Zombie

Two pieces, one to a side, and the subtractive test bites differently on each. Zombie is lean by its maker’s standard: the opening builds the groove in a fixed order, bass and guitars, then drums, then horns, and the vocal section is short and exact, one word and a set of drill commands, each needed because the drill is the argument. The long saxophone solo is the part a hostile listener would cut; it is the custom of the form more than the need of the song. Mr. Follow Follow is required in idea, since it turns the satire from the soldier to the civilian who follows. In execution its long instrumental stretches are permitted more than compelled, restating where they might develop. One lean side and one loose one hold the figure.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a soldier is a man whose will has been removed and replaced with command, and a state that rules by such men rules by the living dead. “Zombie no go go” unless he is told to go. The record says it in sound as fully as in words: call and answer becomes a parade ground, the leader a sergeant and the chorus a drilled squad, the horns sounding like bugles, and the dancing listener is drilled by the same groove, so the claim reaches the body before it is understood. Side two carries it to the follower. It is held below the bar because the condition is satirised rather than articulated from within: the soldier has no interior, and the claim is whole at the first hearing.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation here is of one kind, the transport of the groove, and it comes often on side one. The entry of the horn riff over the guitars and drums is the first height, an exhilaration that does not let go; the arrival of the chorus, a crowd chanting a single word, is the second, collective and comic at once; the drill, command and answer quickening, is the third. The height is never grandeur or terror, though the dread the record names sits under its laughter. The saxophone solo is level, carrying the groove forward without rising. Mr. Follow Follow is darker and slower and reaches less, a brooding weight rather than a lift. Frequent height of one warm kind, on one side, places it below the trance of Remain in Light.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Here myth is built, not only evoked. The zombie is an old West African and Caribbean figure, the dead body raised and set to work by a sorcerer’s command, and the record makes it load-bearing: the soldier is the body, the military government the sorcerer, the command the spell. The structure of the song is the structure of the myth, a master’s call and a will-less answer, repeated until the body moves by itself. And it stays particular: the commands are the Nigerian army’s, drilled in the forms of the British colonial army that trained it, in the Pidgin of Lagos streets. Side two’s follower, the blind led by the blind, is evoked rather than built. The archetype is turned to satire, a mask rather than a world, and that holds it below the bar.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is Fela’s own: Afrobeat, the fusion of highlife, jazz, Yoruba rhythm and James Brown’s funk that he had built from about 1970, and a political song he had already turned on the police and the authorities in earlier records. The musical turn is small. The form, the band and the method were proven, and Zombie is a faster, tighter instance of them. The stake is as large as a record can place: a musician in a military state mocked the army by name, on a record sold in its streets. Turn and stake are one judgment, and an enormous stake on a proven musical path is not a large swerve from the tradition. The departure is in address more than in form: the soldier named and drilled to his face. That small turn holds it lowest of the eleven.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because its knowledge is the drill. Call and response, the oldest form of the music Fela inherited, joins a leader to a community in church and village; here it becomes the parade ground’s command and reply, joining a sergeant to bodies without will. The repetition is the zombie’s motion, the fixed riff the march that cannot stop, and the fast tempo makes obedience compulsive and funny at once. Set as a ballad these words would be a complaint; set as Afrobeat they make the listener perform the condition they mock. The sequence is counted here, once: soldier then follower, side answering side. Side two’s house form and side one’s long solo, permitted rather than required, hold it short of the top.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over fifty years, real and uneven. The record has been returned to as a political document: it was chanted against soldiers in West Africa in the years after its release. It has been returned to by musicians and scholars: the Afrobeat revival bands, the stage musical Fela! (2009), and the studies of Fela, Michael Veal’s book of 2000 among them, read it closely. Formally the groove repays return: the two guitars, bass and drums interlock in patterns that separate on close listening, and the drumming is still studied. Semantically the yield is narrower. The satire is plain, its meaning on the tenth hearing close to its meaning on the first, and side two has been returned to far less than side one. The depth is formal and historical more than semantic.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is African popular music of the 1970s, and the political song across it. The record did not invent Afrobeat, but it is the form’s most potent single instance as a weapon: the proof that a dance record could confront a state by name and carry the confrontation into every street where it was played. That reorganised what popular music in West Africa could dare, more than how it was built. As sound, its reach runs through Afrobeat as a whole, Fela’s body of work rather than this record, and its influence abroad, on Talking Heads and Brian Eno, is shared with his other records. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was taken up as a chant against soldiers beyond Nigeria, and the state’s answer made it the defining case of music against military rule on the continent.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty years, from 1976 to 2026. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been reissued many times, though later issues have added tracks to the sequence and the two-sided original is less often heard as such, a small charge to the unit. Presence is continuous and wide in West Africa and real abroad: the title track remains the best known of Fela’s songs, central to his catalogue, to the revival and to the stage musical. But the album lives in the shadow of its first side, and outside Africa its presence is narrower. The fabric is little fixed: an acoustic band, recorded with little studio effect, and a subject, obedience under command, that has outlived the government it mocked. It stands level with Low and Remain in Light.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, and the band is the craft. The drummer holds a fast tempo with hi-hat and kick in constant, unhurried motion, and the whole record rests on him. The two guitars, one chopping and one picking a short cycling figure, interlock with the bass so that no part leads and none can be removed. The horn section is drilled as tightly as the soldiers it mocks, the riffs exact and the punctuation of the commands placed to the beat. The vocal arrangement, call and answer, is simple and perfectly timed. The costs: the saxophone solo is limited in line and invention, the recording is serviceable rather than fine, and side two’s arrangement is the house arrangement. It stands above Remain in Light in its playing and below it in its studio making.

Score: 8.5 / 10

One law governs the record: command and answer, the will surrendered to a call, mocked in the groove that enacts it. The two most distant elements obey it: the fast, comic drill of Zombie, with its barked orders and its chanting chorus, and the slow, heavy sermon of Mr. Follow Follow, where the follower is warned rather than mocked. Soldier and civilian, laughter and warning, fast and slow: the law covers both and binds them, the second side carrying the first side’s diagnosis out of the barracks into the street. What holds the figure is narrowness. The palette is one, the Afrobeat ensemble in two tempos, and a record of two pieces in one form has little range over which coherence must be won. Narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The state is held directly, and that is uncommon: the army as an institution, its drill and its chain of command, and behind it the colonial army whose forms it inherited. The body is held, as the drilled body and the dancing body set against each other. Consciousness is held as its absence, the will removed, and in the follower as the will surrendered. The street and the citizen enter on side two. What holds the figure lowest is what is absent or only glimpsed: the family, labour, the sacred, evoked only through the zombie’s sorcery, the natural order, and history beyond the colonial echo. Several orders, joined by one law and one voice, in two pieces.

Score: 7.3 / 10