The best African album you've never heard.
Mekfoul District by the Toubab All Stars could, if more widely heard, be the future of popular music. Or perhaps it is the apotheosis of all the popular music that has preceded it. All I know is that I am baffled by its obscurity and frustrated by its lack of recognition by people "in the know".
This 14-song Franco-Senegalese wonder, released in 2010, embodies everything that is or could be great about contemporary music. It's upbeat, optimistic, and highly danceable, but at the same time yearning and critical of several hallmarks of the modern world. It is also self-aware: the All Stars' self-referencing recalls the playfulness of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry as well as the way modern rappers and so-called R&B artists blatantly state their own names in songs. The All Stars are far less moronic about it, consciously self-mythologising, refracting, and using different ethnic styles to underscore the multinational nature of the band. Best of all, the band knows its history and its predecessors, but not a single second indulges in nostalgia: the whole piece stands in the present, listens to the past, and boldly points to the future.
How can it reflect past, present and future at once? 'Hang'Em High' is an open homage to the Italian composer Ennio Morricone. 'Ring of Fire' is a skanking, ska-soaked Johnny Cash cover. 'Ali Bo Mayé' thrillingly chronicles a boxing match the band-members were probably too young to have remembered (the infamous Rumble in the Jungle); the song features snippets of sports commentary à la Meat Loaf's 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light', serving not to euphemise adolescent sex but to celebrate a historic, near-mythical encounter. The album is steeped in the past, both in musical style (ska, country, '60s movie soundtracks) and in subject matter.
So how does it mirror the present? Through its subject matter, for one thing. 'Tous À Vélo' deals with des embouteillages (traffic jams) and their environmental consequences, humorously exhorting listeners to jump on a bike and cycle everywhere. The beat is so elastic, so tightly wound, that it is physically impossible to repress the bounce in your foot, whether sitting or standing. Other subjects include urban taxi-driving and modern capitalism: in the perhaps-not-so-subtle 'Business Class', Marx and Engels are name-checked after some dizzyingly rapid rapping.
The band's aesthetic also embodies the vibrant colour of the 21st Century: they cram in rhythms, themes and ideas that straddle continents and millennia. Styles range from nursery-rhyme-type sing-alongs to updated reggae to soukous to hardcore rap. Songs are sung in French, Spanish, English, and Wolof, sometimes all in the same song. Surprisingly, the classic mbalax that typifies Senegalese music is practically buried in the mix; the band seem to have been influenced more by Youssou N'Dour's more modern records than by his older ones. The music is so fantastic, so smooth and yet so human, that non-French-speakers will only get marginally less out of the album than francophones. Percussion and guitar are fluid and imaginative (picture Topper Headon backing Franco Luambo Makiadi) while superbly arranged horns leaven an already buoyant record.
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The staggering eclecticism on display is what gives the album its currency and its possibilities for the future: the ultimate music is one that is vital, all-inclusive, and encyclopaedic but not academic. For decades, the popular music we know has been reflecting globalism and globalisation: Taj Mahal, the Clash, Paul Simon. The All Stars are not the first, but they are arguably the most natural and successful to date: the styles and rhythms on display on Mekfoul District are kaleidoscopically global without being ostentatiously so, and achieve a gloriously complex synthesis that can only be dreamt of by other bands.
Do not be fooled by the album's ambience and general tone, exemplified by its opening track: this is not just a party album. It is not just something to show your friends that "world music" can be fun and catchy. No, this should be remembered as art, artefact, and something organically artificial - because it is made by people, and its humanity is palpable.
You can listen to some of the tracks from Mekfoul District here and buy it here.
