The Window They Threw Your Mother From (Fela Kuti)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You built a republic
inside a country you did not recognize —
a compound in Lagos
with its own rules,
its own government,
its own currency of sound
and the compound smelled like
cooking fire and marijuana
and the warm oil of saxophones
that had been playing for twenty hours
and the country did not like
that one of its citizens
had declared a border

[Verse 2]
You invented Afrobeat —
a music that was not jazz
and not funk
and not highlife
and not traditional Yoruba
but all of them
the way a crossroads
is all of the roads that meet in it —
and the music was a twenty-minute groove
at its shortest
because the point was not the song
the point was the entering
and the entering required time
to dismantle the audience's ownership
of the next few minutes

[Chorus]
The military raided the republic in 1977
and burned what they could
and threw your mother
from a second-story window
and your mother
who had been a political activist
before you were born
died from what the window did
and you delivered her coffin
to the president's residence
and wrote a song called
the only thing a song
in that situation can be called
and the song played
on every radio in West Africa
before the government could ban it
and the banning was the certificate of delivery

[Outro]
You married twenty-seven women
in a single ceremony
which is either
the loudest expression of grief
or the most organized response
to a society that had killed your mother
for the crime of raising a son
who would not apologize —
and you died in 1997
of complications the decade had decided
were not worth naming
and the compound was demolished
and the music kept playing
on every radio
that had learned the difference
between a song and a sentence