When Burkina Faso Vibrated with a New Culture | Hacker News Reader

When Burkina Faso Vibrated with a New Culture

newyorker.com

61 pointsisserson19 comments

As someone who was born in Burkina Faso, this was a great read. Thank you for sharing. If you found this article interesting I recommend you look into Salif Kieta and Ali Blondy.

Alpha Blondy you mean?

Yes, my mistake! Thanks for the correction.

The richness of the west African music scene continues to astound me. I think the western Sahara area (Mali, Niger) is producing the best music in the world today, but the depth of it, going back to the introduction of commercial recording in the post-WWII era, is fantastic.

Wow, this is super interesting. I've listened to just a very small amount of African music but really enjoyed it. Any artists or albums you can point me towards?

I personally find that labels and anthologies are an easy way to discover artists:

* Awesome Tapes from Africa: https://www.awesometapes.com/

* Analog Africa: https://analogafrica.bandcamp.com/

* Sublime Frequencies: http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/

Here's one album, "Bambara Mystic Soul": https://youtu.be/8XWuFG-Sq_g

Sahel Sounds has a really interesting anthology called "Music from African Cellphones", which is mostly very obscure local bands recorded live on cell phones, and shared around that way. I dig how drum machines are influencing the beats - it's a whole new sound.

And of course, there are lots of anthologies of older music from the 1960s and 1970s, all of Fela Kuti's output, etc...

Analog Africa is a great label. I have been slowly working my way through their collection and the amount of disco, funk, and rock music they exposed me to is amazing. The music is very refreshing. It just ever so slightly odd and different while also being very positive and rhythmic.

My favourite albums of their collection right now are Space Echo, Amara Toure, and also Bambara Mystic Soul.

I think partially because of Spotify's and Youtube's recommender systems this type of music has picked up popularity lately. There are also several DJs such as Palms Trax and Hunee who have recently started mixing in African Disco into their tracks. I do not complain about this trend.

I started a love of modern African music via Franco/OK/TPOK Jazz.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3yR4bfT94yBav4vl12fAra?si=jic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPOK_Jazz

There's also more recent Soukous music which has it's own incredibly catchy cascading guitar:

https://open.spotify.com/user/ryandeussing/playlist/3nMZuA1L...

There are also some truly fascinating stories of how latin music influences landed in Africa and how African LPs carried by merchant seamen from Africa impacted Latin music: http://www.factmag.com/2016/08/21/champeta-colombia-sound-sy...

My personal passion is the "desert blues" music that's mostly Tuareg. Start there with Tinariwen and Bombino. They're widely available in the West without much effort. They also tour heavily in the US, so keep your eye out for concerts!

From there, the Sahel Sounds label puts out a lot of obscure and interesting music on Bandcamp.

I can recommend two films as well. The first is "Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai" (Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It), which is a Tuareg remake of Purple Rain, the first fiction movie in the Tamashek language. The second is the documentary "They Will Have to Kill Us First", which is about Malian musicians living in refugee camps due to the civil war in northern Mali.

That documentary leads to the band Songhoy Blues, who are from the same area but Songhoy rather than Tuareg. They are young guys who met in a refugee camp, and managed to score a British record contract. Upon seeing them live, my spouse said it was like seeing a young Rolling Stones. Very accessible, compared to more raw music like Tinariwen.

There's a lot more, but this is a good start.

Great recommendations. Thanks for sharing!

African Scream Contest - Raw & Psychedelic Afro Sounds from Benin & Togo 70s[0]. Not the best name I guess, but it is one of my favorite compilations of any genre. I found the 3rd song, 'It's a Vanity', from a snowboarding video that came out a couple years ago called "Glue"[1].

As others have mentioned, its released by Analog Africa.

[0]http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/mf4h/

[1]https://youtu.be/udf7DywE2Iw

I like Les Wanyika. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxhOV1gvVTI As a bonus you can see some great dance moves ;-)

This is very old (1958) but my Dad introduced me to Missa Luba - a Catholic Mass sung by Congolese.

Famously used in the movie "If..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missa_Luba

There's no such thing as "best music in the world" ... It's very subjective and while I'm sure the beats are deep, using superlatives don't really do the music justice.

You're no fun.

It's English. It's a language of poetry, not precision.

It can be both. The more precise, the more poetry there is.

If you'd like more context, here's an interesting documentary on the life of Thomas Sankara: https://vimeo.com/46137917

If you like hearing music from different periods and places, this is a cool tool: http://radiooooo.com/

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