Gbute Vange (53 Reasons to Hate Vampire Weekend, Pt. 1 of 4)

"There are these so-called ‘world music experts' who say that there are certain ways you have to play African music.  You have to use the right instruments, you can't be a woman, you can't wear pants, you can't speak English too good.  But I tell you I have been around the world, all over the place, and all I hear everywhere is African music.  So I'm just going to play whatever the hell I want to."

Two of New York City's parks celebrated African music during the weekend of August 11th and 12th, 2007.  Prospect Park's bandshell offered performances by Sierra Leone's Refugee All-Stars, Zimbabwean mbira player Stella Chiweshe, Congolese soukous guitarist Shiko Mawatu, Malian "master of the talking drum" Baye Kouyaté, and Brazilian-born Brooklyn resident Davi Vieira's (myspace) Afro-Latin hyrid band.  Central Park Summerstage hosted Benin ex-pat (and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador) Angélique Kidjo and Zap Mama (myspace), a group whose leader was born to a Bantu woman in the Congo.

That same Saturday, local upstarts Vampire Weekend (home page - myspace) headlined a free show on the Lower East Side curated by the East River Music Project.

A coincidence, I'm sure, scheduling a batch of hip, pale Ivy League grads who've built much of their sound around Afropop-inspired guitar licks as an alternative to actual black musicians who are actually from Africa.  But it presented a opportunity to ponder in a generally underinformed way what, if any, forms of authenticity matter, the embarrassing unchecked nature of modern media coverage, and what's wrong with these kids and their music today.

Don't worry.  There will be time for cheap shots, too.

*

Angélique Kidjo with Buddy Guy and Vernon Reid - Voodoo Child (Live) (mp3) (buy Lightning in a Bottle CD/DVD)

You don't go see Angélique Kidjo (myspace) because she's African.  You see her because she's awesome.

She's been on stage since she was six.  Born to a musical family, her first appearances were with her mother's theater troupe; she was singing on Benin's national radio as a teen.  In the early eighties, when she was in her early twenties, political pressure forced a move to Paris.  There she did time as a back-up singer and fronted Dutchman Jasper van't Hof's African-inspired jazz fusion band Pili Pili before releasing funked-up pop albums under her own name.

Her career has been built on collaborations with artists - a list long and worldly - and cultures, its greatest achievement a trio of records contemplating how the music of her homeland travelled and was changed through slavery.

Angélique Kidjo - Never Know (mp3) (buy Oremi)

Angélique Kidjo - Tumba (mp3) (buy Black Ivory Soul)

Angélique Kidjo - Seyin Djro (mp3) (buy Oyaya!)

The African Diaspora Trilogy visits the United States in the R&B-heavy Oremi; Brazil, where she found people singing songs in Benin's native Fon and Yoruba, in Black Ivory Soul; Cuba and the Caribbean in Oyaya!  There are contributions from Carlinhos Brown, Gilberto Gil, ?uestlove, Branford Marsalis, Cassandra Wilson, Henri Salvador, Kelli Price, and, for some reason, Dave Matthews.

The project never once feels like a conscious anthropological dig (like, say, David Byrne's fine Rei Momo, which has a genre checklist by its track listing) and it's no museum piece.  These are mostly new songs written in partnership with others and their vitality is evident.  The music never gets opaque or arcane, it's not an aggressive attempt at expression through collage.  That would work against the point:  Kidjo's hunt to find her culture around the world isn't a hunt for identity, but perspective; the music isn't an attempt at singularity, but unity.  Nationality doesn't matter, language doesn't matter.  Her words aren't meant to go any specific place - she sings in more tongues than even she understands (makes up her own words, too, which is - wopbopbaloo - very rock and roll of her).  Age doesn't matter.  Your mother would enjoy these records (and may have already, as the Matthews duet was a crossover hit), you should too.  It is her music and it is the world's music.

But not "world music."

World music, according to the Rough Guide to it, was a marketing term dreamed up in 1987 by small London-based record labels for a month-long promotion pushing international artists who had failed to find shelf space.  It has since come to be both a catch-all designation for non-English-speaking acts and a ferociously guarded genre.  The latter's a quest for purity, for music untainted by Western influence.  At its best it represents a struggle against McMusicish cultural homoginization, at its worst, as Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor argue in Faking It:  The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (Hat Tip: Shake Your Fist), its erection of a gate and the anointment of gatekeepers bastardizes careers with its own Western influence:

"The conservationist approach to world music often distorts and ossifies the original culture it aims to preserve...  The modern world-music movement is not openly imperialist or racist but it has a very clear idea of the kinds of simple local, sustainable cultures it is looking for.  In this respect the world music police are more like condescending missionaries, or anthropoliogists of the nineteenth century, always willing to believe the best of the natives as long as they play along with our naïve ideas of their simple life.

