For better or worse, most of what’s sold to the West as world music is chosen by the white man. A lot of excellent albums get through that filter, both from traditional artists and acts that freely incorporate new technology and nonnative influences, though the filter itself has prompted an ongoing debate about authenticity. People on one side argue that the omnipresent West destroys ancient traditions, while others point out that nobody lives in a vacuum and that it’s natural for music to mutate. It’s an old and thoroughly exhausted squabble, though, and it neglects a knottier corollary: what shows up in world music bins here doesn’t reflect what’s actually playing on the streets of non-Western countries.
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Take, for example, the superb music released under the Buena Vista Social Club banner. By and large, it’s not what most Cubans listen to–homegrown hip-hop and timba, a slick dance music, are the preferred forms of pop on the island. Two great African acts that have performed here, the Senegalese group Orchestra Baobab and the Congolese rumba group Kekele, are considered old-fashioned back home; kids in Africa are more interested in the locally produced hip-hop that’s exploded there and the more polished Congolese rumba produced by singer Koffi Olomide. It’s virtually impossible to find music on African labels in the U.S. outside of small African video stores and groceries.
The person responsible for the introduction of Konono No. 1 to the West is Belgian producer Vincent Kenis. In a letter published on the music blog The Suburbs Are Killing Us, he explains that he first heard them in 1979 on Radio France. Ten years later he went to Kinshasa to track them down, without success, and on another trip in 1996 he was told they’d scattered across Congo and Angola. But a few years after that the president of their fan club told him they were back together, and in 2002 he recorded Congotronics live, outdoors in Kinshasa, on a laptop.
