Friday Bonus Music Break

Five for the weekend. I haven’t done this in a while. First up Philadelphians Chill Moody (rapper) and Cody Kahmar with the music video for “My Eyes”:

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New films roundup N°1


Here’s my latest list of new films with African topics. From now on I’ll number them. So this is N°1.  My plan is to become more systematic and regular about it and drop a list of 10 at a time. I also hope to do it once a week. (If I can’t, I am hoping Basia will pick up the slack.) First up, is “The Ambassador” classed as a documentary film by Danish comedian/film director Mads Brügger as a fake European ambassador in central Africa. I recently watched his last film, “The Red Chapel”, on Netflix. It is a rambling trickster movie where Brügger and two disabled actors of South Korean descent (adopted by Danish parents) travel to North Korea in an attempt to outwit his hosts’ censors. The result is tedium, driven by his droll delivery style. In the end, I was less interested in Brügger’s antics (even his two co-conspirators tire of him), so I am not sure what to make of this new project. Here’s the trailer:

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Music Break. Kefee & Becca

Kefee (from Nigeria) and Becca (from Ghana) bring their version of ‘Dan Maliyo’. Pop and play as we like it.

Arise Fashion Week

Pillbox hats are back! What else, besides a nouvelle variation of the old-school “Turkish” headgear, is in style at Arise Magazine’s 2012 fashion week in Lagos? After a drive through Victoria Island to get there, passing massive signs advertising “JESUS”, golden highrises and tattler headlines blaring “BOKO HARAM’S PLOT TO ATTACK SOUTH UNCOVERED,” we’re treated to waterfalls of fabric accentuating the lively flows of a woman’s walk, necklines wider (and going deeper) than a duck’s wake, and enough flash to invite comments about how ‘colorful’ Africans can be. Even from a distance, we can see the cut and construction is far superior to anything Gwen Stefani might attempt with “African” fabric. Here’s hoping that one day, AIAC is invited to the front row!

Dancing to the Lijadu Sisters

The music of the Lijadu Sisters can make the twins’ fans do all sorts of things. What the people walking by were thinking we can only guess, but we do know this improvising fan (in Canada) got the attention of people in the second floor office (watch one minute into the song). One certainty about music: when it hits, you feel okay.

Plenty Koko

We didn’t expect anything else: the video for FOKN Bois ‘Sexin Islamic Girls’ goes all the way. March 6 is Ghana’s Independence Day — which means we have an excuse to post it.

Football: The 11 Commandments of Rigobert Song


When the good Lord handed down the Decalogue to Moses atop Mount Sinai, he limited himself to just the ten commandments. The new boss of Cameroon’s national football team, Rigobert Song, is obviously more demanding.

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Necessary doses of pan-Africanism


Take it with your vitamins. K’Naan and Nas’s “Nothing to Lose” video qualifies. So does Spoek Mathambo remixing Seun Kuti.  Kuti tours the US this summer and Mathambo has a new album coming out in a few weeks. This track, “The Good Leaf,” is the last track on Kuti’s latest release, “From Africa with Fury: Rise” and was posted on The Fader’s soundcloud account this week.  You can download it for free, but here’s the track anyway: [Read more...]

Nigeria Fashion Week

Probably to coincide with New York Fashion Week, Vice released the Nigerian installment of its “Fashion International” series. It’s not bad considering how Vice usually treats Africa (reference: Congo, Liberia and Ghana) and it definitely captures some of the energy of Nigeria. But it can’t help itself. We’re barely a minute into Vice’s report (“looking for something beautiful behind the depressing headlines”) on Nigeria’s 2011 fashion week when we’re told Lagos is troubled by “civil unrest, religious tension and wide-spread corruption” that “have lead to calls for the resignation of long-standing president Goodluck Jonathan.” Pretty prescient. The first Nigerian to get some words in is the “fantastically named” fashion week’s organizer Lexy Mojo-Eyes “who looks like Don King”; next up are the fashion week’s female models (but it quickly gets too “naked”, so the reporter moves on to the male models), wondering why they love “to represent Africa.” [Read more...]

Africa’s first 21st century global pop star?


Nigerian D’Banj–a combination of outsize showman, confidence, flash, little politics and affecting personality–could be Africa’s first global pop star of the 21st century. He draws big crowds on the continent and regularly plays the diaspora circuit in cities like London. Perhaps the clearest sign of that he is about to be a bona fide pop star is that he was recently signed by Kanye West’s label and one of his hits, “Oliver,” is doing better than well on UK pop charts. Now it is getting the cover version treatment from artists as diverse as a British boy band (who changed some words in the song) and mainstream R&B singer, Estelle. But this is not out of the blue. He’s had the Snoop Dogg remix already, Wyclef called him the “African Michael Jackson” (I know, bear with me) and D’Banj won every major award on the continent (MTV Africa, etc), while American or British awards show gives him the “best African/international star.”  On cue, D’Banj will be performing live in New York City later this month. (He shot a promo specially for that event.) He does this while singing in a mix of Yoruba, Nigerian patois and English and his Naija life references. (His producer Don Jazzy should also take some of the credit for his success, btw.) The thing about D’Banj is that he knows and expects this. His recent music video, “Entertainer,” is basically a mash up of him telling us all this (people fainting, posing shirtless like Fela, the jewelry, video models, hotels, etcetera):

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