Liberation Sounds

Music and the people who produce it are an engine of cultural change and transformation. Jibola Fagbamiye’s Fela: Music Is the Weapon documents the larger-than-life music and activism of Fela Kuti. After being influenced by the Black Power movement, Kuti became one of the principal innovators of Afrobeat, as well as a dedicated political activist arrested over 200 times protesting his country’s military juntas. JD Glass documents another heady, political music scene in Punk Like Me, which explores escaping repression and finding queer freedom in the anarchic punk world of CBGB and the Lower East Side in the 1980s.