Africa Is a Country

Friday Music Bonus Edition

Friday Music Bonus Edition

By
Tom Devriendt

This week saw the passing of Don Cornelius. You’ll remember Letta Mbulu was once a guest on his Soul Train. I wondered what a Soul Train show set to an afrobeat would have looked like. YouTube helped:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4HHwgPG0JE&w=600&h=347]

Also on YouTube, the comments to the new Shabazz Palaces video offered a translation of the Amharic conversation between mother and daughter on their ‘Are you… Can you… Were you? (Felt)’ track:

A month later “A special Kwanzaa present from Marcel Cartier, Akala, Nana D and Agent of Change.” We’ve said this before: everybody’s using archive material:

Blitz The Ambassador plugged “my boy Bez” on his facebook page some days ago. ‘That Stupid Song’ has Nigerian Soul:

Finally, earlier this week okayafrica posted this video of Finnish singer-songwriter Mirel Wagner. It is, indeed, exceptional:

Further Reading

Writing while black

The film adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel ‘Erasure’ leaves little room to explore Black middle-class complicity in commodifying the traumas of Black working-class lives.

The Mogadishu analogy

In Gaza and Haiti, the specter of another Mogadishu is being raised to alert on-lookers and policymakers of unfolding tragedies. But we have to be careful when making comparisons.

Kwame Nkrumah today

New documents looking at British and American involvement in overthrowing Kwame Nkrumah give us pause to reflect on his legacy, and its resonances today.