SONG OF THE DAY: Mali Yo

I am not officially a “world music dude” but I do enjoy music from around the Earthball. Official “world music dudes” tend to identify with putumayo, which I think is Whole Foods Spanish for “weak fucker”. I refer to this particular band as Super Rail Band, though they were originally Rail Band and formed half a century ago, sponsored by the Malian Ministry of Information, to promote national traditions. They later became the Super Rail Band, likely because they fuckin’ slap so hard, big in the West African Afro-Latin jazz fusion jam style that packed stadiums, with multiple members of the group launching off into their own solo shit over the course of the lifetime. The band’s official full name is Super Rail Band of the Buffet Hotel de la Gare, Bamako.

A couple things here – African music’s traditions since the colonial independence movement is so amazing. You had this Afro-Latin jazz explosion come from The Congo, plus the whole equally insane Zamrock heavy as fuck rock bands from Zambia region. Of course Hip Life and Fela Kuti in West Africa come to mind, all the while traditional nomadic guitarists through the Sahel had been doing their thing the whole time too. Why the fuck are our choices of listening to music still so goddamned boring, even in this allegedly wide open era of streaming and sharing playlists? Because it’s still controlled by capitalism, and capitalism’s reach often limits itself through customs at the border, and what it does and doesn’t want to allow.

Secondly, the Rough Guide collections are the Democrats of world music to the Republican Putumayo compilations. That is to say, if you look for the Rough Guide to literally anything, it’s going to be more wide open than anything Putumayo gives you, but also all of it is bullshit curation. Fuck it, I’m quitting my job, getting a passport, and just gonna go crate digging through Africa for the rest of my life. If I make it across the continent safely, without settling down into a brand new life as some freak village American poet junkman wizard, then hopefully i can catch a steam ship to South Asia, and go tape digging there, bouncing between nation-states. I’m sure I’ll get embroiled in some sort of Sufi Islamist militia somewhere, likely Indonesia to be honest, but then I’ll finally just get to write wonderful poetry about the internal jihad between ungodly manmade order forced into all our lives, and true spirit of existence, which is about the power of lounge, and not giving a fuck about all this dumb shit, so that you can actually give a fuck about the real shit.