Quick, name any musician from Africa.
If you were like me about a year ago, you couldn’t. So I decided to explore what modern African music had to offer. It probably shouldn’t have been suprising that couple of the songs I wanted to post weren’t on YouTube at all.
Angelique Kidjo might be the most famous of the artists listed here; below is “Papa”.
“Manjani” by Sam Mangwana was wonderful, and it’s a crime no one thought it good enough to put on YouTube. Guess I should do it. In the meantime, here is his “Mabele”.
Issa Bagayogo is a Malinese pop star. Unfortunately, his song “Touba” was also not on YouTube. So we’ll go with “Dambalou”.
“Fire in Soweto” by Sonny Okosun was an international hit, and apparently somewhat controversial.
A couple psuedo-African songs from the gaming world:
Civilization 4’s “Baba Yetu” has to be the most captivating theme in a game I’ve ever heard. The lyrics are the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili (although the singers are most definitely not native Swahili speakers.)
Street Fighter 4 has this theme for the African stage. Yes, this is the game with a Mexican wrestler who fights to obtain the greatest recipe collection in the world. No, I haven’t played it.
I agree, of all the Civilization games, Civilization 4 has the most inspirational opening theme. It’s a shame though, the music motivates you to creating a civilization that would win by culture or space race… so it would make you feel guilty for nuking your enemy to oblivion or bombing them back to the stone age.
in second grade music class we heard “belakawe”, an african folk dance. it had flutes and something shaking like a maracas. this is also not on youtube, sadly.
@Allen: LOL. I eventually liked a strategy of massive military in the beginning to wipe out a rival. Then coast to a space win with the extra cities/space. It’s the best of both worlds.
Nukes would be fun to try…I’ve never seen the computer use them.
@Annie: No wonder it’s not on YouTube. YouTube wasn’t around when you were in 2nd grade.
With the more recent expansions to Civ 4, I preferred winning by assimilation.
Every time I went to war, regardless of whether or not I started it, I would end up with a massive alliance against me. As peaceful as Gandhi was supposed to be, he would always swing a sword at me and go raiding my border towns.
So the easiest victory I’ve found is to make a large deterrent army and then build lots and lots of culture generating buildings. Then you just sit back and watch as more and more of their cities revolt and join your empire.
Angelique Kidjo is very popular in the World music circuit. I liked her interpretation of “VooDoo Chile”. The Original, by Hendrix was great, then SRV made it a classic… and now Angelique.
I sure hope Senior Coconut and his Orchestra doesn’t cheese it up like he did with the latino cover of smoke on the water ( humo en el agua).:
http://beemp3.com/index.php?q=senor+coconut+his+orchestra+humo+en+el+agua+album+version&st=all