The Kuti family tree reads like a syllabus in West African political history. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, grandmother: women's rights activist, anti-colonial organiser, one of the most prominent Nigerian women of the twentieth century. Fela Anikulapo Kuti, father: inventor of Afrobeat, founder of the Kalakuta Republic, a man whose commune was raided so violently by the Nigerian military in 1977 that his mother was thrown from a window, injuries from which she later died. And then Femi, born in London in 1962, raised in Lagos, who at fifteen picked up an alto saxophone and was soon playing in his father's band Egypt 80, absorbing a musical and political education that no conservatory could replicate.

Now sixty-three, Femi Kuti brings Positive Force — the band he founded in 1986, nearly four decades ago — to Heimathafen Neukölln on 8 April. The venue matters here, and not just as a location pin. Heimathafen sits on Karl-Marx-Straße in a historic building tied to the neighbourhood's long identity as an entertainment district for ordinary people — back when Neukölln was still called Rixdorf, the town at Berlin's gates where popular culture meant something louder and less polished than what the city centre offered. It is a promiscuous cultural space in a neighbourhood that has always been Berlin's most restless. Neukölln's population has shifted and reshuffled for over a century. Putting Femi Kuti there, rather than in a sterile arena or a techno cathedral, feels precisely right: a venue built for the common people, a musician who has spent his career insisting that music belongs to them.

The temptation with Femi Kuti has always been to read him as a footnote to his father. Across roughly two hundred reviews, profiles and features spanning three decades, the tension between "Fela's son" and "Femi in his own right" is the single most recurring narrative frame. The framing is understandable — Fela's legend is enormous, and Femi himself has never disowned it. But to dwell there is to miss what Femi actually did. He founded Positive Force at twenty-three. He built it into an eighteen-piece unit with its own identity. His late-1990s debut, *Shoki Shoki*, was not a copy of his father's work; it was tighter, sleeker, more willing to flirt with contemporary funk and jazz without losing the polyrhythmic core. Where Fela's compositions sprawled across entire album sides — twenty, thirty, forty minutes of hypnotic repetition — Femi compressed, sharpened, made the political message hit faster. This wasn't dilution. It was translation, across generations and across audiences.

His more recent work has continued to shift. Reviews and profiles suggest his later albums move toward something rawer and jazzier, more syncopated, less immediately accessible, with an emotional directness that some critics have found challenging. Femi has revisited earlier material, re-arranged and updated it, and taken greater control over production. The trajectory is away from outward-facing polemic and toward something more introspective — reflections on family, forgiveness, the passage of time. But the anger hasn't vanished. He has consistently kept the spotlight on Nigerian governmental failure with the same unflinching directness that defined his earliest work. Personal history and political history collapse into the same phrase — in the Kuti family, they always have.

Positive Force is not a backing band in any passive sense. This is a large ensemble — horns, percussion, keyboards, vocals — that functions as a single rhythmic organism. Femi plays alto saxophone and sings, moving between the two with a physicality that anchors the entire performance. The live show has a reputation for being relentless — not relentless in the way a DJ set is relentless, through accumulation and build, but relentless in its demand for participation. The grooves are long, cyclical, designed to pull bodies into motion. Between and within them, Femi talks — about corruption, about poverty, about the conditions in northern Nigeria where Boko Haram displaced millions, places he has visited personally. I cannot assess the physical energy of these performances firsthand, but the consistency of language across live reviews — "explosive," "sweating," "impossible not to dance" — suggests something genuinely kinetic.

There is a broader context that makes this show feel particularly charged. Afrobeat's influence on global pop has never been more visible — Burna Boy, Wizkid, Tems, the entire Afrobeats wave has pushed West African rhythms into the mainstream in ways Fela could not have imagined. The distinction matters: Afrobeat (singular) is the genre Fela built in the 1970s, rooted in jazz, funk, and Yoruba music, inseparable from political protest; Afrobeats (plural) is a broader, more commercially oriented umbrella covering contemporary West African pop. They share DNA but not necessarily intent. Femi's relationship to this moment is complicated. He is neither the grandfather figure being sampled nor the young artist riding the wave. He sits in between: old enough to carry first-hand memory of Afrobeat's origins, young enough in spirit to keep recording and touring with genuine fire. His work is a corrective to the notion that Afrobeats is merely a pop phenomenon — a reminder that these rhythms were forged in political struggle, in communal spaces, in direct confrontation with power. The Shrine, the club Femi runs in Lagos, operates on the same principle: keep the price low so everybody can afford the show. Music as commons, not commodity.

Berlin, for its part, has always had a complicated relationship with the idea of music as political act. The city's club culture mythology — built on techno, on Berghain's austere hedonism, on the liberatory potential of the dancefloor — sometimes forgets that other traditions got there first. Fela Kuti was building autonomous cultural zones in Lagos in the 1970s, declaring his compound an independent republic, using music as direct political speech. This isn't a competition — Berlin's club scene emerged from its own specific rupture, the void after the Wall — but it's worth remembering that the idea of music as a space outside the state didn't start in a warehouse in Friedrichshain. Femi's performance at Heimathafen is not a history lesson, but it does carry that weight. A room full of people dancing to polyrhythmic funk in a historic ballroom in Neukölln, while a man with a saxophone tells them that corruption is stealing and that his grandmother was murdered by the state — this is one of the few live music events in Berlin this spring where the political content is not aesthetic posture but inherited, lived, and ongoing.