Necessary doses of pan-Africanism

spoek-mathambo-570x400-452x317

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” […]

About these ads

Happy Birthday Seun Kuti

Seun Kuti

You’ve heard this song here before so Seun Kuti fronting demonstrations in Lagos this week shouldn’t come as a surprise. In his own words: “I believe the fuel subsidy removal…is treason against the people of Nigeria.” Follow Seun on twitter for updates.

Occupy Nigeria

reuters_nigeria_fuel_protest_03Jan12-878x584

Nigeria’s political leaders probably did not expect this kind of response from the populace –mass protests, a national strike starting today that shut down major cities–when they decided, on January 1, 2012, to scrap fuel subsidies (as part of “reforms” to deregulate the oil sector). The rationale was that by freeing money spent on the […]

10 African Albums of 2011

Tinariwen

2011′s Music Video Picks

Buraka Som Sistema

Inexplicably absent in this year’s fashionable blogs’ and magazines’ year-end lists are videos by African artists, or those videos recorded somewhere in Africa. I’ve picked ten which I think stood out. South Africans Pieter Hugo and Michael Cleary directed and shot the video for Spoek Mathambo’s ‘Control’ in Langa, Cape Town. We took issue with […]

‘The right ideology’

Musicians don’t only talking about rims or energy drinks. Video shot (by SOUNDTRACKS) in San Francisco (in August 2011) of a jet-lagged Seun Kuti opining on “The Arab Spring.” Bonus. Live footage from his summer gigs in San Francisco:

‘Cars, Clothes and Parties’

Seun Kuti (28 year old son of Fela), playing Brooklyn next month, talk to Wax Poetics TV has some issues with other artists. He is definitely casting stones on all the blinged out, autotuned Nigerian pop.

Faaji Agba

On Friday, July 22, Seun Kuti, play the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn. However, the real treat on that bill will be the warm-up act, Faaji Agba, a collective of octogenarian Nigerian musicians. The link is to a planned documentary film about the group (by Nigerian director Remi Vaughan Richards), some of whose music careers […]

Music Break

Seun Kuti and his band playing a track from their brilliant new album ‘From Africa With Fury: Rise’ on the British TV program “Later Live …” last month. I’m gonna get me one of those t-shirts. – Tom Devriendt

Helping Libya

bp23

Not sure if this more about Seun Kuti‘s desire to sell more units of his latest album out on Monday (he has been talking a lot the last few days), but he has a way with words: I’d been following events in Tunisia for months. In Libya, people are fighting for freedom from Gaddafi – […]

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 5,445 other followers