I bought this from the Our Price on Bridge Street around the same time as King Sunny Adé's Juju Music (for £5.99), when I was first exploring African music.
As with KSA, it remains the only Fela Kuti album I own to this day. It's not that I don't like these records; I love them. So why haven't I bought more of their music? I think mainly for the not-very-good reason that I didn't know where to go next. Since starting this paragraph, I've downloaded Fela's No Agreement and Music is the Weapon of the Future albums from eMusic. Because, unlike 1984, now we have Wikipedia entries to help put a career in context and eMusic picks to help select. So ignorance is no longer an excuse.
Even without those props, I could have guessed that Army Arrangement came from the later part of Fela's career. Just the facts that Bill Laswell produced and remixed the album (while Fela was in prison), that it was recorded in New York and features musicians like Bernie Worrell (Parliament, Talking Heads) and Sly Dunbar, show that this is a metropolitan and very worldly world music album.
Having been listening to some of his '70s work for all of seven minutes now, it doesn't sound like Army Arrangement represents a massive departure from Fela's early work.
I'm grateful for the prompt this has given me to explore more of this music.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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