Mr. Follow Follow

The subject is obedience without thought — the follower who adopts positions wholesale, who lets authority figures do his thinking, who marches in directions he hasn't examined. Fela treats this as a political vulnerability as much as a personal failing: populations of followers are how bad leaders maintain power. The music has a trance-like quality appropriate to the subject, the groove cycling without much variation in a way that could be heard as commentary on the behavior it describes. The horn section locks into patterns that return and return, the call-and-response structure between Fela and the chorus literalizing the dynamics of leader and follower even as the lyrics critique those dynamics. His vocal delivery is patient, almost pedagogical, as if he genuinely believes he can explain the mechanism clearly enough that people will see it in themselves. The track runs long in the tradition of his extended works, and the repetition becomes its own argument — how long will you follow? when does the loop become visible? The percussion is excellent throughout, the layered rhythms creating a density that rewards close listening even as the surface groove carries the less attentive listener forward. You'd return to this when you're trying to understand how consensus forms around bad ideas, how authority propagates itself through willing bodies.