Saturday, December 1, 2012

Some seriously cool music from People’s Azawad (not)

[Update 1 Dec 2012] As part of our satirical series on Azawad, we earlier posted this ...

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The newly-liberated free and independent people’s popular republican emirate of united Islamic AZAWAD  is by now universally recognized as the epicentre of culture on this planet.
Check this out:

They whack those axes like they was Uzis …

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...  yet now must sadly report (we all saw it coming):

Khaira Arby, one of Africa’s most celebrated musicians, has performed all over the world, but there is one place she cannot visit: her native city of Timbuktu, a place steeped in history and culture but now ruled by religious extremists.
One day, they broke into Arby’s house and destroyed her instruments. Her voice was a threat to Islam, they said, even though one of her most popular songs praised Allah.
“They told my neighbors that if they ever caught me, they would cut my tongue out,” said Arby, sadness etched on her broad face.
Northern Mali, one of the richest reservoirs of music on the continent, is now an artistic wasteland. Hundreds of musicians have fled south to Bamako, the capital, and to other towns and neighboring countries, driven out by hard-liners who have decreed any form of music — save for the tunes set to Koranic verses — as being against their religion.
The exiles describe a shattering of their culture, in which playing music brings lashes with whips.
“In northern Mali, music is like oxygen,” said Baba Salah, one of northern Mali’s most-respected musicians. “Now, we cannot breathe.”

[Update 21 Jan 2013]
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/malian-musicians-call-for-peace/

[Update 6 Feb 2014]  And now Tinariwen, singing in Tamasheq -- A long-awaited, much-merited success:
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/02/267027505/first-listen-tinariwen-emmaar

This site lets you listen to the whole album, free.

And once again, the album couldn't actually be made in Azawad...

More on Tuareg music here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/08/vivent-les-touaregs.html

And on the alphabet used to write Tamasheq:  Tifinagh.

[Update Feb 2014]  Cf. now this:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2014/03/03/140303crmu_music_frerejones


Another fruitful Arab/African musical melange:

Nota bene  a particularly haunting melody, sung in English and Zulu, beginning ten minutes into the interview.
I don't really listen to pop music anymore;  but every so often, two cultures interweave, in a way that makes the overfamiliar  once again new and strange.

Here that song separately, here:
“You Shall Rise”
and (with superb video), here:

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