"The result is that world music becomes a ghetto.  The only way for a third-world musician to move beyond the local scene is to collaborate, or to travel and peform to foreign audiences, but both of these options are frowned on by those who prefer their world music to remain pure and isolated.  This desire for cultural authenticity can easily become a kind of disdain, or paternal tolerance, for third-world musicians who aspire to improve their conditions."

It's also futile.  As a basic form of human communication, music has evolved with backs-and-forths as long as there have been comings and goings.  It can be critically or ideologically convenient to believe that primal musical ideas sprung forth from isolated instances, to pin y sound to x location, to oversimply Africa - or America - as a starting point for everything.  But as long as there has been a trade of goods - including, tragically, people-as-goods - ideas have both been taken and given.  Starting hundreds of years ago the Portugueuse, Benin's first white colonizers and slave-traders, left their seed and their language - Kidjo's mother's maiden name was Portugeuse, and when Kidjo was growing up some Portugeuse was still spoken in her town - and it's unlikely they left nothing else.  Africans have had a vast influence on music in the Americas, but the hybrids that developed here jumped back via travel and technology to create new ones there.  You don't get soukous without rumba, highlife without swing, calypso and Cuban son.  Fela Kuti doesn't make Afro-beat without hearing James Brown make funk.

When there's no such thing as cultural isolation, can there be such a thing as cultural authenticity?  It's easy to think otherwise if you're divorced from any particular personal cultural heritage or mired in situations where cultural overlap is constant.  Authenticity's a tricky notion in any performance art.  We don't want to be made to feel something genuine for something phony.  We don't want to feel like we're being fooled.  Music presented within the proper cultural context assists the suspension of disbelief, and because music affects us both emotionally and physically it's tempting to assign spiritual and biological qualities to it.  But can music belong to anything beyond its performers and its audience?  Can it belong to a culture?  A nationality?  A race?

Interracial musical exchanges - I'm not bright enough to successfully navigate the m-word, so let's not go there - may not have historically occurred under mutually positive cirucumstances, but the resultant evolution of ideas shouldn't be ignored.  Even when they take initially uncomfortable turns.  There's a long tradition of cringing when white musicians crib styles from their black peers; a lot of necessary steps carry varying degrees of objectionability before we even consider Ivy Leaguers appropriating Afro-Pop.  Minstrelsy, hillbilly blues, western swing, rockabilly, blue-eyed soul, Mick Jagger...

Angélique Kidjo - Gimme Shelter (Live on KCRW Sounds Eclectic 6-10-07)(mp3)

(Apologies for the tinny quality.  The CD version suffers from a bad case of Joss Stone.)

The quote at the top of this entry (it's approximate, reconstructed from notes some months after-the-fact) was Kidjo's Summerstage introduction to this cover.  And say whatever you want about the song's recontextualization, or re-application, it's no righteous reclamation.  "I love the Rolling Stones," she said.  "They are the best rock and roll band of all time.  It's my tribute to them."  Likewise, the Hendrix song that she's assumed into her repertoire is as much a fan's tribute to a musical hero as - Voodoo/Vodun/Vudun has its origins in her native country - a natural notch in an ongoing cultural exchange.

Kidjo has had an easier time getting attention stateside than many international musicians.  She speaks English, she attracts high-profile collaborators, she's been nominated for four Grammys, she's won one.  She sings pop songs.  She exhibits zero snobbery (she was an opener for Josh Groban, last year, she recorded a song for the Lion King 2 Soundtrack), but has enough talent to avoid seeming indiscriminate.  She's relentlessly but realistically positive.  She tours and she tours and she tours.

Once she has your attention she will hold it.  Not with the songs or the singing or the band, though all are fine; and not with showmanship or hijinks,  though there's certainly  that.  Angélique Kidjo has the charisma of the sun.  She's one of those people whose insides don't stop at their outsides.  She has presence, she has purpose.  In concert she's innately, effortlessly musical.  She shares her joy.

She wanted to write a love song to her continent, she said when introducing the unapologetic anthem "Afirika."  "Because every time you turn on the TV, everything positive about Africa is on the animal channel."  With barely any prompting, the audience filled out the chorus - "Ashè é Maman, ashè é Maman, Afirika" - so heartily that Kidjo shushed her band and yelled at the crowd.  "Come on New York!  Make me dance!"

