Rolling Global Outernational Non-West Non-English (Some Exceptions) 2018 Thread Once Known as World Music

https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/d3wdq7/robert-christgau-youssou-ndour-tal-national-review

Christgau likes Tal National too

could have listened to that drummer all night. between this and the xylouris white show i am really getting my drum on this year. best drum shows ever.

critic Richard Gehr has been reviewing international stuff for quite awhile. Perhaps I'm reading "once again on the rise" wrong, but North African/Sahel guitar has been around for a number of years now. Checking out BKO

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/review-tal-national-and-africas-high-octane-modern-rock-w517585

Sidi Touré, Toubalbero | ★★★ 1/2
BKO, Mali Foli Coura | ★★★ 1/2
Tal National, Tantabara | ★★★★
Imarhan, Temet | ★★★

With American rock bands looking to forward-thinking EDM and elsewhere for genre rejuvenation, African electric guitars and traditional instruments alike are once again yawping, screaming and blurting with new intensity after something of a genre hiatus. Over there, the romantic scenario of picking up chops down at the crossroads has been replaced by the vigorous international and inter-ethnic cultural trading going on in Mali, Niger and Algeria. Amid African music's myriad variations, rock is once again on the rise.

I posted the below on the Afropop thread but its relevant here too:

No respect...For the second year in a row, the Nabisco (N.A.) edited NY Times Magazine special issue 25 Songs that Tell Us Where Music is Going has no artists based in Africa (mostly all US & UK this year except for 1 K-Pop, a hiphop remix with Puerto Rican rappers, and a Scottish pop group with 2 members of Liberian heritage )

The issue does have nicely penned pieces on Chicago footwork DJ Taye and one on a remix with Farruko, Nicki Minaj, and Bad Bunny; SZA ,and Bruno Mars's Finesse remix. But I was expecting more from a former ilxor who writes well and is very smart and who got a bunch of talented writers from elsewhere to contribute. An editor doesn't have to like Scandinavian whatever(pop or metal) or Nigerian Afropop to recognize that it should be included in something with the heading "25 Songs that Tell Us Where Music is Going," but he didn't do that this year or last year (the first time he edited this). Instead, as when he was the music critic at New York Magazine he generally followed his interests-US and UK pop, rap, and r'n'b.

Just splashed out on the new album by Hailu Merga, 'Lala Belu'. Only 6 tracks at full price, which I feel is pretty steep but it's quality and I adore the title track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyuWRXoFCjY

Also picked up the Ernesto Chahoud compilation of Ethiopian cuts. Roll on 5 o'clock!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gmGL5SqhaY&t=150s

New Fatoumata Diawara from Mali video/song "Nterini" directed by Ethopian director Aida Muluneh. Lots of bright primary colors

Oops, video link not working. I like Fatoumata Diawara's voice. Sometimes she tries to hard to crossover to Western audiences, but this one mostly works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gmGL5SqhaY

Also liking Djeneba & Fousco and band from Mali on this song. Beautiful, lilting female & male vocals , mellow backing instrumentation. Have not heard their new album yet.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bbTk72kmihQ

Listened to some of the Djeneba & Fousco album. Not bad. Heard a little reggae flavor. Need to listen to it more

Had heard the story that Tuaregs in exile in Libya had heard Dire Straits , and now there’s video evidence

http://sahelsounds.com/2018/03/dire-straits-in-the-sahara/

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/zimbabwes-powerful-music-of-struggle

Thomas Mapfumo is going back to Zimbabwe for the first time in 10 years, now that Mugabe is out of power. Mapfumo is still nervous about the role the military is playing. They helped remove Mugabe.

Mapfumo was living in Oregon . I only remember him touring the US east coast once or twice over the years he was in the US. A good show the one time I saw him

Thx for recommending Field Recordings from the Sahel and "Nterini"! Both fantastic in different ways.

touched upon by dog latin upthread but the chahoud ethiopian compilation is great

https://bbemusic.bandcamp.com/album/ernesto-chahoud-presents-taitu-soul-fuelled-stompers-from-1960s-1970s-ethiopia

it's so good. i like the way each side of the vinyl seems to explore different avenues, from jazz to rock n roll to more traditional-sounding stuff.

My personal highlight is track 10 Tilahun Gessesse - Aykedashim Libe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_guVpXBAnQA

That's how you do call and response.

saw Tal National over the weekend and (as expected) they were so entertaining
can anyone tell me the name of the song where the guitar player lingers on that one note really dramatically and then does like some exaggerated dramatic strums? (like a classic rock swinging arm strum) it was also the song where he went out into the audience. i wish i could describe it more accurately but that is the best i can do right now. it was probably their heaviest song?

