So what do you do when a country that you've not considered much before suddenly appears in the news? Inevitably and rather pathetically, my response is to start looking on YouTube for interesting music from that country. And it looks like Niger has some very interesting music indeed. There's a fairly large and unique hip-hop scene (google Rap du Niger) that has interesting spins on all sorts of material... my favourite track of the moment is this all-excusing cover of one of my least favourite tracks ever, Modjo's "Lady".
But the track that really caught my ears from an interestingness perspective is this:
Fun points obviously include the use of Vocoder in the age of Autotune, but I'm more interested in the melody, because it reminds me immensely of the kind of melodies you regularly hear in Thai lukthung music. Now, it could be just a musical coincidence - drawn out last syllables combined with pentatonic scales running up and down are not mindblowingly unlikely to occur together, and Hausa may recall asia being a chadic language somehow - but I'm still reading a cultural connection, and the only plausible link I can think of is all-eating, all-spitting Bollywood. Anyone got a better suggestion?
Everybody’s Doin’ What?
4 years ago
4 comments:
i know zilch about niger music but the kids i knew from niger & chad listened to ethiopian/horn music, which is what this sounds like to me ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQBMTl_lzR8 ) & isnt girma an ethiopian name?
& who knows about the thai similarities, its only an indian ocean away..
Ah, yes, Ethiopia certainly seems a reasonable touching point. Bow where does that sound come from? It doesn't sound middle-eastern...
i dunno, just the melody if that song you posted is just so very ethiopian/somali to me. also the rhythm is interesting cuz its ethio with very west african/ivorian drum machine kinda thang. theres a lot of great vocoder use in the horn...
no, the horn always seemed to me to pick up more from the subcontinant in terms of looks, dress, music, etc than from the north. but who knows which direction the vibe even springs from.
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