Africa Is a Country

Friday Music Bonus Edition

Friday Music Bonus Edition

By
Tom Devriendt

This week saw the passing of Don Cornelius. You’ll remember Letta Mbulu was once a guest on his Soul Train. I wondered what a Soul Train show set to an afrobeat would have looked like. YouTube helped:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4HHwgPG0JE&w=600&h=347]

Also on YouTube, the comments to the new Shabazz Palaces video offered a translation of the Amharic conversation between mother and daughter on their ‘Are you… Can you… Were you? (Felt)’ track:

A month later “A special Kwanzaa present from Marcel Cartier, Akala, Nana D and Agent of Change.” We’ve said this before: everybody’s using archive material:

Blitz The Ambassador plugged “my boy Bez” on his facebook page some days ago. ‘That Stupid Song’ has Nigerian Soul:

Finally, earlier this week okayafrica posted this video of Finnish singer-songwriter Mirel Wagner. It is, indeed, exceptional:

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.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.