Can't name the Tal National song.

Listening to latest Sidi Toure album Toubalbero. This Malian guitarist rocks on this, not as much as some but more than he used to. Nice enough vocals

Seeing on twitter that Sierra Leone Bubu musician Janka Nabay who had lived in DC and elsewhere in the US for a bit has died. Based on his Instagram account it appears he was back in Sierra Leone. No details available yet on his passing

Whoa

Just 54. Suddenly got sick there, and passed away.

Sad. He was in NY often enough I didn't know he lived in DC.

He used a Brooklyn based band but for awhile was down here ( both working in a food truck and doing gigs for either Sierra Leone immigrants or crossover audiences )

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/obituaries/janka-nabay-54-dies-carried-an-african-dance-music-worldwide.html

Jon Pareles notes in his Janka obit that after Janka’s 2017 European festivals tour, visa issues prevented him from going to the US, so he returned to his Sierra Leone homeland. There he recently had stomach issues and died.

Fatoumata Diawara North American tour happening. She was great live a few years back.

I missed latest local appearances by Venezuela's Betsayda Machado y La Parrando el Clavo, but the Instagram videos of their Afro-Venezuelan percussion and folk harmony vocals looked just as exciting as when I did see them for a bit at a festival

Malian guitarist Sidi Toure and band touring North America this month

Just splashed out on the new album by Hailu Merga, 'Lala Belu'. Only 6 tracks at full price, which I feel is pretty steep but it's quality and I adore the title track.
title track is incredible, so joyful

Yeah that's become a staple track for me. So simple, so fun

Enjoying that Habibi Funk compilation. Touches on all sorts of R&B styles (as well as Cape Verdean coladera), but the overall feel to me is closer to Garage Rock - raw, sometimes somewhat amateurish, full of power. The ppl behind it seem very earnest and conscientious about it, though perhaps a bit lacking in knowledge of the music that inspired the music they go digging for - they omit that one track is clearly a cover of "Treat Her Right", and attribute "Harlem Shuffle" to a French artist (!).

Liked my one listen to that Habibi Funk comp and need to get back to it. On their Bandcamp page they assert:

Some of our favorite records are best described as Arabic zouk (a genre originating from the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe) like Mallek Mohamed’s music, Algerian coladera (a popular musical style from the Cape Verdean islands) or Lebanese AOR, which means the process of musical influences displayed on this compilation was much more versatile than just taking Western music as a blueprint and translating it with a local accent.

Yeah, they say the same thing in the liner notes. Don't quite get how AOR doesn't count as "western music", but that's pedantry.

Habibi Funk is a great compilation, period. I guess it was a 2017 release.

I need to hear that Habibi Funk compilation more (and read more about it)

It's kind of a label sampler, the liner notes say something like "look out for a full release of this artist's album soon" on nearly every track.

Drove 45 minutes north of me to a Maryland exurb of DC to see Mali's Fatoumata Diawara. A real nice show. She's multi-talented--- plays guitar, has a great singing voice with range, can dance. She's acted onstage and in movies. No backup singers in her band so she looped her voice at times, so she could then dance some more. She sings in multiple languages and did pleas between songs for peace and respect in African countries. I had just seen the documentary "Mama Africa: Miriam Makeba", and Fatoumata's power, charisma and down to earth sensibility reminded me of Makeba a bit.

I think it's a shame Diawara couldn't have been on the Coachella bill-- lots of indie acts on the bottom of that bill that she could have taken the place of. Oh well, almost everything on this thread gets dismissed as obscure "world music" niche stuff that's not as relevant as American or Brit pop, rap, indie, r'n'b or country.

