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July 29, 2009

The sebene, that never-ending circular vamp that cues the women's belly-shaking (soukous-music word of the day)
via worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com

 

The Congolese guitarist Henri Bowane is reputed to have invented the sebene in the 1940s, but this kind of instrumental bridge, on which one or two musicians develop arpeggios in circular progressions while another improvises around them, has forever been common to music for Congolese harps, lutes, thumb pianos and xylophones.
Aha. I had been calling it the descarga, but I am always happy to learn a new, more appropriate word for the part of the song that cues the insanity: in Franco's Azda, the repetition of the theme keeps the tension going throughout Franco's solo; in other, less virtuosic performances, the sebene is the part where you, the listener, feel as if you're diving into a huge pile of feathery guitar notes, like a woman in a music video.

In other, less abstracted videos, the sebene is the part where the women dancers move to the front and begin their undulations. The circularity of the music and the circularity of the movements are echoed in the circle shape of the navel, both in motion and at rest, as well.

The quote above (and bizarrely still picture) is from the surprisingly helpful National Geographic page on soukous music.

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Filed under  //   circles   Congo   descarga   Franco   guitars   music   National Geographic   sebene   soukous   vamp  

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April 2, 2009

"Written description of how soukous women have their waist" in one word, undulating

(Every once in a while, Google Analytics's list of keywords that bring
you, Dear Reader, to my blog comes up with good ideas to write about.
The scary thing is that converse of the truism that there is someone
writing about pretty much anything on the Internet holds true: there
is someone searching for pretty much everything on the Internet. Et
voilà today's post, inspired for you by the intrepid Googlenaut
searching for "Written description of how soukous women have their waist". My blog was at
no. 3 when I wrote this post; I should hope it rises somewhat.)
 
The Dany Engobo/Coeurs Brisés videos, where the mild and inoffensive
zouk tunes clearly play a supporting role to the hypnotic
tummy-shaking of the Coeurs Brisés (Broken Hearts) troupe of dancers,
could be, if you took them lightly, campy as all get out, but I don't
see them that way. Instead, there's something deeply serious about the
attractiveness of lissome women moving hypnotically to the middle-aged
male head of family. Strangely enough, watching such dance videos for
an hour or so, or the length of a VHS tape, always proved relaxing,
like a nice afternoon nap, rather than erotically stimulating.
 
A couple years later I met the guitarist Diblo Dibala after a summer
concert at South Street Seaport. My buddy from work Rose was a friend
of one of his two backup dancers, the older one. The younger one had
managed to shatter boundaries by being a Brooklyn girl (bizarrely
nicknamed Electra) who was touring the world as an African dancer.
This only reinforced to me the complete inauthenticity of soukous
music and soukous-dancing videos; these were products of late
20th-century cultural capitalism, not the honest and straightforward
expression of prelapsarian village life that is the default approach
to African cultural products. In other words, folks were watching
these videos (and Diblo's dancers) not because they had some kind of
cultural relevance to the viewer, but because they liked the dancing,
or the physiques of the dancers, or both. My interest was validated; I
didn't have to come from some Kinshasa faubourg in order to
appreciate it.
 
Here are some examples:




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Filed under  //   Coeurs Brisés   dancing   Diblo Dibala   Google   music   soukous   videos  

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February 13, 2009

Kékélé, 'Yo Odeconer' for your slinky 2-14-09 listening

Yo Odeconer Ft M'bilia Bel by Kékélé  
(download)

If 'Yo Odeconer' wasn't on your Valentine's mixtape, it should have
been: its groove and sultry harmonies validate M'bilia Bel's vocal
acumen, despite all the ultra-cheesy zouk-Antillais records that she
has made.

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Filed under  //   Kékélé   M'bilia Bel   mp3s   music   soukous   Valentine's Day   zouk  

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January 19, 2009

V is for velocity

Azda by Franco  
(download)

(My grandmother has driven a Volkswagen for the longest, which I
mention in case you need an excuse for why I'm talking about the stone
classic "AZDA" today, one of the classics of African music and the
theme song for a Kinshasa VW, pronounced fay-vay in Lingala,
dealership.)
 
This is where soukous comes from: start with a fairly conventional
rhumba, the kind of thing that you could hear all over Africa in the
fifties and sixties, courtesy of a stream of Cuban rhumba vinyls that
helped create and indulge the rage for "international" sounds. All of
a sudden, at six minutes in, Franco's guitar pops out of the mix and
he throws down an absolutely incandescent solo, the kind of thing that
I imagine lighting up the entire Kinshasa nightclub district. But
wait! At seven minutes, he pulls into this insane hammer-on theme, and
it makes me break down and cry for joy and excitement, as if all of a
sudden the bay horse on which I've staked my wages is making his move!
He's edging through the pack, galloping around the back turn, tail
waving, going for absolute broke, foaming at the bit, his tiny jockey
up in the stirrups coaxing the beast to embody the pen-and-ink drawing
on the children's primer page for "V is for velocity."

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Filed under  //   advertising   Congo   Franco   guitar   metaphor   mp3s   music   rumba   sebene   soukous   Volkswagen  

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