Love’s a Real Thing: The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa
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Successful marketing can iron out a lot of this apparent randomness, though, by helping sustain a reissue campaign that focuses on a specific style or on the music of a particular region. In 2000, when MCA began its series of stateside rereleases from Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late Nigerian inventor of Afrobeat, it took great pains to make sure the albums would have an audience: after waiting till they’d already caused a buzz in Europe, the label released the first of the discs alongside the U.S. debut from Fela’s son, Femi Kuti, who was touring America and providing in-the-flesh testimony to the music’s staying power. The French imprint Buda originally planned to release only ten volumes in its superb “Ethiopiques” series–but, in part because the label did justice to the greatness of the music by investing in handsome packaging and informative liner notes, volume 19 just came out and there’s no end in sight. And two British imprints have capitalized on the demand for post-Fela Afrobeat, contributing to a healthy and still-growing stack of reissues and compilations: beginning in the late 90s the now defunct Strut Records put out several volumes of hard Nigerian funk, and in 2003 the Soundway label, owned by DJ and record collector Miles Cleret, kicked off its “Ghana Soundz” series.
When it comes to creating niches for different flavors of international music, though, David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label wrote the book. Luaka Bop’s collections of Brazilian pop laid the groundwork for the surge of interest in tropicalia in the late 90s. Nearly a decade ago The Soul of Black Peru introduced the world to Susana Baca and offered glimpses of artists who’ve since made tours of the States, like Eva Ayllon and Peru Negro. And Telling Stories to the Sea, a compilation of music from Lusophone Africa, helped launch or reinvigorate the Western careers of Cesaria Evora, Bonga, and Waldemar Bastos.
But most of the music on Love’s a Real Thing isn’t so clearly beholden to Western pop, instead folding indigenous sounds more thoroughly into the mix. “Keleya,” a 1975 track by Mali’s Moussa Doumbia, takes Fela’s Afrobeat as a point of departure, adorning its expansive funk with wild, in-the-red yowls worthy of James Brown and a squalling, squeaking tenor saxophone solo. Percussionist Gasper Lawal, a London-based Nigerian who’s done session work with Ginger Baker, contributes “Awon-Ojise-Oluwa,” a 1980 cut that mellows the hard Afrobeat he mastered in the 70s with an infusion of the sashaying grace of juju, a laid-back dance music most famously exported by King Sunny Ade. The 1975 cut “Ifa,” by Tunji Oyelana & the Benders, creates its fierce, chugging groove by mixing and matching elements of juju and a related form called apala, less well-known outside Nigeria, that’s relatively stripped-down and punchy; after a vocal-and-percussion incantation, low-end bass and funky guitar licks bubble in and turn the piece into a dance workout.
