Music Is the Weapon of the Future: Fifty Years of African Popular Music
Author | : | |
Rating | : | 4.57 (576 Votes) |
Asin | : | 1556524501 |
Format Type | : | paperback |
Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
Publish Date | : | 2014-05-28 |
Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Amazon Customer said Four Stars. Nice stories
From the unique voice of Salif Keita and the hard funk of Fela Kuti to the poignant blues of Cesaria Evora and the upbeat swing of South African township jazz, African music has shaken the planet. Instead of offering biographical summaries, Tenaille plunges straight to the deepest, most intimate, and most significant aspects of the life and work of each musician. This book traces its history through 30 portraits. In a compact form, this retrospective imparts all the information essential to understanding these complex pop stars, while putting them in a political and cultural context and spicing up the mix with generous helpings of anecdote.
Ronnie Graham's The World of African Music and World Music: The Rough Guide offer valuable discographical information, but this is the first and only work to treat the relationship between politics and Afropop. Here, Tenaille, a French journalist specializing in world music, profiles in detail 30 significant African musicians, some as familiar as Miriam Makeba and Yousseau N'Dour, others as relatively unknown as Mory Kante and Zao, but all crucially important in defining and defending African music as inherently important, joyous, and free of colonial control. The only shortcomings are the lack of an audio CD of representative artists and photographs of African instruments (e.g., the balafon, the njarka), which would have enha