AfricaIs aCountry

Fighting Pop

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

Fighting Pop

By
Dylan Valley

http://vimeo.com/41242490

Congolese/South African (via Belgium) musician Yannick Ilunga, AKA Iamwaves, has been rather busy lately. His group Popskarr, a new ‘electronic/Nu Disco/Misty Pop’ outfit, has just released a stylish single called Fighter; and as his alter ego Petite Noir he has released a mixtape for Okayafrica’s ‘Africa in Your Earbuds’ series (which earned him a tweet shout out from Questlove of The Roots) and a new video for ‘Till We Ghosts’ (above). He calls the music he makes ‘Noir Wave’, an African take on New Wave and Post Punk. It’s an interesting scene to be in, one that has produced genre-busting electronic acts such as Spoek Mathambo and (my personal favorite) Dirty Paraffin. While both those acts have been truly groundbreaking (both equally Afrocentric), Popskarr/Petite Noir’s nod to Bloc Party front man Kele Orekere’s solo stuff is unmistakable, including all the hipster-pandering that comes with it. However, this is something that — with a bit of guidance and experience — Yannick can easily outgrow over time. Personally, I’m looking forward to his future releases.

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.