Beast of No Nation

This is Fela at his most internationally focused, naming names — Reagan, Thatcher, Botha — and placing apartheid South Africa's supporters into a framework of global complicity. The music matches the expanded scope, the arrangements feeling more orchestral and confrontational than his earlier Lagos-centric work, the horn section deployed with a bluntness that matches the directness of the accusations. The production has a density appropriate to the weight of the subject, each instrument seeming to add to a collective indictment. His voice carries a controlled fury that's different from the sardonic amusement of his satirical work — this is the register of someone who has been watching atrocities receive diplomatic cover for too long. The saxophone playing is particularly powerful, moving between aggression and lament in a way that holds contradictory emotions simultaneously. Released in 1989 as the apartheid regime was beginning its final decade, the song has a prescient quality, naming the moral failure clearly at a moment when many governments still preferred euphemism. You listen to this when you want music that is willing to be uncomfortably direct about political complicity, that refuses the comfortable distance of abstraction.