Fela Kuti - Water No Get Enemy

Music 8 years ago

Fela Kuti - Water No Get Enemy

Fela Anikulapo Kuti is an absolute legend. No dispute, No contest. Here is one of his beautiful tracks titled Water No Get Enemy.Below is the little story about the title


I’m no native informant. But I gather that the song featured prominently in the Broadway show Fela! — “Water No Get Enemy” — means something like “nobody hates something as useful as water.” Make yourself as indispensable as this, goes the implied wisdom, and any detractors you gain will just look silly. An appropriate motto for a musician like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, for whom music making seemed as necessary as food and drink. Also an audacious one, as the defiant composer of “Water No Get Enemy” well knew the many enemies his music gained. Is it still gaining them? A Broadway musical with the emphatic title Fela! is unlikely to present any portrait less than adulatory of its subject, the godfather of Afrobeat. And The Eugene O’Neill Theatre on a Saturday night is probably the wrong place to start a nuanced conversation about the life and legacy of a man as contradictory as he was compelling.


Download listen and enjoy.