On hot days while walking through Katutura, Namibia, The D Man heard the popular sounds of Africa blaring from homes and shebeens. Refugees from Congo or Angola. Hip Owambo kids. Old men and women. They all shared a passion for the rhythm-heavy and key-board inflected sounds that pulsed throughout the continent during the turn of the century. The music was alive, even subversive, and stemmed from a common ancestry in highlife (see: here), Afrobeat (see: here and here), and other far-flung derivations. In South Africa, kwaito beat over the townships during the peak of its commercial success and offered the youth a sense of danger and empowerment, not unlike Southern California's rap scene from the late eighties and early nineties. Music was a public and (dare I say it?) primal aspect of African culture and connectivity.
Given these dalliances with the Motherland, The D Man is a sucka for Afro-pop and is happy to share the splendid album Warm Heart of Africa by The Very Best. Every year there is usually one album that The D Man overlooks and actually feels bad about it--not just that he let his readers down or that his own sense of the musical canon abandoned him--but he feels like he owes the artists something of an accounting, or at least a simple explanation or apology. So it is with The Very Best.
Esau Mwamwaya, an ebullient Malawi-born singer, met up with the Belgian DJ/production duo Radioclit in London. Apparently, Mwamwaya was running a second-hand furniture shop and sold a bicycle to Etienne Tron, whose studio happened to be just down the street. Mwamwaya ultimately teamed up with Tron and Johan Karlberg to create a project called The Very Best. The group released a mixtape that became an underground sensation and on their proper debut album, The Very Best revels in a warm celebration of expansive Afro-Western pop music, with bright-eyed vocals from Mwamwaya and impeccable samples and production by Radioclit.
Check out the new video for "Warm Heart of Africa" featuring Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig. It is precisely what an Afro-pop video should be for a song that fuses multiple styles and raises thousands of smiles. This is not "world music"--this is great global pop music in vibrant dialogue with its various neighbors. If this doesn't make you feel good, well, something is really wrong. Get some help.
BONUS: Check out the song "Rain Dance" with everyone's favorite Sri Lankan freedom fighter, M.I.A. You will shake your backside, I promise.
3 comments:
:)
This was the video we were supposed to make together. Me, the cool cosmopolitan suburban punk. You, the honey-voiced black man surrounded by fly African ladies.
Two worlds colliding. Should have been us.
We can create a Warm Heart of Africa 2.0 in October.
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