Senegalese rappers presenting weekly news round-up
The war in Syria isn’t the easiest topic to break down in a brief newscast. But that’s exactly what Senegalese rapper Makhtar ‘‘Xuman’’ Fall does — and throws it down in rhyme no less. All eyes are turned to the powder keg of the world; To the Middle East where Syria is sitting on a bomb. Dialogue, discussions and negotiations; To legitimise a war you need a coalition.
Fall raps these lines in French from behind a newscaster’s desk, sporting reading glasses and a blazer with his long dreadlocks tied back behind his head.
Next he turns to a ‘‘guest commentator’’, Senegalese rap icon Didier Awadi who adds a few words of his own: ‘‘The bastards are getting organised and they want blood... One more time they want to make us swallow their lies. And even without the proof, they’ll bring out the heavy artillery.’’
In the span of a programme just five minutes long, Fall and his co-host Cheikh ‘‘Keyti’’ Sene tackle everything from the Middle East to local woes like the flooding that disproportionately hits poor suburbs of Senegal’s capital. They even interview people on the street — all of whom can conveniently rap as well.
The programme Journal Rappe is now aired twice a week on a Senegalese television network after it went viral on YouTube earlier this year.
In an effort to reach even more fans, Fall raps his portion in French while Sene’s contributions are in the other national language, Wolof. It’s not an identical translation but the two try to offer up rhymes along the same lines. Over the past several years, many rap artists in Senegal were active in antigovernment protests that helped lead to the ouster of long-time President Abdoulaye Wade. Their timely and politically tinged lyrics, though, haven’t easily translated into real-time sales.
Nightclubs and neighbourhood hangouts radiate rap music in the West African country although most of what is played comes from the United States or France. Hip hop is wildly popular, and artists here are seen in many ways as modern-day griots, traditional West Africa musical storytellers who pass on history through their songs.
Journalists, they may tell the other side but they stay neutral. We don’t
It’s a laborious process. The co-hosts spend an entire week crafting and filming their tracks for a single five-minute show. Each week they record their performances together in advance and then gather at a second-floor apartment to tape them as they voice the lyrics. As buses and horse-drawn carts clack by on the pavement below, they take turns sitting in front of a green sheet.
Two electric fans whirl as more than a dozen men crowd into the room to watch the process. Glasses of Senegalese tea are passed around and cups are shared as one guest stumbles over cramming French President Francois Hollande’s name into his tight lyrics.
Sene is a linguist at heart, having studied translation at university. He speaks French, Wolof and English, and insists there is no topic they can’t break down in verse. In Senegal, though, he admits it’s hard to talk about homosexuality or marabouts, the country’s highly influential Islamic spiritual leaders.
‘‘They love that this is a place where we give more than information. With journalists they may tell the other side but they stay neutral. We don’t,’’ he said as he drafted his thoughts inside a Dakar recording studio alongside Fall.
The Journal Rappe programme shows just how innovative hip hop artists remain in Senegal, says Murray Forman, an associate professor of media and screen studies at Northeastern University.
‘‘They’re taking it to some different place, a place we don’t commonly see hip hop which I think is fun and exciting,’’ he said after watching their programmes online. ‘‘What I also like about this — they’re pushing and challenging the flexibility of established media forms like a newscast.’’
The concept already has been an artistic hit with real commercial potential, says Senegalese hip hop icon Duggy Tee. On a recent show, he joined Journal Rappe sporting a diamond earring, white blazer, and black and white tie with his image emblazoned on it as he waxed poetic in Wolof.
‘‘Rap is the street and the street is reality,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s why the concept has been such a success.’’
Justin Moore
Stand at attention for the recitation of the names of our new country-music heroes.
‘‘You’re a little bit of J-Lo, a little bit of Kim Kardashian,’’ Justin Moore sings on I’d Want It To Be Yours, which extols the virtues of what Trace Adkins called the ‘‘honky tonk badonkadonk’’.
Moore, too, is inspired by what bubbles out of Daisy Duke’s shorts: ‘‘Looks like two little pigs in a tow sack/I’m telling you right now, baby, you got back.’’
So Moore is a bad boy? Someone who not only has brought the genre low, but who wants to poison it with pop culture and hip hop references? He is far more wily than that. Off the Beaten Path is his third strong album, each of which engage in a bait and switch: cloaking old-school values with new-school references, but never going too far.
