Gwen Ansell
21 May 2009
column
Johannesburg — When an African nation reflects America in its music, there's often puzzlement or anger that "authenticity" has been squeezed out by an alien modernism, and in the scholarly establishment here, the assertion of nationalism is usually assumed to entail the rejection of these "foreign" sounds.
Recent studies in musicology have suggested a different analysis. As US scholar Ingrid Monson and others have noted, what's going on may not be copying in any crude sense, but the very African technique of signification. When a player signifies on another music, she rehearses and takes ownership of elements from elsewhere and puts them into unexpected company. By so doing, the musician adds fresh meanings and layers of meaning, often in highly subversive ways, just as in the early African-American churches, hymns and sermons that signified on the River Jordan -- a familiar biblical trope -- were often offering meanings and strategies for the liberation of slaves.
We see it in the music of other African countries. It's been six years since Malian singer Oumou Sangare released an album. In that time she has not been idle. In the time-honoured Malian tradition of female entrepreneurship, she has developed her farm, built a hotel -- the Hotel Wassoulou, named after her genre of music -- and launched half a dozen branded products, ranging from her endorsement of the Chinese Go car Oum Sang brand to Oumou Sangare rice. "I make the most of my fame. My name sells things. People like to have it on the things they need."
But the 2003 two-CD retrospective, Oumou, did not satisfy fans' desire for new music from the singer. Now, with Seya (Joy) from World Circuit, Sangare has more than met that need. The album's 11 tracks are all written by Sangare, and they continue her forthright exploration of previously taboo topics, including forced marriages and the oppressive marital relationships that can turn a woman into a "stunted little tree".
Wassoulou is a sparsely populated forest area in southern Mali, the home area of Sangare's family, although she grew up in the capital, Bamako. It's an area with a heritage of great and revered singers. On the track Donso, Sangare employs the symbolic language of a Wassoulou hunters' song to evoke the survival of spirit and tradition even after death. On the plaintive Iyo Djeli she sings in praise of one legendary griotte of the 1960s, Madame Djekani Djeli. These praises reflect Sangare's career path and her influences. Yet there's signification going on too in this evocation of an old deep-forest sound in a modern context.
The emergence of Wassoulou music, which took the complex driving rhythms of the south and transformed them into something resembling funk, parallels the emergence of democracy in Mali, and the end of the era when staid, 1960s Cuban-style dance band arrangements of griot music dominated popular music. The ambivalent relationship between the two styles has been expressed by almost all Mali's modern stars.
On Seya, Sangare uses a large ensemble of traditional instruments; modern Wassoulou arrangements and more retro Cuban treatments (as well as some things -- such as the liquid sweetness of the singing -- that are hers alone). What she draws from signifying on these elements is fresh in sound and unequivocally subversive in content. The glorious singing and infectious melodies belong on any collector's shelves.
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