Perhaps Joy is Still Alive

You've all heard the song "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" once or thrice. Granted there are other things that might truly 'save you', but often times music can be incredibly healing, I think that is why we are all so obsessed (or just plain bored).

Lately, to cure my own doldrums, not really all that bad by the world's or even my own standards, I've stumbled upon a few old-skool Congolese Rumba records that are blowing my mind. The rumba was the precursor to another Congolese form, soukous. I don't claim to know much about soukous, and really can't comment intelligibly on any African music. However, I can claim that the soukous and rumbas I've heard make me very happy in a way that nothing else is! (musically I mean)

This concept is not new and travel writer Frank Bures wrote on soukous' joyful qualities in an article titled The Sound of Sunshine, an excerpt:

It was a dark time, and looking back on it now,sometimes I think the only thing that saved me was soukous, a sound I had brought home with me from Tanzania. On bad days in that room, when I hadn’t seen sunlight for what felt like days, I would put my headphones on, put on Dalle Kimoko, or Kanda Bongo Man, or Pepe Kalle and be lifted up to a place where the sun was shining, a place that was green, a place where people were laughing.

Perhaps my enjoyment of such retro-genres is some sort of romanticized Afro-escapism, and it very well may be. And this time, for once, I do not care. Everyone else is into such romantic escapism; they dream of early 80s NYC, Havana in the 50s, or some glamorous hip-hop life. I don't wish to be living in a 1950s Congo or to live in a hippie fantasy of global harmony (though that'd be nice). I just like good music, music that might be very foreign to me and my upbringing and which isn't played much anymore. I don't care.

There's been a dearth of musical reissues as of late, primarily non-Western, now that all the classic rock and soul records have been reissued. However, there remains thousands of old albums from across the globe that are still new to our ears. Haven't you noticed all the compilations of Nigerian Funk from the 1970s, 1960s Thai Go-Go, or Ethiopian Jazz? So far I've been very resistant to these reissues because they seem kind of absurd and nostalgic. But, I realized that I might be absurd and listening to old esoteric recordings from some far flung place I may never go to maybe isn't all that bad. If I can truly enjoy the music for the music and not some 'escape' into a palm tree and exotic girl laden fantasy, then it is a-okay. In fact, maybe, just maybe, listening to 'world music', current or not, will open minds and foster dialogue and understanding across borders. Again, I'm being idealistic here. Maybe music can heal, or maybe it is just going to further slanted National Geographic-esque exotic fantasies. What I do know, is that this stuff is very joyful, something lacking in most music (across the globe) today. ENJOY this video from Kekele, a super group of classic rumba players. These are the cats that laid the groundwork for soukous, and the rest is history. Enjoy!