Friday Bonus Music Break, N°18

Another ten music videos that we’ve been playing a lot recently. The first one above. Kudurista Titica’s ‘Ablua’ is a stomper. (Talking about Angolan music, and its history: Marissa Moorman has been consulting Afropop Worldwide for a new series called Hip Deep Angola, the first part of which, ‘Music and Nation in Luanda’, you can listen to here.) Next, still from Angola, and I have a hunch Titica served as an inspiration for Edy Sex:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB4dNscISJc

An older Namibian Overitje pop tune, but Ondarata (remember them) just now put their video for ‘Tukutuku’ on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjT61lyrYgE

Janka Nabay and his ‘Bubu Gang’, whose live performances have become legendary by now, made this video for ‘Somebody’:

From Mali, Ben Zabo’s latest music videos are a treat:

As he did with that other project The Busy Twist, Gabriel Benn (alter ego: Tuesday Born) plays around with images recorded in Ghana in this video for ‘Kwabena’:

Jupiter Bokondji (from Kinshasa) and his band Okwess International in the studio:

South African Bongeziwe Mabandla has been working hard on completing his debut album. I hear all kinds of influences here:

On his website, Ian Kamau (who spent much time travelling and performing in South Africa recently) explains why he wrote ‘Black Bodies’:

And because we feature not nearly enough poetry or spoken word, this ‘park jam’ from Obscur Jaffar (Burkina Faso):

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.