Saxophonist Femi Kuti fronts a 14-piece band, with drums, two percussionists, guitar, bass, keyboards, four horns and three singers. Like a soul review or a go-go band, Positive Force go from one number to the next with hardly a pause. Songs last as long as 10 or 12 minutes, as the leader explains the issues that inform the simple, direct lyrics of Afrobeat anthems such as One Day Someday and Traitors of Africa.
As a singer-songwriter, Kuti has a talent for catchy hooks and a way of stretching verse melodies across the beat that is closer to Bob Marley than to Kuti's famous dad, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. You can't take your eyes off him as he strides, struts and runs around the stage, declaiming his heartfelt songs. When the lead falls out of his microphone, he puts it back together with a flourish and turns a technical hitch into a little personal triumph.
When he mimes a thrusting movement and grabs his crotch for the number Stop AIDS, it's not with the arbitrary and unconvincing lasciviousness of a Michael Jackson performance. He is talking about something that is killing his countrymen, and the dire consequences of religious doctrine overriding safe-sex education in Africa. Kuti gets straight to the point: "If you must do sha!/ You better cover your bamboo."
An extended version of Do Your Best becomes an opportunity for Kuti to tell the packed Ocean crowd about the political situation in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular. The big, emotional '97 (from his new album Fight to Win) deals with the deaths of his cousin, sister and father. But the personal details and political arguments are always framed by music. The ultra-professional band lock together like a great drum, with skin-tight rhythms and a fine guitarist, who drives the grooves along with a large repertoire of rhythmic and decorative devices.
The three-woman chorus add vocal and visual excitement to the mix, with a dance routine that takes in hip-shimmying and bottom-wiggling in every mathematical permutation of the 4/4 beat. At one moment their beaded costumes appear to vibrate at four times the speed of the music.
