Saturday, June 19, 2010

One Pound No Balance

It appears a lot of people enjoyed the clip from "The Stephen Osita Osadebe Show" I posted last week and want to see more.*

So here's some more.



I'm still posting these short clips on YouTube just for the sake of continuity (plus, somewhere deep down inside I probably want to be a YouTube star) but I'll soon start putting up longer versions on Dailymotion.

*What I found interesting though is that the clip of the much more obscure Golden Sounds I uploaded to YouTube on the same day has received well over two times the number of views of the Osadebe video--thanks probably to the World Cup-fueled renewed interest in "Zangalewa"/"Waka Waka." I really hope the Golden Sounds can harness this attention into a strong comeback!

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Africa's true anthem?

I realize that it's been out for a while now but I heard Shakira's World Cup song "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)" for the first time just the other day when she performed it at the kick-off concert.



While I usually like Shakira, I found this song to be pretty bland. But then again, that's probably exactly what you want from a would-be international anthem of this sort: enough of a catchy melody to stick in the world's collective memory but ultimately featureless enough that people of all nationalities, colors and creeds can project themselves into it.

What I found interesting about it was that the catchy part was an adaptation of a makossa song I remembered well from my youth: "Zangalewa," by the perennial Cameroonian national band, The Golden Sounds:



(The part Shakira bites occurs at 7:33, by the way)

I really didn't know anything about The Golden Sounds when the song was first released in 1986--I'm not sure I even realized they were Cameroonian at the time. (What I really remember is the video activating my long-running interest in the history of minstrel-style comedy in Africa.) I didn't understand the Fang lyrics, so I had no idea they were singing about rowdy army recruits in colonial-era Cameroons and I don't think most Nigerian kids did either as they sang that zamina mina refrain as a stepping cadence during school march-past exhibitions and sporting events.

We definitely didn't know the extent to which the song had become a sensation all across the continent and even beyond, as it quickly became something of a standard on the champeta circuit and other African music-influenced scenes in Shakira's native Colombia. In 1988, it became a merengue hit when the all-female Las Chicas del Can from the Dominican Republic revamped it as "El Negro No Puede":



Las Chicas' "El Negro No Puede" seems to have directly inspired 1989's "El Negro No Puede (Waka Waka)" by the Dutch-Surinamese group Trafassi



and then you have the version by Dutch-Surinamese Beatmachine (featuring Trafassi's Edgar "Bugru" Burgos)



But while "Zangalewa" continues to exert its influence across South America, it's far from forgotten back home in Africa, as demonstrated by "Zamouna" from 2008, by Didier Awadi of the pioneering Senegalese hip-hop group Positive Black Soul:



Of course, I am far from the first to break the story behind "Waka Waka"; in fact, since Shakira's record dropped there's been a mini-Wimoweh-style shitstorm surrounding the song and the credit/royalties owed to the Golden Sounds. Apparently, steps are being taken to compensate the Sounds and the publicity has spurred the band (who disbanded, I think, in the early 2000s) to start contemplating a comeback. This is particularly good news to me, because underneath the buffoonery they were a pretty wicked performing outfit, as seen here in this snippet from their set at FESTAC '77 in Lagos:



What the whole "Waka Waka" story really leaves me thinking about, though, is the possibility that "Zangalewa" could be the most influential modern pop song from Africa, and more so than the oft-cited "Sweet Mother", it might be the true anthem of Africa. Which makes it all the more fitting that Shakira evoked it for this momentous event of the World Cup holding in Africa, doesn't it?

Yep... This time's for Africa!

Friday, June 11, 2010

The Stephen Osita Osadebe Show - "Osondi Owendi"

It's extremely rare to encounter live performance footage of Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe because like many musicians of his generation he guarded his music and his image jealously. He turned down most invitations to play on television and demanded exorbitant sums for the rights to film him in performance. However, in the early 1980s NTA 10 Lagos finally convinced the Doctor of Hypertension to do a weekly television half-hour show.

The program took the format of a live-in-studio Osadebe concert--no skits, no guest stars, no interviews, no chit-chat, no frills. Osadebe and the band would just perform two or three songs straight. The only variation would be when Chief would step off stage to let one of the other band members lead while he danced in the wings.

Here is an early rendition of the now-classic "Osondi Owendi." It's actually a bit longer than this but I had to get it to fit in at under 10 minutes in order to upload it on YouTube.