The Soukous Challenge
Tuesday, October 28th, 2003 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerAround the beginning of the last century, a scholar whose name I forget wrote that from now on, no one need be unhappy. The reason for this optimistic prediction was the invention of the gramophone (or phonograph, as it was then known). Anyone who was feeling unhappy, he thought, could just put on some Mozart and cheer up immediately.
Of course it didn't work out like that; unhappy people tend to listen to unhappy music, and create a massive market for such, the most extreme example being the 1980s, when between the growling of Goths and the whining of the post-new-wavers, it was pretty hard to find happy music, unless you were into Kylie Minogue and Wham (irrelevant reminiscence - a skiffle group I knew did a song to the tune of "Freedom" which went "What does Andrew do in Wham? / What's the job requirement? / He can't sing and he can't play / He's just a bloody ornament / What does Andrew doo-ooo? / Oh what does Andrew do in Wham?"). Perhaps it was not entirely co-incidental that it was at this time that African music became popular in Britain. Even before Paul Simon released Graceland, compilation albums like "Thunder Before the Dawn" were circulating in indie music shops, thanks largely to the anti-apartheid connection. Dour radicals who refused to listen to rock because it was "sexist" and "phallic", and whose idea of a fashion statement was green hair and orange leg warmers, suddenly started listening to the likes of Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens and Kanda Bongo Man.
Kanda Bongo Man has a special place in my heart, as I first heard him while having breakfast in a cottage in the Yorkshire Dales with two beautiful women in a state of severe undress, but that's another story, and one which is not suitable for a public forum. But I digress again.
Anyway, here's the soukous challenge. Put on some soukous, or, if you prefer something a bit more robust and varied, some mbaqanqa (for the uninitiated, soukous is from Francophone countries like Zaire; mbaqanqa is mainly South African, and is more influenced by traditional Zulu music). Now try to be miserable.
C'est ca, c'est ca, c'est ca ...
Of course it didn't work out like that; unhappy people tend to listen to unhappy music, and create a massive market for such, the most extreme example being the 1980s, when between the growling of Goths and the whining of the post-new-wavers, it was pretty hard to find happy music, unless you were into Kylie Minogue and Wham (irrelevant reminiscence - a skiffle group I knew did a song to the tune of "Freedom" which went "What does Andrew do in Wham? / What's the job requirement? / He can't sing and he can't play / He's just a bloody ornament / What does Andrew doo-ooo? / Oh what does Andrew do in Wham?"). Perhaps it was not entirely co-incidental that it was at this time that African music became popular in Britain. Even before Paul Simon released Graceland, compilation albums like "Thunder Before the Dawn" were circulating in indie music shops, thanks largely to the anti-apartheid connection. Dour radicals who refused to listen to rock because it was "sexist" and "phallic", and whose idea of a fashion statement was green hair and orange leg warmers, suddenly started listening to the likes of Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens and Kanda Bongo Man.
Kanda Bongo Man has a special place in my heart, as I first heard him while having breakfast in a cottage in the Yorkshire Dales with two beautiful women in a state of severe undress, but that's another story, and one which is not suitable for a public forum. But I digress again.
Anyway, here's the soukous challenge. Put on some soukous, or, if you prefer something a bit more robust and varied, some mbaqanqa (for the uninitiated, soukous is from Francophone countries like Zaire; mbaqanqa is mainly South African, and is more influenced by traditional Zulu music). Now try to be miserable.
C'est ca, c'est ca, c'est ca ...
