Maverick singer and activist Seun Kuti has claimed that his father, the late Afrobeat pioneer Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, was also a pioneer of rap music.
Speaking on a recent episode of the Hits Don’t Lie podcast, Kuti argued that Fela engaged in what would later be known as rap, particularly on his 1980 album Authority Stealing.
According to him, the music legend delivered spoken-word verses over rhythm long before the style was formally labelled as rap.
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“Fela was the first person to rap. He did a bit of rapping on the album Authority Stealing. When he did it, we didn’t know it was going to be called ‘rap’,” Kuti said.
However, the claim has sparked debate, as hip-hop historians widely credit DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash as the pioneers who created and shaped rap music in the United States.
DJ Kool Herc is known to have introduced the breakbeat style in 1973, several years before Authority Stealing was released in 1980.
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is globally celebrated for creating Afrobeat, a fusion of funk, jazz, highlife, salsa, calypso, and traditional West African rhythms, as well as for using music as a tool for political activism and social criticism.
While Seun Kuti’s remarks highlight Fela’s innovative use of spoken-word delivery in music, the origins of rap are generally traced to the early hip-hop movement in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s.
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