She likes to dance, doesn't do it alone.  It has become fashionable to invite the crowd on stage - feels like every third show I attended, last year, included a call to bum rush.  I don't know how long it's been a part of Kidjo's show, but it's not new.  Anyone who wants to can come and stay for a few songs, but she puts out a special request for kids and their parents.  At Prospect Park's Bandshell in 2006, to ensure the stage would become a swirling mass of giddy Brooklynites, she went out to fetch folks, jumping the fence that reigned in the VIP section.

Kidjo is authentically Kidjo.  She crosses too many borders, brings too many people together, to be "culturally authentic."  Which culture?  Benin?  The whole path of the diaspora?  Paris?  She now lives in Brooklyn.  Just another Brooklyn musician!  Her music is not raw, is not isolated, is not fixed.  Why stay in one spot, when all you hear everywhere is African music?  She's not going around showing a scrapbook, she's having a conversation.  Her music's too worldly to be "world music."  "I used to argue about this sort of stuff but it's too stupid," she says. "Nature provides variety. Nature is not pure, for Godsakes. You cannot go against nature. There is nothing ‘pure' in this whole world."

(Kidjo's next local appearance will be Saturday, April 5th at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, which is not in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, or Park Slope.  Tickets are here.  And a touch pricey.)

(More pics from Kidjo's Summerstage show here.  Also there: Hoppersmusic, NYC Summer Blog.)

*

Sierra Leone's civil war (1991-2002) drove more than a third of its population across its borders.  Torn from their homes and ways of life, separated from families and social support systems, over two million people took shelter in camps in neighboring Guinea and waited out the brutal, indiscriminate violence that had overtaken their country.  Many assumed they would only have to stay a few months; some are still living there, some children have never seen their "home."

A trio of filmmakers who had been making a documentary on the role of music in refugee camps stumbled across, then focused on, a band vocalist/songwriter Reuben M. Koroma and guitarist Francis John "Franco" Langba had assembled to pass the time.  Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars (myspace) sought to give voice to the displaced while entertaining them, to turn commiseration into celebration.  The group attracted some attention, went on a UNHCR-sponsored tour of refugee camps; after the war ended ("the largest peacekeeping mission in UN History" up to that time, according to the film), they were used to spread word that it was safe to go back.

It's not a particularly good movie (Netflix has it available for streaming and rental or you can buy the DVD), but it's a good story.  The documentary was a hit on the festival circuit and played PBS, the band recorded an album (it's called Living Like a Refugee, though if we're to believe Tom Petty, you don't have to...) and toured internationally.

In addition to cultural issues Barker and Taylor discuss personal authenticity, the idea that an artist has experienced the events or lifestyle about which they're singing.  The All Stars would appear to have this corner covered, been there, done that.  The refugee experience was the very genesis of the band, and if you're demanding genuine loss there's plenty to be had.  The youngest member of the band, a rapper who calls himself Black Nature, was eleven years old when he was first brought to the camp.  His parents were killed in the fighting.  Were his mother alive, he says, "I don't think I would recognize her good."  A percussionist plays without his left arm.  The most horrific tale in the film belongs to vocalist-kongoma player Mohamed Bangura.  Back in Sierra Leone, he watched men murder his mother and father; then, before chopping most of Bangura's hand off, militants made him beat his own infant child to death with a mortar and pestle.

Think how awesome Vampire Weekend's music will be once its members pound their children to death with a mortar and pestle!

The All Stars' authenticity is important because they are trading on it.  Which isn't to suggest that it's some skeevy, exploitive marketing tool, but that, initially at least, the music is secondary.  The backstory's out front selling tickets.  In their own country, it's a shared experience (again: one-third of the population, two million plus).  Overseas, it's curiosity and inspiration and patronage.  Lands with more money and more stability don't know these kinds of lives.  It helps that this story had a happy ending - firsthand suffering is less of a draw than firsthand survival.  Their show provides opportunity to give audience to and glean secondhand hope from folks who've earned their tale.

Or, hey, have they?  Toward the end of the documentary, when the refugees first return to Sierra Leone, Koroma is reunited with members of his old band, The Emperors.  These men, most of whom stayed and weathered the war, were folded into the new outfit.  When they toured, Emperors guitarist Ashade Pearce - an imposing figure with serious features and frosted dreads and eyebrows - came, but All Stars founder Franco did not.  How many members of the touring band were actually refugees, I do not know. It's hardly Journey-without-Steve-Perry.  Koroma is there, as is his wife "Auntie" Efuah Grace, as is Black Nature.  Bangura, the most memorable figure in the film, is not with the band, nor is he on the record.  He was too troubled to return to his newly pacified country, was still - as late as 2006 - trying to live with himself in a refugee camp.

There are no songs called "Beat My Own Infant Child to Death with a Mortar and Pestle Blues," so I guess that's okay.

