Monday, January 17, 2011

A List of Bad Asses & Hot Lips

NUMBER, the First
In a very particular order by which they enter my brain-hole, I begin: Étoile de Dakar is the greatest band I've run into in a long time. They are unknown. Except in West Africa, so I hear, but there's really no way of telling beyond what Westerners tell me on the inner tubes. I hear they were huge. They invented the mbalax genre, or rather so Youssou N'Dour named it when people outside Étoile's home of Senegal began asking him what "his" music was called.

I do not take it lightly to call a band the X-est of anything, let alone with the particular X above, or given the music, its close second "intense." Nor consequently will I lightly or at all attempt to describe it, besides pointing out that it's as rhythmically complex as anything I can recall, as if every band member is playing in their own time signature and tempo. You should hear it. Everyone should hear it. They started an entire genre and revolutionized a country's music scene! That's like someone not knowing about Germany & Kraftwerk, England & the Beatles, Zaïre & soukous, America & James Brown.

Gander: Afro-Cuban influences ran rampant across, to the best of my knowledge, much of sub-Saharan Africa. It was huge in Senegal, before & after its 1960 independence. It was huge in Dakar, the capital and main center for clubs and music. And so to celebrate this independence, some totalitarian asshole with a lovely taste in music began a band called the Star Band of Dakar, which, inundated with firings of various degrees of appropriateness, ended up splintering and giving birth to a group called the Étoile de Dakar, "étoile" being the French for "star," French being the bastard language of Senegal, then and now. And so master-mind guitarist Badou "I took the rhythms of the drums and put them to the guitar" N'Diaye, gorgeous vocalists Youssou "so world famous you've heard of him even if you haven't" N'Dour & El Hadji "ended up right back into the poverty he began his musical career in" Faye & Eric M'Backe "the Latin singer" N'Doye, the most erratically careful and jumpy bassist Kabou Gueye, and crucial Tama talking-drum player Assane Thiam, plus others, obviously, started playing the music that took Dakar then the nation then West Africa by storm. And for two years between 1979 and 1981, the year the rivalries Youssou's unnatural fame brought about splintered the group once more, this band reigned supreme. Shit, they still do.

Get their greatest hits. Buy the albums so you get the liner notes and support them. Don't be fooled by titles like "The Rough Guide to Youssou N'Dour & Étoile de Dakar," cuz this was as much everyone's band as it was Youssou's, gorgeous though his voice may be (and gorgeous it is). The tama playing, the bass playing, the rhythm guitar playing, the singing, it's all superb.

I don't even know where to begin with their songs. Here's one. Here's another. Here's an exciting one. Here's a moving one. It goes on, but w/better sound quality if you buy the CD's. On headphones for all the dynamics or on a tape deck as it was first & loudly disseminated, it's all good.




ITEM, the Second
Speaking of Afro-Cubanism & revolutionizing genres, have you heard of Zaïre, currently known by some long official title concluding with the word Congo? (there's another Congo bordering it) It's the really large country in the dead center of Africa, coincidentally also a French colony, and perhaps also coincidentally another heavily-Afro-Cuban-influenced country. And while mbalax is very intense, soukous is the diametric opposite, a complex "easy-listening" that might soothe a weary soul, keep a studious book-worm studying, or leave millions of potheads sinking in their seats if not melting into someone else's body. Or at least that's the soukous of Tabu Ley Rochereau, business-conscious professional and band leader with a voice lighter than the music. And while mbalax most definitely took over at least West Africa, soukous took over the entire continent. And no one's the worse for it!, except Tabu Ley's musical contemporaries, Franco excluded.

There's a (fairly comprehensive?) greatest hits called The Voice of Lightness, spanning almost two decades from 1961-1977, featuring songs, jams, more songs, more jams, and something totally different.


SOME THING, the Third
It's interesting how one culture's experimental music is another's tradition. There are some 5 million Tuaregs living across the Sahara, Arabized in religion only, still speaking Berber tongues. The information about them is thin. Very thin. But there's something about living in the desert that really, really teaches one how to trance. These are apparently love songs sung by young men & women. This is Fadimoutou Inamoud: