“In Africa today, musicians keep in touch with global pop culture via the Internet and program locally flavoured music of explosive creativity, which in turn often finds its way back into the western world: powerful, urban and contemporary club music.” This sentence captured my attention while I was reading the Ten Cities brochure. Ten Cities […]
A few days ago Tom posted another installment of 10 African films to watch out for, one of which is the documentary “Underground/On the Surface,” on the popular “second-class” youth music genre mahragan shaabi. While we wait to see the documentary for ourselves next year, above and below are some home-made videos of young men dancing […]
I got a treat when I was in Johannesburg recently. I was about to jump into a cab when this van pulls up and out piled these colorfully clad kids. With their exit came the loud blasting house sort of music; then the dance moves, taunting, shouting matches, some alcohol, and street fashion…but at the […]
African governments don’t want us thinking that “homosexuality” is within the realm of their “traditional values”. So these leaders, even Nobel Peace Prize winning ones, use that as an excuse to justify the persecution and lack of protection for some of their most vulnerable citizens. Well, it seems that the Angolan government who currently seem to have their […]
Adria Petty, the co-director of Beyoncé’s new “Countdown” video which lifts entire sections from the work of Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, now says the dance references come from Germany, not Belgium, and from Audrey Hepburn. She told MTV she brought Beyoncé “a number of references and we picked some out together. Most were […]
So about those pantsula references in Beyonce’s latest video: Beyonce and her choreographer, Frank Gatson Jr, had seen a Mozambican group, Tofo Tofo, on Youtube. This is Gatson talking to MTV about Tofo Tofo, above in someone’s wedding video: We prepared a lot for it. We had seen something on YouTube; we had seen these […]
Some critics went after Bill T Jones for his musical portrayal of the king of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, on Broadway. Here, in the video above, Mr Jones responds–indirectly–to criticisms of “Fela!,” during a discussion with Bill Moyers about the life of the American President, Abraham Lincoln. Jones created a dance-theater work celebrating the bicentennial of […]
