Tanzanian music aficionados will complain that this selection is old news, but for the rest of you, I bet this is new: Ashimba.
His music sounds to me like a sort of cross between Aurelio Martinez and Nameless, if that makes any sense. Definitely keeping TZ on my mind on a beautiful late summer day in NYC. How I wish I could link to Ashimba’s song Usingizi, which is the most addictive one. But it appears that this is the only music video he made from the album. There’s a sample from Usingizi in the last moments in the video. You can download Ashimba’s whole album here.
PS, Is this becoming a music blog? Not my intention, but I am trying to bring a new selection every weekend.
Nairobi’s Daddy Owen has taken Coupé-Décalé, the Franco-Ivoirian dance craze, to church with his praise song, Kupe De Kalle.
The song is at least six months old, though NPR just picked it up, so it’s been making the Internet rounds a bit more in the last few days. (The NPR article is oddly incomplete in describing the origins of Coupé-Décalé — doesn’t even name the style, which is several years old. For that, read the Wikipedia article.)
This is interesting and unexpected to me for a few reasons.
The distance between East and West Africa often seems vast. It is usually cheaper and easier, after all, to fly from Nairobi to London than it is to fly from Nairobi to Abidjan. (Read about some of the shenanigans involved in intra-African flights here.) Thus, talking to some Kenyans, for example, one often feels that people sort of think of West Africa as the bizarro world on the other side of the continent where life is unpleasantly loud and in your face. This song is an example of the digital breakdown of that distance — something that is increasingly common with high speed web connections.
There is a mild East African flavor to this version of Coupé-Décalé. It’s hard to describe. It’s not quite as hard-hitting, but a little easier to listen to while kicking back, than those joints from the Jet Set.
And Coupé-Décalé is a style that epitomizes raunchiness, ridiculousness and excess — not the genre you’d expect to be mined for church music. (Cue comment from reader revealing that there’s been a gospel Coupé-Décalé movement in the Ivory Coast for the last five years that I don’t know about.)
Check it.
Of course, music has always been one of those things that crossed African divides — borders, languages, politics, religion, great distance — with relative ease. So maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. In any case, this is awesome. Makes me want to go put on some pointy shoes and spit some gibberish raps.
I was delighted to see the front page New York Times article today. Not only did it describe one of my favorite stretches of the San Juan River west of Mexican Hat, Utah — a river that gave me one of my first tastes of the wilderness as an eight year-old — but it also made a splashy introduction of some points that I think everyone will take more and more seriously in the next decade or so. Namely, that being constantly online shapes the way we think and process information, and that sometimes, we have to get offline. Continue reading →
The big vote is tomorrow. (Pretty good article (I think) by Gettleman.)
In addition to the news, here’s what I’m watching: anti-apathy clips from Kuweni Serious :
(Browse through their stuff for some others featuring Makmende, like this one where dude is complaining about government efforts to encourage birth control.)
Eamon Kircher-Allen 