He is in no way a dissenter, merely someone who understands that old forms can stand even stronger with injections of new ideas.
Without the vintage quaver in Moore’s voice — on For Some Ol’ Redneck Reason, his twang lands like a generous pour of whiskey — or the thickness of the guitars in his arrangements, these songs would have other meanings for those that care to listen.
But Moore is solid in his convictions: that country music of the 1970s is worth preserving, and that the true modern spirit of that sound is mindful of the rest of the world.
He’s also capable of non-ideological beauty: Old Habits, a duet with Miranda Lambert with echoes of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, or That’s How I Know You Love Me, about the taming of a difficult man written with elegance and complexity by Justin Weaver, Rodney Clawson and Chris Tompkins. And he’s capable of playing it safe, too, with This Kind Of Town or Country Radio, which embrace old tropes without improving them.
‘‘I don’t care what you listen to, how you wear your hair, you can paint it blue/Hey, it takes all kinds,’’ Moore sings on the album’s opener, Old Back in the New School.
But really Moore wants it the other way around, for the new to season the old.
‘‘I don’t mind some attitude, a rebel heart/Hell, I got one too,’’ he adds, ‘‘but you still gotta walk the line.’’
— Jon Caramanica
MGMT
Something’s always looming and buzzing — or burbling or clattering or tapping or ratcheting or blipping — near the foreground throughout MGMT’s third album, MGMT. It makes the album both testing and, eventually, rewarding.
Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, who write and record as MGMT, have embraced excess since MGMT’s 2007 debut album, Oracular Spectacular. Their lyrics are ornately elusive, their arrangements deploy a neo-psychedelic profusion of instruments, and many of their songs pack in multiple episodes. MGMT trimmed back those tendencies enough to start their major-label career with three singles from Oracular Spectacular that pushed forward drumbeats and keyboard hooks to hint at 1970s pop in Time To Pretend, Electric Feel and the 2 million-selling Kids. But MGMT’s second album, Congratulations in 2010, spurned pop mechanics, reaching back to the most baroque confections of 1960s pop, with no hits.
Behind the disco-ball gleam of Oracular was a fascination with youthful bravado and disillusionment; the labyrinthine songs of Congratulations grappled — and quarrelled — with commercial success. On MGMT, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser have even larger ambitions. They ponder purpose, fate and mortality in songs like Mystery Disease and Your Life Is A Lie.
The album’s keynote is borrowed: Introspection, a folk-rock song from a 1968 album by a Long Island songwriter who called himself Faine Jade. It vows, ‘‘There’s a reason, and I will someday find the plan.’’ MGMT is less optimistic; its songs see growing malaise and the inevitability of loss and deterioration.
Which explains the sound. There’s still a late-1960s foundation to most songs, while MGMT makes fewer digressions from verse-chorus-bridge than on Congratulations. But the music
Kenny Garrett
Focus has never seemed like a problem for saxophonist Kenny Garrett, who at 52 still possesses the taut, molten sound that made him a force nearly 30 years ago. But the title of his new album, Pushing The World Away, is meant to suggest a respite from distractions. Judging by the clarity and intensity of the results, Garrett had to do a lot of pushing.
His chosen path as a bandleader builds on the mid-60s terrain of the John Coltrane Quartet and there’s a typical amount of slashing polyrhythm and modal expedition here. Which might be a problem if Garrett’s current band, with the pianist Vernell Brown, the bassist Corcoran Holt, the drummer McClenty Hunter and the percussionist Rudy Bird, didn’t do this sort of thing imposingly well. So, too, do the colleagues who sub in for parts of the album, like the pianist Benito Gonzalez and the drummer Marcus Baylor.
As a composer Garrett is often quick to show his hand. Hey, Chick is his nod to Chick Corea, a long-time collaborator; the next track is Chucho’s Mambo, a tribute to the pianist Chucho Valdes. There’s also a springy calypso, J’ouvert (Homage To Sonny Rollins); and a churchly ballad with strings, Brother Brown, for the pianist Donald Brown, who helped produce the album.
Working in that capacity, Brown should have talked Garrett out of a smooth-jazz cover of I Say A Little Prayer, an odd-metered incantation so literalminded it incorporates actual chanting.
— Nate Chinen