999,889: Fela Kuti—Zombie

When our society advances to the stage of adolescent rock n' roll dystopia, and our generation (here I am thinking of people born between 1970 and 1990) is collectively called to answer for high crimes against culture, one of the worst of our offenses enumerated by The Wall's gigantic cartoon buttocks will be our blatant and ham-fisted misuse of the zombie. From decreasingly necessary remakes of thirty-year-old zombie movies to self-conscious zombie horror-comedy parodies of said movies to zombie war protests to zombie-themed adult birthday parties to lazily appending "zombie-" to whatever decidedly non-zombie-ish event we might be holding, we (and here I am thinking of everyone in the world except me) have thoroughly ruined the zombie. As we have previously wrecked robots, ninjas and puppets for everyone, so have we done with the walking undead. And like those brain-eating denizens of hackneyed jokes everywhere, we show no awareness of what we are doing and no sign of stopping. In our future science world where sunlight is illegal and rock music is punishable by death, the secret police will have to shoot our heads off to prevent us from sending out evites to our Godamned zombie flash mobs.

Invoking the zombie has become such an automatic and uninspired move that most of us probably can't remember a time when doing so could actually have been considered revolutionary. So step into the time portal set up by the leaders of the human resistance and go back to 1977 Nigeria, where they had a real-life government that was autocratic and corrupt. Resident Afrobeat inventor Fela Kuti was already a politically provocative guy, having declared the commune where he made his home an independent nation in 1970. For an encore, he wrote Zombie, whose lyrics were as rebellious as its beat was infectious. He mocked the Nigerian army by comparing its soldiers, who served as government enforcers against ordinary citizens for all kinds of petty bullshit, to the mindless stupidity of the zombie—the Afro-Caribbean variety, which served robotically at the pleasure of its voodoo master. The record was a smash hit, and Kuti's fans even took to performing zombie pantomime in the presence of soldiers.

You might be wondering what the big deal was, since after all the Cranberries used the zombie to protest political violence almost twenty years later and they didn't exactly earn that much cred for it. The difference (aside from the Cranberries' unwise foray into sludgy off-brand metal versus Kuti's awesome horn-driven opus) is that after Zombie hit it big for the Cranberries on MTV, the UK government and the IRA didn't send out 1,000 guys to burn Dolores O'Riordan's house down and throw her mom out a window to death. On the other hand, O'Riordan didn't marry more than two dozen of her own back-up singers, but that's a story for the next Fela Kuti entry.