Africa Is a Country

Weekend Music Break No.69

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

Weekend Music Break No.69

By
Boima Tucker

Still from Red Red's "Ghetto" Video

A general round-up of tunes that caught our ear this week at Africa is a Country, in no particular order.

Martinique-born Jazz composer and pianist, Chassol returns home to film a Carnival-inspired video for his song “Reich & Darwin,” off of his album Big Sun.

Here’s one for the DJs: UK-based Hagan is back with another EP for Italian-Liberian duo Pepesoup’s label Soupu Music. This one I’m pretty sure samples one of those Angolan Kuduro can players.

Liberia’s David Mell moved from Monrovia to Minnesota in the past year, but that didn’t stop him from producing Afropop heat!

South Africa’s Kid X has been turning heads in Africa is a Country circles.

Ghanian “AfricanEDM” duo Red Red release a video with Sarkodie and some great dancers in what looks like Jamestown.

Percy gives “Bonnie and Clyde” a Nigerian update.

The Very Best released their new album Makes a King last week. They have two videos already out from songs on the album. Here is one.

Nigerian rapper Kelvin King filmed a video (called “Freestyle”) in Johannesburg. It’s seems Pan-Africanism is contagious.

Stromae is endlessly pursued by a blue bird.

Last but not least, one big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Africa is a Country founder, Sean Jacobs!

Further Reading

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.