I got into world music all the way back in 1982 with the release of Juju Music by King Sunny Ade. It was a total game changer for me. I’d been into punk and some reggae and funk and a bit of hiphop, spinning in a tiny little club on Haight Street (San Francisco for the geographically challenged) called Le Disque. It was my first DJ gig and I was between mostly New Wave-y bands. Short sets in other words. Unpaid I think, or at best very minimally and probably mostly in liquid form. The place had been a gay disco, but now it didn’t really know what it was. A nice change from the very hippy place, Shady Grove, just down the street, that I’d hung out at previously. So, obviously I didn’t really know what I was either. Well, except for being as wild and bohemian as I could manage.
Anyway, once I got into this African stuff, I never really looked back and just kept exploring everything from anywhere that wasn’t Euro-American that I could lay my hands on. And there is a lot of it and San Francisco was a good place to find much of it. And world music is a wonky term that has provoked much controversy.
The drawback to it is that extreme diversity and the overwhelmingly variety available. It is basically a meaningless term, although I use it freely enough. There’s everything under its umbrella from extreme noise to the mellowest of gentle vibes, from traditional music that is often quite wild to cutting edge of today experimentalism, which can be soothingly atmospheric. And, needless to say, every country and region has its own sounds that have some claim to cultural uniqueness, although many are derived from and influenced by others. Without bothering to count them up properly, Africa alone must have, I’m guessing, better than thirty modern distinctive styles in the post-colonial period with some overlapping of approach, e.g. the soukous of Zaire migrating to Kenya and Tanzania and thence to the pico soundsystems of Colombia (as recordings, not live, although African musicians have crossed the Atlantic both to record new work and perform live), and also a range of how much is borrowed from tribal sounds. It’s a great big tangled mess.
So, when you want recommendations, I find it almost impossible to know where to begin. I’ll say that I still adore Juju Music and many other of KSA’s albums, which are generally hard to find - and that the last CD I bought is Trip To Bolgatanga by African Head Charge. I listened to three Youssou N’Dour CDs today from three distinct periods of his career - and before that to the excellent African Salsa compilation on Stern’s, which is all Senegalese artists. Other African countries also have Cuban influences in their musical expressions. I followed Youssou with the classic Thokozile by Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens with the Makonga Tsohle Band, South African mbaqanga somewhat revved up in my opinion for the Northern audience, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
Funnily enough, I recently started reading Computing Taste : Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation by Nick Seaver. You can guess what it’s about. I’m not very far into, but it readily displays why music recommendation is a complex task.
But, okay, head in lion’s mouth, I’m next looking forward to getting my hands on Piconema, a collection of Zairean-influenced East African music that has become big on Colombian pico soundsystems. Call that a recommendation if you wish.