The Music Rarely Disappoints

I only got to catch one movie all weekend, the very disappointing comedy “Africa Paradis.” Taking place in 2033 after Europe has declined into poverty, colonialism and war while the recently created United States of Africa has become the center of global wealth, the movie follows the attempt of a French couple to illegally immigrate to Western Africa. It’s a wonderful premise, yet they blew it. The movie is low-budget, boring, and melodramatic.

I also only caught one session of the series of conferences on the history of slavery. Predictably, there were no Senegalese there, with more French people in the crowd than Africans born and still living in Africa. For inane reason most of the discussion ended up being about diversity training for teachers in France. Queen Mother Blakely brought up reparations and the response was underwhelming.

The concerts, however, didn’t disappoint.

The music was good and varied, even though the only representatives from the Diaspora were some Martinicans performing Martinican folkloric music and dance, and Netsayi, a black British “acoustic soul” singer who also sings in Shona. She gets credit for putting female instrumentalists on stage (a rare sight in Senegal, where the only women on stage are young, pretty “singers”) and for actually saying something in her songs. Still, it’s regrettable that there was only one non-Francophone artist. Then again she was sponsored by the British Embassy, and it’s not like the Brazilians or Cubans can afford to send someone or Senegal afford to bring them. Beyond that there were some tedious Mbalax bands, a gnawa band which made me really nostalgic for Morocco and the highlight of the weekend, the Senegalese hip hop, R&B, and dancehall trio Daara J. I had seen them perform on SummerStage in Central Park last year, and remembered how the crowd just wasn’t ready for them. This time though they came on at 3 AM on a Saturday playing before their core audience of young, working-class Dakarois men and they put on a great, high-energy show which woke everybody up. It made up for having to take the ferry at 4 AM and then having to waxale with cabdrivers while my teeth were chattering due to the cold.

Fete de la Musique

Thursday night Soizic and I went to the Fete de la Musique downtown, an outdoor concert sponsored by Radio Nostalgie and presented over S2TV. Soizic’s boyfriend is a DJ for the radio station and was one of the MCs for the concert. The concert was interesting; it consisted of a bunch of second and third-tier musical acts each performing one song before a mostly bored and unimpressed audience. There was no entrance fee so the place was packed but people were not feeling it. Most of the acts were random Mbalax singers who came on stage and lip-synched their lyrics. I don’t speak Wolof (yet) but I get the feeling that all the songs are about the same shit. Mbalax is one of those “highly-infectious, irresistible rhythms” that “world music” magazines and travel guides always seem to describe, but it is hard to get into it when it is just a random singer singing some song no one knows. The singers that had back-up dancers were always much more entertaining because Mbalax dancing is just bad-ass. It is like a way cooler Chicken Noodle Soup Dance. The other acts were all terrible hip hop acts that imitate the worse of American hip hop. It is like they all watch too much of the “Made in USA” show and think that if they rap about guns, clothes, cars, women and jewelry all of these things will suddenly materialize. The performances consisted of the MC coming on and yelling “What’s up!” in heavily-accented English, with three of his boys flaying their arms to the beat and nodding their heads whenever the MC finished a punch-line. My favorite song was the one where the chorus was “shake your booty” but instead sounded like “check your booty.” This was followed by a trio of female MCs, which led me to think that there might be a respite from the ignorance, but instead they sang a song titled “Bounce.” I will give y’all a clue: it wasn’t about basketball. I also saw what claims to be the first reggaeton group from Gabon. I was frightened by what was about to come when the Soizic’s boyfriend—who is Gabonese—announced the act. I shuddered, and thought as an American hip hop fan I already have so much to atone for; I cannot bear to also shoulder the burden for the ignorance that can only result from the spread of reggaeton. Fortunately, the two MCs sounded like all of the other 50 cent clones I had heard that evening, and I can sleep well after concluding that the reggaeton thing is just a gimmick. The only good thing from the evening was that it looks like maybe Senegalese don’t insist that all of their women be super-skinny. Many of the performers (even two of the three MCs rapping in “Bounce”) were full-figured and natural-looking women.