Re: Youssou N'Dour: Living In The Ground

Afrobeat is actually a term used by Fela to describe his music
to the African music fan N'Dour and Fela are as you suggest, world's apart
but still represent the higher levels of modern African music
I was not really sure what points you were trying to make and didn't see the
value of dragging in socialism and Chuck D

A


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"Jeff Rubard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
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> Youssou N'Dour: Living In The Ground
>
> The history of the appropriation of electrified African music
> ("Afrobeat") by the developed world, occurring since roughly the
> middle of the 80s with a significant falling-off as of late, is a
> strange one.  Although records by the Talking Heads and Paul Simon
> featuring African musicians and motifs were big sellers, there seems
> to have been very little permanent influence on Western popular music
> worked by that period; today bhangra from India has a significant
> following among club kids, but what is to be heard of Africa is
> primarily musicians influenced by the sounds of the Carribean (reggae,
> dancehall).  During the period of African electrified music's great
> flourishing, these were dominant influences; above all, the figure of
> James Brown (still one whose consideration
> is clouded by a great deal of unnecessary awe at Brown's showmanship
> skills) was the leitmotiv for the adaptation of traditional genres to
> the social life of a post-independence, modernizing Africa.
>
> It is rather well-known that the dominant figure of this period
> (occurring during the 1970s) was Fela Anikulapo (Ransome) Kuti, who
> patterned his mature act on Brown but whose showmanship is rather
> downgraded due to the inaccessibility of his music.  Kuti's Africa
> 70/Egypt 80 records are rather widely available on CD, at the
> "contemporary" price point of $18-19; and Kuti music of this period is
> something like a maximal extension of Brown's New Breed-era longform
> grooves.  Was Fela Kuti better than James Brown?  In some respects
> yes, as Bootsy Collins once remarked; the swing-size band manages to
> bristle with virtuosity in a very restrictive format.  But Kuti was
> not *that* much better, such that this explains his legendary status;
> rather, comprehensive consideration of his *oeuvre* requires one to
> attribute a great deal of influence to his activities as a practical
> politician, which in my opinion tend to be misprised as disliked but
> necessary concomitants of aesthetic production
> in an unfree country, although this is probably accurate enough for
> purposes of "musical history".
>
> In a piece on Public Enemy, I recently wrote about a connection
> between "actually existing socialism" in the Eastern Bloc and the
> culture of the African diaspora mediated through the pan-Africanism of
> that period: when Chuck D says "plus I never have, and plus I never
> been" there's more than a little of the left-handed compliment
> present.  And to my mind, Fela Kuti was the epitome of this: the "New
> Man", transposed into an Third-World context.  By contrast to Kuti, Ho
> Chi Minh was veritably Eurocentric, with his Western intellectual
> education and distaste for much of Asian culture; but (and this is
> important, since Kuti was never any kind of Stalinist) what is of
> value in that political and cultural tradition is present in Kuti's
> defiance of corrupt Nigerian governmental and corporate authority,
> though perhaps not in his easy familiarity
> with native religions he was not born to.
>
> So, is Kuti, who fought these murderous authorities for decades, an
> objectionable figure in any sense?  The answer is yes, and it comes
> from his son Femi Kuti, who remarked that his father had fought these
> people all his life, and nothing changed.  And for all we know,
> perhaps that young man would have liked to have seen something
> different from his father.  Has there been something different?  Yes;
> for many years in sub-saharan Africa, the musical tone has been set
> not by Kuti but by others, chiefest among them Senegal's Youssou
> N'Dour. N'Dour is also a hard figure to know, as his image has been
> wrapped up following the earliest years of his band Super Etoile with
> the aforementioned appropriation of African music by the West; I claim
> no special expertise in this essay.  But music from that period is
> inexpensively available on a disc from Rough Guide, and although this
> is still more than a little precious the record is well worth owning.
>
> Why?  Well, for starters Robert Christgau's characterization of Super
> Etoile is not quite right (although I still believe every word in the
> Consumer Guide is literally true): Super Etoile is the best
> electrified band *ever*, this is what amplified instruments were made
> to do.  From a technical perspective, although there is limited
> soloing the band as a unit is the most technically proficient
> outfit "since Thinking Fellers", and like that defunct SF group their
> music is frankly pretty.  Furthermore, like that group (which was
> affiliated with a sound subsisting across the bay, in the tonier parts
> of Oakland) a genre which blends rock and R&B with traditional sounds,
> *mbalax*, grew up around Super Etoile.  Supplanting earlier "Star
> Bands", this became something like the national sound
> of Senegal.  Are there better mbalax bands?  I doubt it very much, but
> I also doubt that this is important, which this linguistically
> challenged listener takes to be the point of N'Dour's music.
>
> N'Dour's music is, in its way, perfect qua *sui generis*; to emulate
> him would be to engage in something of a conceit for the entertainment
> of one's self and one's friends, both of which could be construed
> rather widely.  Is it perfect from the standpoint of the liberation of
> the Senegalese people?  That question does not apply, and this is
> something like the criterion of the first status.  N'Dour is not a
> hypermasculine figure like the "openly polygamous" Kuti; his aural
> signature is his extremely high register, but I suspect it wouldn't
> bother him too much if the style did not appeal to you.  In other
> words, he is not a figure of open rebellion; but he is not apolitical,
> either.  Much of the political valences of N'Dour's work are
> inaccessible to the Western ear, as he often writes in native
> languages; an early hit included on the Rough Guide disc is the song
> "Thiapatholy", but what exactly is being said is likely to remain
> inaccessible to my ear forever.  However, I suspect something of the
> flavour of N'Dour's political stance can be gleaned from the song
> "Woman Is The Future
> Of Love", included on the recent *Nothing's In Vain*.
>
> This twist of Louis Aragon's dictum "Woman Is The Future Of Man" is
> rather obviously a cut on the modernizing tendencies of
> "Afro-bolshevism"; and with all due respect to Negativland, I suspect
> it is a perfect cut given the cultural context of N'Dour's career, the
> AIDS pandemic among African youth.  As is well-known, AIDS is
> omnipresent in Sub-saharan Africa (claiming the life of Fela and many
> other notables), but I suspect close listening to N'Dour may be the
> first indication that the *Lord Of The Flies* understanding of
> contemporary Africa promoted by Robert Kaplan in his popular Atlantic
> Monthly essay of about a decade ago "The Coming Anarchy" may not be
> entirely correct, although the large-scale economic damage caused by
> AIDS is real enough.
>
>
> Super Etoile is not escapist; their music is not particularly
> "luxurious", having a minimum of flourishes added to the
> challenging-enough concept of  mbalax (double-tracked rhythm).  But
> neither are they particularly  *cautionary*; these are not tales of
> "life among the lowly" and its attendant risks, those are well-known.
> I recently introduced the Hegelian concept
> of reconciliation into the consideration of country and western
> music's  relation to existing institutions, and I would say that
> N'Dour's music goes further than any of those acts do in grasping the
> suffering caused by the
> world order.  It is either *reconciled* or *post-reconciliation*, and
> figuring out the difference between the two might take a while, since
> no clues are offered by the artworks themselves.  If you are looking
> for a tool to amplify desires for *sociopolitical* purposes, this
> isn't it; but, y'know, it might be okay anyway.