How Fela Kuti’s Grandson Mádé Kuti Is Bringing Afrobeat To A New Era

Following in the footsteps of his legendary grandfather Fela Kuti, Mádé Kuti is redefining Afrobeat for a new generation while honoring the genre’s political, musical, and cultural roots.

He is the son of a son of African music royalty. You can call him a duke of the beat. The beat of Afrobeat, that is. He is the son of Femi Kuti, the Grammy-nominated Afrobeat musician, and the first son of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the pioneer of the Afrobeat genre. Objectively speaking, he could be considered the duke of Afrobeat. With his father Femi and uncle Seun Kuti as princes in the Afrobeat lineage.

But such monarchical titles are of little concern to Mádé Kuti. Humbly, he could not care less about his royal identity within the genre. All this Kuti wants is to continue uplifting and defining the Afrobeat sound.

“I play music of my fathers and my grandfathers because Afrobeat is a very young genre,” Mádé told me in our exclusive interview. “And I would still like to maintain that fresh impact of the message within the music because it’s more than just sound. It’s a very political genre of music over the past few decades. And that message still holds strong.”

Though Mádé Kuti has been performing as an Afrobeat showman since the age of eight, playing bass guitar and saxophone with his father’s band, The Positive Force, his official entry into the music industry came in 2020 with the release of his debut album For(e)ward. The project was incorporated into a joint album with his father, Legacy +, which earned Mádé his first Grammy nomination in 2022 for Best Global Music Album. The record features his infectious single “Free Your Mind,” a track that documents his spirited approach to continuing and reimagining the Kuti musical legacy.

Mádé has recently embarked on the release of his second album, Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From?, which has spawned the single “I Won’t Run Away.” The track serves as a testament to Mádé’s deep understanding of Western music theory, seamlessly intertwined with the polyrhythmic essence of Afrobeat. He honed this knowledge at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire, from which he graduated from in 2020—the same institution his grandfather attended in the 1960s when it was known as the Trinity College of Music, before its merger with the Laban Dance Centre.

“What that experience did for me was change the way I perceived music—it opened my mind to perspectives I hadn’t really considered before,” Mádé recalls. “The course I studied was composition, so we delved into pretty avant-garde material like atonal music, modern composers, and experimental compositional techniques—things that would have been impossible for me to experience while in my bubble at the Shrine. I wouldn’t say I directly used those tools I learned over those four years, but I was definitely inspired by them.”

While Mádé has already been exposed to music in Lagos, his decision to attend Trinity Laban Conservatoire was driven by a desire to deepen his musical knowledge and connect with other talented musicians. Studying at the same institution his grandfather once attended came with a unique sense of legacy, many in the jazz department were familiar with Fela’s influence and admired his compositions.

Despite being a part of Gen Z, Mádé maintains his commitment to preserving the essence of the Afrobeat genre. There is widespread confusion between Afrobeat and Afrobeats, with the need to clarify that the two are distinct, not only in style but in purpose. Afrobeat, the politically charged fusion of jazz, funk, juju, highlife pioneered by his grandfather Fela Kuti fusion differs from the more commercially driven Afrobeats sound dominating today’s charts.

“Fela was absolutely—like you would mention a Stravinsky, a Schoenberg, or a John Cage—a detailed composer,” he said. “He was meticulous. He wrote everything himself and detailed everything himself. So we’re sort of following that blueprint as Afrobeat musicians and trying to find what it is that we want to reflect in our music, what our own unique experiences are, while staying true to that message.”

“Whereas, I suppose, Afrobeat’s message today is more—like I said initially—more commercial. It’s more about, it’s more capitalist.”

Still, Mádé does not dismiss the Afrobeats music genre, and rather finds it necessary for the sake of showcasing the variations of music stemming from Africa.

“I want Afrobeat music to be so globally recognized that it is full of incredible sub-genres, and a lot of people that are very conservative about the original sound, that want to maintain it the exact way Fela played it, and people that want to take chances and explore.”

In just four years since his professional debut, Mádé Kuti has already performed on some of the world’s most prestigious stages, including the Philharmonie de Paris of France, the Sauti Za Busara Festival in Zanzibar, and a historic appearance at the 2024 Glastonbury Festival alongside his father and Coldplay for their collaboration “Arabesque.” He stands as an artistic heir to an imperative African musical legacy—one defined by innovation and truth. Through his self-discipline and creative conviction, Made carries forward the victories of his father and the visionary spirit of his grandfather. Simply put, Mádé Kuti is the future of Afrobeat.

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