YOU’RE WELCOME Amadou & Mariam
Mar 24, 2009
The West African duo makes music for the good times, even in bad times.
BY JENNIFER KELLY
Why does the world's most life-affirming music always come from the most troubled places? Welcome to Mali (Because Music/Nonesuch), Amadou & Mariam's follow-up to 2005 critical favorite, Dimanche a Bamako, is, on the one hand, pure sensual joy, a raft of infectious-rhythmed, ebulliently performed funk-rock-desert-electro-dance songs. The poverty, the political corruption, the personal suffering of two singers who have been blind from birth are present, but subsumed in a music so generous, so inclusive and celebratory that you cannot help feeling a wave of optimism. In a First World funk over wasted 401(k) balances, layoffs, foreclosures and soaring college tuition costs? Amadou & Mariam invite you to a party, with borrowed chairs, home-made liquor, a ragtag assortment of multi-national guests and music that goes on all night. It's just what you need... really.
Amadou & Mariam have always incorporated lots of different musical styles and ethnic influences into their West African aesthetic. Their breakout album Dimanche a Bamaka featured producer Manu Chao prominently. Musicological purity is not their thing. So it is, perhaps, not surprising that Welcome to Mali is not solely - or even especially - Malian. People who have spent the last year listening to African Scream Contest or Nigeria Rock Special compilations may find the orchestrations a little slick, the cross-cultural borrowings of reggae, American and African hip hop and IDM jarring. But, with few exceptions, the genre-hopping works fairly well. This is African-tinged pop, with the emphasis on pop. There's nothing archival or field recorded about it.
"Sabali," for instance, the opening track and one of two produced by Damon Albarn, intercuts Mariam's high, wistful voice with tense new wave piano chords and glitchy electronics. Albarn adds a programmed beat to this cut, rather than the live African drums you might expect, and a series of high, scale-cascading synthesizers. It's an interesting juxtaposition, the ultra-clean, ultra-modern IDM arrangements around an achingly natural, non-Western voice, but you quickly get beyond "interesting". The track works as the purest kind of electro pop, natural and synthesized, danceable and subtly melancholy.
Later, on "Djama", a reworking of a song originally recorded in 1979, Amadou & Mariam experiment with a back-beated reggae sound, and "Je Te Kiffe" with guest vocals by Juan Rozoff, shades towards Western indie rock. The huge, call-and-response choruses of "I Will Follow You" and the title track are underlined by a full string quartet, and concert hall piano. Yet in all cases, these non-African sounds are integrated, enveloped almost, with the buoyant rhythms, the scintillating funk guitars of West African pop.
Western influences pop up everywhere, but there are also some wonderfully distinctive African touches, too. Toumani Diabate brings his unearthly kora to "Djuru," its sharp, reverberating tones somewhere between a harp and a guitar. In this cut, the shuffling, hip-shifting beat is all body, the kora untethered spirit. Later, in "Bozos" and the hidden track "Boula", Zoumana Téréta plays a rough, evocative "suku" or Malian violin, the instrument's low, scraped-out tone adding an additional layer of emotional depth to the songs. And rapper K'naan, out of Somalia, comes on board for "Africa", a love song to a troubled continent, imagined as a woman.
Welcome to Mali can be heard as a party, but there are darker, more politically-engaged undertones scattered throughout the album. Amadou sings about the tangled politics of Africa in "C'est N'est Pas Bon," and again on "Boula." "Masiteladi," an open-hearted travel song, touches on the long separations from family that Africans must endure to make money in its cities. Yet even these songs are full of joy, celebrating survival, friends and music, even in very difficult circumstances. The worst depression in history in the west would be a pretty flush year in Mali. Welcome to Mali is for the good times, even in bad times.
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