Scanning reviews, some seem surprised that the All Stars' sound is bright and bouncy, but nothing else would make sense.  Koroma says the original purpose of their music was to "de-traumatize the people, dis-occupy people from the worries that they have;" there's no call to force folks who've already lost so much to suffer through more moaning.  One of the band's most popular songs is about soap!  "Washee washee," they sing.

De-traumatize, dis-occupy... Koroma didn't use the word "distract."  Many of his lyrics directly address hunger, homelessness, helplessness.  The songs don't creak and kvetch because they don't have to.  It's easy to forget that people are capable of a more complex catharsis when we're oft-stuffed with thin one-note genre-stuffs that wear their emoticon on their sleeves.  Here it's happypop, angryRAWRAWRAWR, r&bsex, empty, clever indie.  Bah.  Post-hippie America has learned to bristle at preachy sloganeering, our anti-political bent nicely complemented by an inability to dance and think at the same time.  So the shrewdness of two of the world's most cutting political styles - calypso and reggae, party musics both - is boiled down to bounce and bongwater.  "You guys up for some reggae tonight?"

Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars - Refugee Rolling (mp3) (buy)

¡No Más!  This is reggae, or near-reggae, and it's a sharp integration of the refugee lifestyle with one of music's more complicated figures.  The transient has been romanticized, he's been scorned, he's been portrayed as prideful or self-loathing.  But his successes or failures have been the result of an internal yearning for freedom.  He can love them and leave them, but he has to leave the ones he loves.  For the All Stars, the open road is a cage.  "Rolling" starts with politely barked orders (well-placed sarcasm in "another safer region" and "it's final").  There's an understanding that subservience is necessary - "rolling for the better, rolling for our safety, rolling for our lives" - and an understanding that perpetual mobility keeps you weak.  "A rolling stone never gather no riches, a rolling stone never gather no property."

Touring, of course, is a totally different situation.  I don't think I've ever seen anyone happier on stage than the All Stars' bassist, who gives out smiles like they're free.  He's got a pair of go-to rockstud moves:  He strolls around with his instrument flat on the top of his head, or he runs forward and slides to his knees.  He does this again and again and again, and it's tough to tire of it because you don't think he never will.

This night in Prospect Park, the All Stars play a lot of reggae.  A lot.  They play other things.  They play palm wine music, which has a different laid-back groove.  They play gumbe, a very satisfying Caribbean-derived pop associated with Guinea-Bissau.  Occasionally songs get punched up by Nature, who raps with gusto (his idol is Busta Rhymes).  The band - already eight or nine strong - is joined (video) for a song or two by S.L. hip-hoppers Dry-Yai, whose white T's/baggy jeans aesthetic contrasts with the All-Stars' tie-dyed pajama-like outfits (though one percussionist wore an "I Love Black People" t-shirt).  They rap over reggae.  At one point Koroma introduces a song as a style native to Sierra Leone, a style that's disappearing.  It's called baskeda, he says, and it's "not reggae.  But very similar to reggae."  It sounds like reggae to me.

I don't like reggae!  But the show's a blast because the band's having a blast.  It's election night in their home country, which is cause to celebrate; they have a home country and can go back to it, which is cause to celebrate; they're on stage playing music and people love them, which is cause to celebrate.  Some apparent expats rush the VIP section waving Sierra Leone's green, white, and blue.  The sound is full, the All Stars' polyrhythms have the crowd shaking and grinning all show long.  They may be a better story, but they're a pretty good band.

Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars - Pat Malonthone (mp3) (buy)

Brought the house down from the waist down.  Many of the All Stars' songs are in English (it's the national language of Sierra Leone, which was a Brit colony).  This isn't, but it was the most understood song they played.

The title means "cooking okra," its lyrics "warn against greed and gluttony," sure, okay.  The important words here are "gbute vange," a style which Koroma said translates as "movement of the lower part of the body," which translated perfectly.  The niceties are fine; those Santanaish licks are sweet, the percussive fits and calls/responses give other parts of your being stuff2do.  But this song's got an itinerary.  In the crowd, head nodding gave way to shoulder gyrations, the groove shook down vertebrae until even the white people were using their hips.

I don't like okra!  But okra-lover or no, refugee or no, African or no, whoever's behind gbute vange knows exactly where you can put your authenticity.  Had they come up with a rhythm called "stop supporting corrupt governments and keep your ‘never again' genocide promise," that room would have gone out and saved the world.

(more pics, also there:  Innercontinental, That Pluming Place)

CONTINUE TO PART TWO

tags: angelique kidjo  refugee all stars  vampire weekend  year old concert reviews  tldnr  better never than late  

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