RADIO & ALGERIE

the special guest on Mudd Up! radio tonite will be my DJ mixer. The special guest next week (June 27) will be DJ Eddie Stats! upcoming guests in July & August include Caroline Bergvall, Sasha Frere-Jones, Kalup Linzy (& possibly Taiwan), and Heatwave.

Needless to say, I/we are psyched.

*

here’s a bootlegged official-unofficial CD i picked up in Barcelona this weekend. The artwork lists 6 tracks, but the CD only has 4. What got lost?

The shop didn’t have any Dahmane el Harrachi so they gave me this instead. Presumably lifted off cassette, this is a old recording of classic Algerian chaabi. (Right? I could be wrong — clarifications welcome.)

alg-cd

Algerian chaabi track 3, 9:20

since i couldnt find Dahmane in the shop, i went to youtube. they got him. He strides against the seashore in a wash of nostalgically saturated colors, intimations of l’immigritude heavy in the salty air.
Gulls cry, waves crash, boats and planes keep pulling people out of their homes.

4 thoughts on “RADIO & ALGERIE”

  1. the radio/mix/show was really nice. the music at the beginning of that new skepta tune is from sierra leone, and it is very well-known in the whole west africa.

  3. I was wrong. It’s not from Sierra Leone. It’s from Nigeria, and it’s by Prince Nico Mbarga of the Abakaliki region in Southeastern Nigeria. His music is widely accessible, as close as Amazon.com and Sterns Music. Google his name, there’s a nice Wikipedia writeup.

    I actually grew up in Sierra Leone listening to this song, and I thought it was done by a Sierra Leonean musician… until now, which serves as a testament to how popular the song was/is even today. The lyrics are very catchy and accessible (especially for anglophone Africans because it is sung in pidgin), then you have the Congolese guitar riffs, and the highlife motifs. I’m quite sure my father owns this record, or some other Mbarga record.

    As for Skepta, I heard that in one of his rhymes, that he’s Nigerian. One for Africa!

Leave a Reply