MikePadgett.com

Seun is the youngest son of the late Fela Kuti, the politically active leading light of Afrobeat. Having grown up in the thick of that scene, Seun now heads Africa 80, the second incarnation of his father’s band, playing the same energetic mix of funk, jazz, rock and highlife that electrified West African music in the 1970s.

Cheerfully arriving onstage after a characteristically long prelude, it becomes rapidly clear that the tall, young Kuti has every bit of his father’s innate cool. The band, taut and heavy on syncopated percussion, rattles along effortlessly and from the get go, no-one in the audience is left standing still. Kuti is comfortable as a frontman, swapping between voice and sax parts, contorting his body and throwing shapes during the solos of his colleagues.

The music ebbs and flows and there are no gaps between tracks. The rhythm of a hot, dry African evening descends upon the Ancienne Belgique, a special sense of time and place that can be felt, indistinct yet insistent, in the spirit of the rhythms and the brass punctuations.

Kuti’s socially aware lyrics, often delivered in mantra-like repetitions, remind us of the family legacy: to effect change through music. “Let me tell you something about the financial crisis,” admonishes Kuti during a brief interlude, as the band continues its incessant rhythm at half volume in the background, “the rich tell us that if we don’t save their banks, we’ll all be poor. Well, most of us have already been poor for a long time.”

All too quickly, it was over. Even if the pace was admirably hectic throughout, with its appetite piqued the crowd was still expecting more than a single, one-track encore. Indeed as the house lights went up, there was a palpable feeling that the climax of the night had still to be reached but the damp streets of Brussels were all that was left to us.

First, there was panic over students using the World Wide Web to cheat on their essays.

Then it was revealed that CIA employees had been doctoring Wikipedia articles on the subject of such public menaces as President Ahmadinejad and Oprah Winfrey.

The Internet and Hard Fact have always enjoyed a difficult relationship. Sometimes the truths were held to be self-evident to all but the most gullible users (remember the Nigerian 419 Scam?); others were open to interpretation (cf. the Taser incidents at the Universities of Florida and Los Angeles respectively).

For millions around the world, Wikipedia is the cutting edge of information delivery. At the time of writing, the website claims to deliver in the region of 8.2 million articles in 253 languages [source] - it’s a veritable fountain of knowledge, much to the bitter chagrin of commercial encyclopaedia publishers.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia and access to content is free. Whereas access to the 120,000+ online articles provided by a leading commercial encyclopaedia is normally about £5.00 per month. Put it that way and a couple of key points emerge:

• You’re more likely to expect (and forgive) if a bit of inaccuracy creeps into 8.2 million freely available articles in 253 languages
• A commercial encyclopaedia couldn’t compete, even with “a staff of 19 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors” [Encyclopaedia Britannica, source]. more likely to be biased

We don’t really have any numbers on Wikipedia vandalism. One or two concerned parties have taken to documenting outrages, often with the righteous indignation of a juror.

Meantime, those of us on the fringe of the debate might be inclined to see the funny side. Am I the only puerile fool barely able to stifle a giggle at Bill Gates’ portrait defaced with a silly moustache? Or the assertion that George Washington “had a shit on a stick and then told people that it was OK to have unprotected sex …”? Or this non-sequitor I found this evening?