Jil Jilala - Laayoun Ainya

Laayoun Ainya is one of the most famous Moroccan songs of the 1970s and something of an unofficial national anthem for many Moroccan nationals.  This is a song you will hear played by the groups that gather in the Djemaa el Fna on balmy nights when crowds gather to be entertained and sing along to popular and familiar tunes.  The song itself deals with important aspects of Moroccan nationalism and questions over the Moroccan claim to sovereignty over the Western Sahara and deals explicitly with the Green March, during which hundreds of thousands of unarmed Moroccans occupied desert lands.

On October 16th 1975, the International Court of Justice in the Hague issued an advisory opinion on the legal status of the area known as the western Sahara prior to the Spanish colonisation of the region in 1884.  That night, King Hassan II appeared on Moroccan television and radio asking for 350000 volunteers to occupy the territory in an attempt to secure Moroccan sovereignty over the land. This sovereignty was contested by Mauritania, Algeria and many of the inhabitants of the sparsely populated desert region as represented by the Polisario movement. As a result of the occupation an agreement was signed which divided the land between Morocco and Mauritania, this resulted in fifteen years of Polisario's guerilla warfare against the Moroccan government. 

I don't wish to get into the politics of the Green March, but the music contained in the grooves of this record is absolutely wonderful:

I suppose my views on nationalism and the idea of the nation state are best summed up by Benedict Anderson: 

"In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

"It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion...all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically-as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society.'...The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.

"It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destorying the legitamcy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.

"Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

"These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism."

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991, pp. 5-7.

Tracklist:

01 Laayoun Ainya

02 Jlatni Riahak

03 Darat Addawra

04 Ennas Fi Lahoua Nachdate

Get it HERE.

Los Guaraguao - Es Mi Viejo (1974)

When I was at university a couple of years ago there was a big debate between different members of the teaching staff over elements of Marxist theory. Which is the more pertinent element of the theory, exploitation or alienation? Some liked the work of Guy Debord and Walter Benjamin and the idea that capitalism creates a world of illusion, an enchanting wonderland of fashions and glittering trinkets which help separate us from our fellow human, whilst others thought this irrelevant in the face of the real exploitation of the world's poor for the benefit of the world's rich.

Of course the world is never so simple as such false dichotomies would suggest. The spectacle is necessary so that the exploitation can be perpetuated, and the spectacle must be brighter and more encompassing as the exploitation intensifies.

What does all this have to do with this week's charity shop musical 'bargain' you may ask. Well not much would be my answer, other than that this group of Venezualan musicians were part of the Nueva Cancion (new song) movement that swept Central and South America in the 1970s and '80s. Music was used as a form of immediate mass communication to express ideas that were in opposition to the views of the repressive, right wing regimes that were being installed and supported by the US government across the continent. This music expressed the feelings of the people, of the workers, and was considered dangerous enough to warrent repression in many South American countries, and many songwriters and musicians were harrassed, beaten and forced into exile.

Check out these great recordings from the 1983 Nicaraguan peace concerts for a good overview of the Nueva Cancion movement.

Tracklist:

01 Es Mi Viejo
02 Canto a mi Pueblo
03 Mi Canto
04 Cancion Por Il Fusil Y La Flor
05 Ay Que Si, Ay Que No
06 Algo Diario
07 Cristo al Servicio de Quien
08 Juventud Adelante
09 El Campesino
10 Eres Asi

Get it HERE.

Negativland - Escape from Noise (1987)

Read THIS. Its a good overview of the album and the prank Negatvland pulled after its release. There's also some links to related stuff. For the unfamiliar, Negativland are a bunch of San Francisco subversives, painstakingly sculpting audio collages to scramble our brains. Escape from Noise features guest noises from a who's who of underground superstars including Jello Biafra, Jerry Garcia, Fred Frith, Alexander Hacke (from Einsturzende Neubauten), the Residents and thee Reverend Ivan Stang (mouthpiece of The Church of the Subgenius).

