Fela Kuti will become the first African solo artist in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday, and he will not go in alone. Sade, Luther Vandross, Wu-Tang Clan, Queen Latifah and MC Lyte are inducted at the same ceremony at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Six of the class’s 18 honorees are Black artists or Black-led acts.
The Hall’s chairman, John Sykes, called induction “music’s highest honor.” The ceremony is taped Saturday and airs in December on ABC and Disney+.
Kuti, the Nigerian bandleader who created Afrobeat and died in 1997, is inducted in the Early Influence category, as are Latifah, Lyte, the Cuban singer Celia Cruz and Gram Parsons. Sade, Vandross and Wu-Tang Clan go in as Performers, the Hall’s main category, alongside Phil Collins, Billy Idol, Iron Maiden, Joy Division/New Order and Oasis.
Look at who sits where. Three of the six Black honorees, Kuti, Latifah and Lyte, receive the Early Influence award, which honors artists who shaped the music rather than the performers the Hall treats as its main class. Rock and roll was built by Black artists, and this class says so. It also files half of them under influence.
MC Lyte has worked for almost four decades. Speaking to the Washington Informer about the honor, she said: “It’s a testament to a career that I’ve worked almost four decades in now.” She said she is “thrilled,” and that “even that is an understatement.” Her record is a list of firsts for women in rap: the first female rapper to release a full-length solo album and the first solo female rapper to earn a gold single.
Wu-Tang Clan, the Staten Island group, and the late Luther Vandross are two very different pieces of Black American music, and both are Performers this year. Sade, fronted by the Nigerian-British singer Sade Adu, adds a diaspora thread that runs straight to Kuti’s Nigeria.
That thread belongs to readers in Brooklyn, Atlanta and Toronto as much as to Lagos. Black music has never stopped at a border, and the Hall’s own list now shows it.
The honor is late for some of them, and it is deserved. Saturday night is theirs, and the December broadcast will be the first time most of the country sees Fela Kuti’s name read out in that room.
Have your say