Weekend Music Break No.76

Y'en a Marre in Madrid

We took a break last week, but we’re back experimenting with a new format. This Weekend’s Music Break is in the form of a Youtube playlist so you can just hit play, sit back, and enjoy. Let us know if you have any thoughts about the new format in the comments!

Our selection this weekend is: A dedication to today’s Champion’s League Final with the Eto’o Coupe Decale dance; P-Square and Awilo Longomba’s new “Enemy Solo”; Angola’s Mery with “Fogo cruzado” feat. Ksuno Beat; South African rapper Boolz with “Aphe Kapa”; Nigerian-American rapper hits the studio with friends in “Roslin’s Basement”; Italian-Moroccan rapper Maruego brings a controversial subject to the small screen with “Sulla stessa barca,” which translates to something like, “we are all in the same boat.”; A group of DJs from around the world collaborate on an impressive live “Scratch Jam”; Lisbon’s Batida releases a video for beautiful “Ta Doce” feat. AF Diaphra; Haiti’s Beken sings “Tounen Lakay” in a live session; Finally, Y’en a Marre gets a half-hour documentary on MTV’s rebel music series.

About the Author

Boima Tucker is a music producer, DJ, writer, and cultural activist. He is the managing editor of Africa Is a Country, co-founder of Kondi Band and the founder of the INTL BLK record label.

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.