We’ve Resurrected Weekend Music Break. Here’s No.68

Ghanian singer Jojo Abot

Keeping with the weekend’s theme, we’ve decided to resurrect the Weekend Music Break with number 68! For those who forgot (or who are new to the site), this is the place to highlight music that has caught our eye, or landed in our inboxes this week. Enjoy this edition’s selections in no particular order:

First, the video for Rocky Dawuni’s lead single “African Thriller” has been out for awhile, but his new full lenth album Branches of the Same Tree was released just last week:

 

Next we have Kenyan-Dutch musician and filmmaker Festus with a dub reggae track, and video documenting a trip home to Nairobi and Kisumu. It’s beautifully shot glance at the East African landscape and its people (despite a bit of the persistent African Kids music video theme). The track is out last week via his own label Turtleville:

 

Ghanian Hiplife/Azonto star Atumpan moves on from the small girls to focus on the baby mamas with a rural village themed video:

 

UK-based South African DJ and producer Moroka put out a groovy edit of Senyaka Kekana’s early-Kwaito single “Go Away,” as a tribute to the recently passed singer:

 

Finally, BBC1xtra had their annual Destination Africa event this past month. For it, they sent UK-based artists Stormzy, Jay Vades, and New York-based singer JoJo Abot home to Accra to record a collaborative record called, “Mievado”. This week’s release of the song was accompanied by an interactive video that gives you little closer taste of each artists’ perspectives on the city.

 

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

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.