Tag: africa
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Amassakoul, Tinariwen (2004)
These dudes are the real deal. The members of Tinariwen met and learned to play music in refugee camps. Lead vocalist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib’s first guitar was made of a gas can, a stick, and a bicycle brake line. The band reportedly has seventeen bullet wounds between them. Tinariwen’s astonishing music is rooted in the…
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Dimanche à Bamako, Amadou & Mariam (2005)
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia met at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind in the late 1970s, and for the next couple decades made music in relative obscurity. Near the turn of the century, they began overlaying Malian traditional music with blues and rock styles, utilizing a dizzying array of instruments—balafon, calebasse, djembe, trumpet, harmonica, tabla,…
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I Have No Everything Here, Zomba Prison Project (2015)
Dostoevsky, in House of the Dead, wrote that the character of a society can be judged by entering its prisons. It would not be fair to lay the horrors of Zomba Central Prison—overcrowding, malnutrition, HIV—on Malawian society: it’s one of the poorest countries in the world, and the gap in well-being between free people and…
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Original Sufferhead, Fela Kuti (1981)
Few artists can credibly lay claim to inventing a genre. The genre Fela Kuti created, Afrobeat, remains difficult to define. The word connotes musical influences (Nigerian traditional music, Ghanaian highlife, funk, soul), instrumentation (horn-heavy, percussion forward), and a musical ideology (energetic, experimental, political). All of this is a reflection of Fela’s time and place: a…