1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 26. Miriam Makeba – Miriam Makeba (1960)


I came across Miriam Makeba after hearing Pato Pato on the radio and loving it, but to my shame didn’t really check out the rest of her catalogue, apart from “The Click Song” (which really ought to be called Qongqothwane although Makeba wryly acknowledges that Westerners have difficulty with the distinctinctive sounds of the Xhosa langauage. 

Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa”, helped bring (South) African music to Western attention over 20 years before Paul Simon will team up with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, singing in Xhosa and a variety of other African languages, and occasionally English. Escaping Apartheid, she lived essentially as an exile in the USA, unable even to attend her own mother’s funeral. I’m glad she lived to see the end of that era at least, must have felt some kind of vindication. Oh, and she had a long collaboration with her mentor Harry Belafonte. 

The album overall is a great mix of traditional songs with some jazzy, bluesy elements including a cover of House of the Rising Sun – perhaps not as iconic as the Animals’ version, more slow and soulful – as well as Mbube (“Lion”), which is the original version of the song later Westernised as The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimowey). There’s a great comic turn of The Naughty Little Flea, the stirring Retreat Song, and Makeba’s famous Click Song. 

Makeba has a gorgeous voice that covers a load of ranges and timbres to suit the song. There’s always a fine line with what is rather condescendingly referred to as “world music” between proudly showcasing your culture and pandering to Western exoticism, I think Makeba treads it very carefully. 

Which brings me to a bit of a side rant. I’ve seen criticisms that Dimery’s list is very Western-centric, which is probably true, not least because the music of everywhere else gets lumped together as “World”. As if the USA and English-speaking nations aren’t part of the same world. So far, though, we’ve not only had Makeba, we’ve had Ravi Shankar, we’ve had a variety of Afro-Cuban and Latin grooves. And do the likes of jazz, blues, and rock and roll, all of which stem from African American musical traditions, count as (white) Western? Since we are all, give or take a half million years, Africans, maybe music is music?  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dr Simon Reads... Appendix N. Part One: Poul Anderson

Image
Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N: Introduction This is a new series that will feature sporadically, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. You will either know what I mean by “Appendix N”, or you will have no clue. In the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide, Gary Gygax provided a large number of appendices, from random smells to reputed magical properties of herbs and gemstones. Appendix N was a bibliography of works that inspired him. Back in 1982 when I first got hold of this book, there were only a couple of items on there that I’d read, and only a few other authors that I’d even heard of. Many years later, after, much reading, I returned to Appendix N expecting to have added greatly to the works on there that I’d read; but actually, there were still very few. Many of the authors were obscure or out of print authors of, for want of a better expression, golden age pulp; the kind that feature in Amazing Stories and the like. Now, ...
Read more

An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 80: The Nineteen Guardians of Saqar (sounds cooler than it is) (Shrouded (al-Muddaththirl))

Shrouded (al-Muddaththirl) 1-56 The Nineteen Guardians of Saqar (sounds cooler than it is). Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Qur’an version). In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Qur’an, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology. For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2ApLDy0 For the online Qur’an that I use, see here http://al-quran.info and http://quran.com Shrouded (al-Muddaththirl) 1-28 “O you wrapped up in your mantle! Rise up and warn!” Like the previous surah , Enwrapped, this one starts with God addressing the Prophet as one wrapped in a mantle. Last time, because of the emphasis on praying at night, I took this to be a reference to a literal cloak against the cold night, but here it seems to be more metaphorical. Perhaps it was always meant to be both. I think metaphorical because the Prophet is told to “ purify your cloak ” and to avoid “ i...
Read more

An Atheist Explores the Qur'an Part 121: Closing Thoughts

It took half as many posts to tackle the Qur'an as it did the Bible, 120 compared to 248, but it felt like longer sometimes. Perhaps because the Qur'an is written by a single man and deals with pretty much the same topic over and over, whereas the Bible is a compilation of multiple works, some of which are historical, some apocalyptic, some laws or building instruction, some philosophical, some poetic, some a bit of each. From that point of view, I'd have to say that the Bible was the more interesting work to read. Have I learned any great wisdom from the Qur'an? I'd have to say … no, not really. Granted, I probably didn't approach it with a particularly deep understanding of the material in the first place, but that (as with the Bible readthrough) was always my intent. Picking through line by line is still something of a deep dive, and in both books I tried to be alert for symbol and metaphor. Doing it that way, however, it's easy to miss thematic callb...
Read more