I don't have a grand thesis to offer, but it's interesting (for lack of a better word) that the ease of access provided by digital/social media hasn't lessened the parochialism of north american music culture. I might even say it's worse now than, say, 15 years ago? Not sure I could back that up tbh, and a lot of it probably has to do with the reduction in venues for writing about music / metric-driven editorial decisions about what gets covered, but it feels to me like there hasn't been anything "world" that really grabs attention in a long while. I'm probably forgetting something big and obvious though

tal national are pretty popular from the last show i saw of theirs

probably something about media outlets though

Songhoy Blues, Tinariwen, Jupiter & Okwess all seem to have a decent amount of crossover appeal

ha I was actually thinking of Tinariwen as an old band that got attention in an earlier era, so I guess this is all pretty relative. On that note, I don't know who Jupiter & Okwess are! and I need to check out Tal National

and tbh I was thinking more of stuff at the Beyonce/Weeknd level of global pop (afrobeats, dancehall, soca, kpop, etc) rather than the stuff that usually ends up on this thread. I guess WizKid was supposed to play at Coachella but didn't?

anyway, media budgets are probably the main factor. there just isn't anyone willing to pay someone to report on what's going on in Mumbai or Rio de Janeiro or Johannesburg like there was in my probably rose-colored memories of music media around the turn of the century

anyone else on here been enjoying the gumba fire comp on soundway? synthy 80s boogie from south africa, some amazing cuts on that thing but this is my favourite right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U12gemqcv1g

anyway, media budgets are probably the main factor. there just isn't anyone willing to pay someone to report on what's going on in Mumbai or Rio de Janeiro or Johannesburg like there was in my probably rose-colored memories of music media around the turn of the century

― rob, Monday, April 16, 2018 8:4

That's true. But alot of it really comes down to the individual writer (and if there's not a pr person hyping the stuff too). The Washington Post ran a freelancer's piece a year and a half ago about afrobeats/afropop; but they haven't had anything since. I was reading critic/author Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker say that she doesn't use Spotify,and only occasionally looks at Youtube so I guess expecting her to cover music that isn't mailed to her or that she can't buy, would be difficult. Former NY Times jazz critic critic Ben Ratliff used to go to Brazil and current New York Times writer Jon Pareles has as well. Peter Margasak in Chicago covers African music like Tal National as well as avante-jazz stuff. But Pitchfork's coverage is so hit and miss.

the ease of access provided by digital/social media hasn't lessened the parochialism of north american music culture

Well, has it done anything for North American cinema culture, or literature, or anything? I feel like this ease of access has been totally amazing for ppl already inclined to seek out stuff from other cultures in the first place, but it hasn't really lead to a more global world culture.

(I do wonder if ppl click on random Korean or Spanish shows on netflix sometimes. I hope so!)

anyone else on here been enjoying the gumba fire comp on soundway? synthy 80s boogie from south africa, some amazing cuts on that thing but this is my favourite right now:

Yeah, really nice. There's a lot of Boogie and a lot of House in there but I was surprised at how much it truly feels like its own thing.

curmudgeon: you're right that some established critics likely have the clout to follow their curiosity and write about something "riskier," but I can't really speculate as to why they aren't. tbf, I feel like the Quietus does a good job on this front, and while their tastes rarely match mine the Singles Jukebox consistently reviews non-anglophone pop songs that I never see mentioned elsewhere. I also haven't picked up an issue of the Wire in a very long time, and there are probably other venues doing work that I don't see.

Daniel_Rf: I think there are some pretty big format (meaning both digital file formats and length, not to mention differing language/translation issues) and consumption differences between music, literature, and cinema that make comparing them difficult. There aren't digital platforms for literature like there are for music; and as you mentioned, Netflix has actually invested quite a bit in offering "foreign" content, certainly compared to network/cable tv/your average multiplex. Of course, we have no idea how popular those shows & movies are, but they feel a little more visible to me than the music does. That said, I take your point that for lots of people, music (and lit/movies) not in English has very limited appeal and ease of access won't affect those attitudes.

These things are very difficult to compare, I agree. I guess I was just thinking of the early promise of the internet - culture and infomation distributed across the world! - and how this has certainly come true for a small cadre of enthusiasts, but the mainstreaming of the internet has not magically brought it about for the majority. I guess it's pretty naive to think it could have.

Latest Sidi Toure and band album on Thrilljockey has a nice rocking Malian groove feel. They’re touring North America now.

Aww, I missed this Sidi Toure appearance streaming--Apr. 22 - Charleston, WV - NPR Mountain Stage Radio.

The Sidi Toure April 24th 6 to 7pm US EST gig at Kennedy Center will be video-streamed by Kennedy Center on Facebook Live, and video archived on the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage website

Got to admit only discovered this through James Yorkston tweeting that he plays on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l37oVFrobGA&feature=youtu.be

Went back and checked out her other work thanks to it.

Try again with the youtube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l37oVFrobGA

https://ostinatorecords.bandcamp.com/album/abu-obaida-hassan-his-tambour-the-shaigiya-sound-of-sudan