Stunt 2009: Week 13 – Africa calling

*This is a companion piece to a similarly-themed article on Karen’s site which, all things being equal, should be published at roughly the same time.*

Is anybody actually using these Spotify playlists? Cos if not, I’ll just save myself the effort.

1. **Pata Pata** Miriam Makeba – such a jolly and uplifting song, I can’t help but like it.

2. **Soul Makossa** Manu Dibango – pretty funky, it makes good “walking” music, if you know what I mean. The sax riff is simple, but effective enough. There’s a few little interesting changes thrown in as well, so it narrowly avoids feeling too long.

3. **Lady** Fela Kuti – 14 minutes long, the first 6 of which are basically vamping over the same chords, and then there’s some singing, but it’s all really rather monotonous.

4. **Monie** Kanda Bongo Man – “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG.” I wonder what Warner Music Group think that their job is. Here’s a stab in the dark – maybe you’re supposed to be giving your artists exposure? What have you achieved here? You’ve made yourselves look stupid. Fucking stupid.

5. **Birima** Youssou N’Dour – I can’t deny it, this is a pretty good song. But I can’t bear this dude’s voice. And this song has a really annoying bongo solo, which basically just consists of some eejit hammering away at them at machine-gun rate for too long. I do like the way that the song builds towards the end – I wish more songwriters made the effort to incorporate some kind of dynamics into their songs. Shame that Youssou can’t be bothered to write an ending, and just fades it out.

6. **Lasidan** Ali Farka Toure – six minutes, mostly guitar wank over the same few chords.

7. **Didi** Khaled – just very very annoying, predominantly because after a while you get tired of Khaled saying “Didi, Didi, Didi didididididididiwa didiwa didiwa heyeyeyeyeyey” or something like that. This is one of the most repetitive songs that I’ve heard in recent years.

8. **Tekere** Salif Keita – another moderately bland song with too much guitar widdling, but at least it’s sufficiently inoffensive to be listenable as background material.

9. **Shumba** Thomas Mapfumo – I quite like this song, though it doesn’t do much. It’s got a nice ambience. It’s got multiple guitar melodies, a vocal melody and a relatively complicated bassline all happening simultaneously, and they shouldn’t really fit together but somehow they do. No dynamics whatsoever.

10. **Yeke Yeke** Mory Kante – the song was written in the 1980s but gained notoriety in 1994 when it was remixed by German Techno duo “Hardfloor”. It’s been quite a long time since I went to a nightclub, so any interest that I may have had in dance music has mostly evaporated.

So, in conclusion: mixed feelings, but generally eager to get onto the next playlist, whatever it may be.

The next week’s playlist

We’re going to be off on holiday, so the next playlist will last us a fortnight. Unless it’s a load of toss, in which case we’ll listen to it once and then find something else to listen to.

Random number: 77
Two playlists, mystical forces choose Sam Cooke over Julian Cope. The book says:

> The soul singer’s soul singer, Cooke was the idol of everyone from Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin to Muhammad Ali and Rod Stewart. Selections #3-#10 are all Cooke compositions.

This looks most promising. Here’s Spotifyage.