December 19, 2025 -- Fela Kuti was a Nigerian musician, producer, arranger, political radical, outlaw and father of Afrobeat. Kuti is being honored by the Recording Academy® with the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award, announced today, alongside Carlos Santana, Chaka Khan, Cher, Paul Simon and Whitney Houston. The Special Merit Awards Ceremony will take place in Los Angeles during Grammy® Week on January 31.

Kuti’s important legacy and tremendous catalog of music has been celebrated and explored significantly in 2025. Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, a 12-episode podcast series, presented by Audible and Higher Ground, and produced by Talkhouse and Western Sound, premiered this fall. Hosted by 3-time Peabody Award-winner Jad Abumrad (Radiolab, Dolly Parton’s America), this in-depth documentation of Kuti’s life and legacy was culled from over 200 conversations that Abumrad conducted with his family and friends, as well as historians, activists, luminaries and fans like President Barack Obama, Ayo Edibiri, David Byrne, Brian Eno and Santigold. It also includes previously recorded interviews with Paul McCartney, Questlove and Burna Boy. Landing at #1 on the New Yorker’s Best Podcasts of the Year list, the magazine describes it as “bursting with life, humor, pain, interesting ideas, and, of course, sharp, catchy, hypnotic music…I can’t think of another show that’s both danceable and, by its end, profoundly heartbreaking.” Fear No Man has also been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS/CNN’s Amanpour, Washington Post, KCRW and more. 

Kuti’s 1976 album Zombie was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame earlier this year. It made history as the first Nigerian album to be inducted, and will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. Zombie has been widely honored as a groundbreaking work of protest music, and among other accolades Pitchfork named it one of the Best Albums of the 1970s, saying, “perhaps Fela’s most effective fusion of funk and politics, it confronted Nigeria’s increasingly corrupt, detached government head-on, and in doing so both united the public and incensed the ruling party.”  

In November, Partisan Records issued their first-ever vinyl edition of The Best of the Black President. With packaging designed by founder of New York-based clothing and design brand Head of State, Taofeek Abijako, and featuring re-imagined artwork from Fela's longtime collaborator Lemi Ghariokwu (known for creating 26 of Fela's iconic album covers), this 4-LP colored vinyl limited edition box set doubles as a functioning Ludo game board with perforated game pieces.

Felabration - a week-long festival celebrating Kuti at the New Afrika Shine in Lagos, Nigeria - celebrated its 25th anniversary this past October. News will be revealed in the coming months as Partisan and the Fela Kuti estate prepare to honor the 50th anniversary of Zombie, and another seminal album, Expensive Shit, which is featured on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. 

Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938-1997) was a Nigerian musician, producer, arranger, political radical, outlaw, and father of Afrobeat. Fela’s legacy spans decades and genres, touching on jazz, pop, funk, hip-hop, rock, and beyond. In the 1960s, he created the genre and popularized it by combining funk, jazz, salsa, calypso, and a blend of traditional Nigerian rhythms.

Fela recorded over fifty albums during his lifetime, becoming one of the most revered musicians across the world. Beyonce paid homage and incorporated his track “Zombie” into her iconic 2018 Coachella performance. Paul McCartney, Bono, and Ms. Lauryn Hill have all visited the Shrine, the venue where Fela performed in Lagos. Talking Heads’ album Remain In Light nods heavily to Fela’s album Afrodisiac (the expanded version of Remain In Lightincludes an album outtake titled “Fela’s Riff”). Thom Yorke cited Fela’s style of storytelling as a major source of inspiration for Atoms for Peace. In Miles Davis’ autobiography, he named Fela as one of three artists that he considered the future of music. His music has been sampled by Kelly Rowland, Wyclef Jean, Earl Sweatshirt, Common, J Cole, Mos Def, Nas, The Roots and countless more. In addition to the musicians he’s inspired, Fela has also greatly influenced “Afrobeats,” the new wave of pop music in Nigeria. 

A titanic musical and sociopolitical voice, Afrobeat’s revolutionary politics brought Fela into violent conflict with successive Nigerian military regimes, which made many attempts to suppress him and once sent in the army to burn down his communal home, Kalakuta Republic. His mother later died as a result of the raid. Fela refused to be silenced. He rebuilt Kalakuta and his Lagos club, the Afrika Shrine, and continued to make fierce and supremely danceable music until a few weeks before his passing in 1997. His funeral was attended by over one million people, the highest number of attendees recorded at a ceremony of this nature in Africa, surpassed only by Nelson Mandela’s.

Fela! The Musical had a two-year run on Broadway from 2008-2010 and was backed by Jay-Z and Will & Jada Smith. Director and choreographer Bill T. Jones won the Tony Award for Best Choreography for Fela! in 2010. Fela was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021 & 2022. His music has also been used across the world in film, TV, advertisements and games such as The Harder They Fall, Beast, Queen and Slim, Atlanta, Narcos, Gucci, Guinness, Ciroc, Nike, Grand Theft Auto & many more. Fear No Man - a 12-episode podcast series, presented by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground and Audible, and produced by Talkhouse and Western Sound, debuted in 2025, and Fela’s life story has been documented in multiple films, including 2014’s Finding Fela! (directed by Alex Gibney), and 1982’s Fela Kuti: Music Is The Weapon (directed by Jean Jaques Flori and Stéphane Tchalgadjieff). 

Fela’s legacy continues to live on through his family. His son Femi leads The Positive Force. Fela’s other son, Seun, leads Egypt 80, and his daughter Yeni and son Kunle are the keepers of the Kalakuta Museum and the New Afrika Shrine. Mádé (Fela’s grandson) has played alongside his father, Femi, and has recently launched a solo career of his own. An annual celebration in honor of Fela, known as Felabration, takes place in Lagos and around the world each October. In 2009, Knitting Factory Records and Partisan Records began reissuing his catalog, including six vinyl boxsets, curated by Questlove (2011), Ginger Baker (2012), Brian Eno (2014), Erykah Badu (2017), Chris Martin & Femi Kuti (2021), and Idris Elba (2023).

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