Tracklist:

01 Announcement
02 Quiet Please
03 Michael Jackson
04 Escape From Noise
05 The Playboy Channel
06 Stress In Marriage
07 Nesbitt's Lime Soda Song
08 Over The Hiccups
09 Sycamore
10 Car Bomb
11 Methods Of Torture
12 Yellow Black And Rectangular
13 Backstage Pass
14 Christianity Is Stupid
15 Time Zones
16 You Don't Even Live Here
17 The Way Of It
18 Endscape

Get it HERE.

Guadeloupe: General Strike, Riots and Civil Unrest

Well, I was up late last night posting the Ti Zozios album. When I checked my dashboard today, I was surprised to find this post about Guadeloupe on Ian Bone's blog. These riots aren't really getting any coverage in the British media, but are being well reported in France where there are serious concerns that trouble will flare up in Paris (again). The mass resistance to low pay and high inflation that began in Guadeloupe a month ago is spreading across the region and to French Guyana and the Reunion Islands in the Indian Ocean. Here is a French news report:

Franco et Josky Kiambukuta du T.P.O.K. Jazz - Missile

The Democratic Republic of Congo has been in the news quite a bit lately, short pieces in the broadsheet newspapers and on television telling of the current situation in the troubled nation. We get told about the displaced population, over a million people on the move around the land trying to avoid battles between government troops and rebel forces. We are told about tribal conflict...Hutu rebels, possibly supported by Rwanda. We get to see images of a people living in desperate poverty. Commentators have recently been telling us that this is the world's greatest humanitarian disaster, and all the while Western governments seem reluctant to get involved. Little is said about the region's vast mineral resources that continue to be mercilessly plundered by interests that are certainly not 'tribal'. The wealth created by those who mine the copper and coltan that are essential to the world electronics and communications industries, to the globalised 'network' society, seems to flow everywhere but back into the heart of Africa.

Seeing these images and hearing the news reports, it is easy to imagine that the African people have always lived this way, rolling from one disaster to the next, like children in constant need of parental supervision. Such views obscure Africa's bloody history and Europe's part in it. Brutal colonialism, the scramble for Africa, and years of ruthless economic exploitation have all played a fundamental role in the current desperate situation.

For me, music presents openings to other ways of thinking. The music of the Congo gives us a different view of the country and its people, so today I've posted another fantastic album by Franco et T.P. O.K. Jazz. Franco began recording in the early 1960s and soon became one of Africa's most popular musicians. The newly independent country was entering a period of political turmoil after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, and Mobutu was consolidating his military power with the help of US and European governments who were worried about the spread of Communism in Africa. Mobutu came to power in 1965, and it is during this dictator's violent reign that Franco, and Congolese music more generally, enjoyed his most fertile period, leading a large orchestra and producing an unprecedented number of records that were hugely successful across the continent. It was during this time that Franco earned himself the title 'Sorcerer of the guitar'. His playing is indeed magical. In 1978 Franco spent time in prison after speaking out against Mobutu's regime. When he came out, the country's declining economic situation meant that the big bands he had been used to leading were no longer viable. The 1980s saw the decline of the Congo's previously vibrant music scene, musicians emigrated and nightspots closed as the country's money dried up.

Currently, 'Congotronics' groups such as Konono No 1 or the Kasai Allstars are enjoying some success with Western listeners:

This is fabulous music, but contrast the scene with this great '70s footage of Franco's band and we get some idea of the distance travelled, of the way the country seems to be sliding backwards, its poverty growing as global demand for its valuable resources increase:

Today's album is from 1982 or '83, and it features a smaller band than those on the other T.P.O.K. Jazz album we posted, its still a stellar listen though with those incredibly intricate duelling guitars snaking their way into the brain.


Tracklisting:

01 Missile
02 Chacun Pour Soi
03 Partage
04 Adieu Je M'en Vais
05 Tu Es Mechante
06 Laissez Passer
07 Ngai Te

You can get the zip over here.