Bereket Mengistab of Eritrea

Hey folks, sorry to have been so M.I.A. (and not even in a catchy way) in regards to this here blog.  It’s not for a lack of playlists; expect a playlist double-post sometime this week (you best get ready).  In the meantime, I thought I’d share this most awesome blog with y’all, as I’ll be playing from it liberally on the program this evening: Awesome Tapes from Africa.

I’m still not entirely sure what exactly this project entails, but it’s pretty incredible.  It seems like a Brooklyn-based DJ/ musicologist-of-sorts named Brian Shimkovitz has been collecting just that, awesome tapes from Africa, digitizing them, streaming them on his blog, and then using this material to play clubs & shows.  Also, it seems he has begun re-releasing some of these tapes in the States on his own label.  In the process, he’s created a heck of a streaming archive–be prepared to lose several hours, as what I’ve heard of the music he’s featured and posted has been roundly fantastic.  Super neat work that people are doing.

So I know I went and promised y’all a playlist from this past Monday’s show, but to be perfectly honest, I was paying about as much attention to the order I was playing things in as my 12th-grade English class was paying to the Extended Cut of a VHS version of Laurence Olivier’s King Lear that we would watch in daily, 15-minute chunks, so that it seemed like that poor King was wandering around blind in the fluorescently-lit felt-and-astroturf-lined set (picture Medieval England in the Metrodome circa 1993) for at least a couple months.  This is all an elaborate way of saying that any playlist I post won’t be terribly accurate, especially in terms of the order of things.  I was treated to some fantastic guest appearances in the studio (special thanks, incidentally, to Mr. Cameron Barr and Ms. Kati Ruark for providing some world-class banter, rapport, knowledge of the Kingdom of Lesotho [pronounced LeSUtu], and Opinions About Enya), and I was not terribly focused on playlisting.  My apologies,  but I’ll try and cobble together some of the tracks I played that y’all may appreciate.

(EDIT: AHHHH it’s not letting me embed anything at present so just click on the link because I swear it’s good)

So, first things not first at all, the above video is Baloji doing “Coup de Gaz.”  Baloji was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) but was raised in Belgium, and has been described as “a force in French rap over the past decade.”  This track is from 2007′s Hotel Impala, and is absolutely lovely and catchy and sad but also uplifting, which may seem overwrought (it probably is) but really is very much worth your time.  I’ve played it twice now on the program, which some folks may find Uncool, but on a world music show that airs two hours weekly I think it’s okay to give some of the super high-quality tracks enough time to really get inside your head.  I’ve only scratched the surface on this “world” music business, and I promise to quit being so Africacentric at some point, but I really have been blown away by the quality of music that’s happening at all of these far (from Whitesburg) flung corners of the earth and that I’ve just been able to stumble upon.

For far, far more on African hip-hop, check out www.afrobeat.org , there’s some fantastic work happening over there.  In the meantime, I’m going to go find a harshly-lit movie set in which to royally (ha!) screw up the splitting of my vast inheritance and slowly go insane.  See you on the other side.

the H.G.

So this is some brand-new, catchy-as-anything hip-hop out of Tanzania, from a group called X Plastaz, one of the most popular hip-hop acts in Tanzania.  Rapping in Swahili and Haya, they have crafted a powerful blend of contemporary hip-hop sensibility and traditional Maasai melodies and chants, which they weave throughout their music to create an incredibly unique sound.  They’ve been featured in National Geographic, on MTV, and on HBO, so they’ve garnered quite a bit of buzz, and from what I’ve heard of their music, I’d say it’s fairly well-deserved.