AfricaIs aCountry

Music Fridays

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Music Fridays

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNE-5WUtSE&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

A good way to tide you over till Sunday’s World Cup final is to listen and dance to good music. Here’s five music videos I have on heavy rotation.  First up, a current personal favorite of mine: the music video for the Ugandan singer, Jaqee’s single “Moonshine” off her new album. The video was filmed in Uganda and Ethiopia.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUIIVmhK1ps&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

2.  A beautiful video for Rwandese-American “New African Soul” singer, Somi’s song “Prayer to the Saint.”  Nice beat. The video was filmed in and around two legendary Harlem venues, The Apollo and The Shrine.  Essence Magazine recently described Somi as “… at the forefront of a new roster of African artists grabbing attention here in America.”  (BTW, is that my man, Stone, clapping away at 0:56?)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A86uqiK9alU&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

3. The Nigerian Nigerians P-Square and J Martins with “E No Easy.”  I can dance to this. Now if Nigeria’s football team can play like their musicians perform.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMGd3mAfl-0&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

4. Nas and Damian Marley with “As We Enter.” The video–with its Wu Tang Clan feel, all grimy and dark hoodies–was online a few weeks ago right around the time Nas and Marley’s “Distant Relatives” album was released, but it was pulled from the ‘web. Now it is online again. (These two have been all over the internets promoting the new album and have lots of interesting things to say about Africa’s relation to the Americas. We plan to do a longer post about that in the next few days.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSopUVEhG8Y&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

5. Finally, after all that exertion slow yourself down with Zap Mama’s “Drifting” (featuring G Love). You need to conserve that energy till Sunday. BTW, how long has she been at it and she still produces good music? Damn.

— Sean Jacobs

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.