anyway.

Decca refused to press it, wary of the army, so Fela launched his own Kalakuta imprint in 1977 to get it out. Sorrow Tears and Blood answers state violence with his lightest rhythm — Allen barely brushing the kit, guitars ticking, the chorus listing what the raids leave behind. Spotify types the release as a single, but it holds both original tracks, Colonial Mentality included.

Cut in 1975 while Allen still held the drum chair in Africa 70, with that band behind him, Jealousy made the case that the drummer was afrobeat's co-author. The title track lets the kit lead — his rolling, snare-shy pattern pushed to the front of the mix, horns answering in staggered rows. Spotify sells it only inside Comet's two-on-one Progress, Jealousy, which packs his first two LPs together.

A B-side cut for Cameroon's 1972 Africa Cup of Nations anthem became the import New York DJs fought over, an American top-40 hit in 1973, and the source of the ma-ma-ko, ma-ma-sa chant Michael Jackson later folded into Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'. Soul Makossa itself is all economy: one sax riff, one chant, a groove that never breaks stride. Border case — makossa via Paris, not Lagos afrobeat.

Housing, not the army, is the target: Allen's 1979 LP grumbles about a Lagos with no room left for the people who built it. No Accommodation For Lagos rides a lean vamp, the Afrika 70 horns punching short jabs where Fela would have preached. He quit Fela's band that same year, over royalties and a touring payroll of seventy-one. The link is Comet's pairing with 1979's No Discrimination.

Accra's ranking arranger had known Fela since their London music-school days in the early '60s, and this 1977 Essiebons LP is where his highlife roots and afrobeat's engine finally meet. Heaven crawls — horns hanging behind the beat, guitar keeping a highlife lilt while the groove darkens underneath. Border case, and proudly so: Ghana bending the Lagos sound to its own melody.

Identical twins Kehinde and Taiwo Lijadu sang every line in locked unison, and that is what makes the title track eerie — one voice at double weight over a queasy, organ-smeared groove. Danger came out on Decca's Nigerian imprint Afrodisia in 1976; the stream carries Numero Group's licensed reissue. Border case: afrobeat shading into Afro-rock, and better for it.

Out in Enugu, far from Lagos, William Onyeabor pressed this 1978 LP at his own Wilfilms plant and sold it himself. Atomic Bomb the song is a placid apocalypse — burbling synthesizer over a stiff, patient groove, backing singers cooing the title like a lullaby. Spotify's edition is Luaka Bop's reissue and displays 2014; the original is 1978. Border case: synth-heavy Afro-funk from a man who refused every interview.

Ghana's heaviest record of 1976 came from a trio that soon after backed the soul singer Pat Thomas. No Condition Is Permanent takes a lorry-slogan for a title and grinds it out — sax tearing at the edges, the rhythm section recorded so hot it distorts. Nothing here is polite. Border case on the Afro-funk edge of Accra, and the best argument on this list for digging past Fela.