We begin with your once-every-five-years Fiend update: The ex-No Limit rapper-slash-grizzly-bear-throated drug linguist is still making records—mixtapes, mostly, charming on the whole. If you grew up during the break-up of New Orleans’ rap empires, this news comes as a delight, like an ancient comet spotted orbiting back towards Earth, taken as harbinger of the reemergence [...]
It was just a song about a leaf, but at a certain time, I’m told, like seemingly anything in Haiti, it could get you killed. “Fèy” was that kind of hit-slash-occupational hazard for RAM, the Parliament Funkadelic-sized cast of Haitian dancers and folkloric musicians who performed it. The track itself sounds more sedative than seditious: [...]
Lost in the riddle of who South Africa’s most eminent Afrikaner gangsta rappers truly are and aren’t, is the thought of how fraught with imposters and racial shapeshifters entertainment has forever been in the Rainbow Nation. You and your ’80s roommate took this place for an easy morality play: Indisputable victims, most of them black, [...]
DAKAR, SENEGAL—I pass my first two weeks in this cosmopolitan desert city looking for Baaba Maal. The world music giant, singer behind nine records sold internationally, UN youth ambassador and Senegalese icon has some houses here, out there in the milieu. Senegalese of wealth often give him such things: houses. Senegalese without give what they [...]
One afternoon, 1965, the three Louisianan sisters/cousins who gave you “Chapel of Love,” unaware that the studio’s tapes were still rolling, recorded for posterity two minutes of delightful historical intrigue that had been circulating in oral obscurity for generations unknowable. “Iko, Iko,” they called that tune. The English chunks of the record came from an [...]
On the eighth track of her third record, ex-blues singer Liz McComb joins in the company of stomping piano chords and squealing electric organs to proclaim she’s “happy, happy working for the Lord.” It’s hard, toilsome work, she says, and that much you can hear: McComb is a tireless performer, ever pounding away onstage and [...]
Poor Ziggy Marley, poor Femi Kuti. The two chosen sons of the world music industry spent their youth dutifully catering to the expectations bequeathed to them by their fathers, superstars from the 1970s named Bob and Fela, respectively. (Maybe you’ve heard of them.) But then along comes meddlesome younger siblings (Damien and Seun, respectively) with [...]
Here’s a statistic courtesy of National Geographic: Of the 7,000 languages spoken on Earth, nearly half are facing extinction. Consider the artistic and anthropological repercussions. If 3,500 languages are fading away, how many songs, poems, proverbs, and folk stories are going to die off before the 22nd Century? The Caribbean coast of Central America, site [...]
As a CD, Umalali: the Garifuna Women’s Project offers the kind of cross-cultural immersion that an mp3 can’t match, a complete package with vivid photography documenting the female Garifuna singers—Central American descendants of shipwrecked slaves whose recreation group vocal styles have passed down from grandmother to granddaughter. Producer/engineer Ivan Duran did a magnificent job with [...]
