Music. Response. by risa
‘Music. Response. Music; it triggers some kind of response.’
– The Chemical Brothers
I have sent you my first impressions of the dark continent. I have sent some emotionally filled words describing my new home. I have sent you some contrasting images. I now send you another major part of life here in Mali : music.
On the streets of Bamako, music is no stranger. Radios are everywhere. At many corners around the city local Malians can be found – if they don’t find you first – selling ripped copies of African music along with a few genuine copies of local artists’ albums. Amazing performances at the Centre de Culture Français are sure to have you begging for more. Dancing and music are such important parts of this culture. I visit the Carrefour de Jeunness and witness the amazing drumming and dancing of young local artists, practicing over and over again, often for a concert that will never be held. They dance and drum for their own sake. For their love of the art.
I hear such a variety of music. All different, but all distinctly African. From traditional music to hip-hop and rap; it all breathes Africa. The rhythmic sounds of drumming tam tams and djembes are everpresent. Radios play the music of what some might call screaming female stars, famous for overdosing on mercury based skin bleaching. The soothing sounds of Ali Farka Touré’s electric guitar contrast beautifully with the french reggae of Ivoirian artists like the famous Alpha Blondie or the lesser known Tiken Jah. The fast paced dance music of Coupé Decaller is sure to get your pelvis moving and vibrating like you would not have thought possible. Habib Koité’s rhythmic accoustic guitar and belowing voice sends chills down your spine. Beautifully sung melodies from Angelique Kidjo of Benin put you into a state of relaxed bliss, while the rampant and exicited chaos of Koffi Olomide’s Orchestre from the Congo sends your head in a whirlwind.
Two blind Malians, Amadou and Mariam, recently performed at the Montréal Jazz Festival – sadly this year I was unable to take in this amazing annual event since I was galavanting around Europe before taking up my place here in Bamako. These two local artists are probably best known in the West for their relatively recent album made and produced with the multicultural Manu Chao, Un dimanche à Bamako. If you get the chance to pick up this disc I highly recommend it. With an obvious influence from Manu Chao, the more traditional African sounds are still present and interestingly rendered in this all round epic album. For now I send you a line of lyrics from the hit single from that album. While this song is one of the most Manu Chao-like tunes with less Amadou and Mariam, it is pretty catchy, and definitly brings a smile to my lips.
‘Il est minuit à Tokyo. Il est cinq heure au Mali. Quelle heure est il au Paradis?’
Michael Albert
September 11th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
Though known for unabashed cynicism and over-the-top antics, Vice magazine provided some insight that relates to these remarks at hand. let me explain.
in offering this nugget about vice, i don’t mean to put under erasure the encounters on the ground; the auto-reflective impulse of encountering things abroad, in moments trust and surrender and a substantial relinquishment of control, is an exercise in continued reverence, meaning that it can become a series of moments of epistemic rupture and subsequent recouperation, openning the way for something else entirely. the relevance of vice, beyond its sideways chuckles, rests in an article that i read recently regarding one of the magazine’s carousing surfer-cum-journalists, who had undertaken a trip to mogadishu, somalia with the goal of staking out some of the better surfing spots on africa’s eastern coast. the crushingly colloquial, from-the-hip commentary animated the experience this guy had been having. the primary frame of the article was the familiar lawless import of “mogadishu: most dangerous place in the world”. yet, as the article unfolded, the author returned continually to the experience of and encounter with music. musicality was a quality that he detected; it was pervasive. he was capitvated and mystified, not by the discernable “african-ness” of the local scene but rather by the local import of uk grime and dizee rascale and roots manuva, arguably diasporic music produced abroad and coming back to haunt somalia, subsequently articulated locally on the street to the crews of kids playing football, thugs with guns, and people cruising around. the people whom he supposed would be moving their bodies to the rhythms of some resiliant form of authentic local music were dancing to other things.
i think he was suprised and amazed at the dergulated flow of music into this zone; despite the apparent lack of formal, institutionalized rule and such, he was moved by the way in which the music reached the ground. really, i think, it suggested to him what we may well call the workings of a deregulated global cultural economy that is at once diffuse and rooted in various places. in that, i think he may have felt that, rather than finding he had farther to go in terms some mythic identification with others that is impossible, he instead moved from sympathy to kind of empathy based on the musical taste at play. though petty notions of taste can’t bridge the political or economic gaps created by the visscitudes of late transnational capital, the music served as a hinge, a common way of becoming affected that was startling. the author acknowledged this in a vice-like, roundabout way. yet, to read of those few moments of expression in such an unlikely venue–the hypercritical rag that eats its own tail–suprised me: vice had done political economy, cultural studies, and an ethics of identification all at once. further, it cut through the simultaneously lame self-celebratory and apologist stuff inherent in scholarly ethnography and made a significant point. the author’s self-consciousness and awareness–his surfing extravaganza and adventurous encounter with the dark continent–charged his suprised enchanment and genuine epiphany with efficacy.