Category: Around The World

We continue last week’s theme of only locally popular music and have a closer look at the Senegalese artist Youssou N’Dour, who is considered one of the most celebrated African artists in history. He joined Star Band, Dakar’s most popular band in the 1970ies at the tender age of sixteen and became one of the founding fathers of Mbalax, a hugely popular musical style combining traditional Senegalese music with the Latin styles popular at the time. But despite frequent collaborations with several well-known Western musicians (not least among them Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon) outside Africa he is by far best known for the single he did together with Swedish singer Neneh Cherry.

Cherry – whose family history is rather complicated and who moved a fair bit around the Western hemisphere in her life – stated that the huge success the song had worldwide took her quite by surprise, as the track was supposed to be an experiment.

The title of “7 Seconds” refers to the first few breaths in the life of a child, as of yet unaware of the harshness and violence of the world it’s coming into. It features lyrics in French, English and the West African Wolof.

It’s a rare occasion for a French song to get to the top of the charts in countries that do not speak the language, which might explain why Claudie Fritsch-Mentrop, better known by her stage name “Desireless” is kind of considered a one-hit-wonder outsider her native France. But “Voyage Voyage” made it to the top in several countries, including the UK and Ireland, West Germany (you do remember there used to be two Germanies, don’t you?), Norway and Spain. Ironically it only made it to second place in France itself.

Fritsch-Mentrop was originally in fashion design and started her singing career relatively late, after a trip to India. She created the androgynous and cold persona of Desireless and had a falling out with her label as they wanted too much influence in the character for her taste.

While she’s still performing and writing new songs she was never able to reproduce the fame outside France.

Probably the only music video featured on our blog that prominently mentions its director.

We’re going to stray a little bit from our “famous music videos” path today in order to go with just the right bit of music for the gorgeous weather we’re having these days.

Robert Nesta Marley, better known as “Bob Marley” grew up in tiny Nine Mile and later Trenchtown, the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica. He formed a vocalist group with his childhood friends Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, and was encouraged to learn the guitar by the local popular artist Joe Higgs. It would take another decade, a few name changes and a label change to Island Records before they would gain international success, but in the end they were fired as opening band for “Sly and the Family Stone” because they had become more popular than the main act. The international breakthrough came with the live version of “No Woman, No Cry” (which is Jamaican patois for “Woman, Don’t Cry”, not what many people think namely “There is no reason to cry when there’s no woman”) in 1975, their first big hit outside Jamaica.

There is a Zurich connection as well: It was after a Bob Marley concert at the Hallenstadion in the end of May 1980 when fans coming from the concert joined forces with young people protesting against the city’s decision to let the Opera house use the “Red Factory” during renovations. The youngsters had tried to secure a cultural space of their own there for a long time, and that night they clashed hard with police at the first of what is these days known as the “Opernhauskrawalle”.

Marley died a year later from cancer.

I wanted a video from back then, which is why you’re seeing a recording from the Rainbow Theatre, London – performed the day after the release of his probably most acclaimed album “Exodus” – instead of the better known breakthrough version that received a much newer video two years ago.

144 times. That’s the number of repetitions the one and only sentence in Daft Punks’ “Around the World” gets. Does that make the song Gross? On the contrary!

The video is resembling the structure of the song quite closely: There are five instruments, and therefore five groups of characters. Robots for voice (apparently powered by the program you wrote back then for that “introduction to algorithms” class, by the looks of their collision reactions 😋), athletes for the bass, disco dancers for the keyboard, skeletons for the guitar (in a divergence to their traditional role in Saint-Saëns’ “Le Carnaval des Animaux”) and last, but not least: mummies for the drums.

A meticulously planned mathematical companion to a catchy tune? Count me in!

Music is and always has been political. So it’s about time we’re going to deal with a song where this was a huge deal. In hindsight Paul Simon’s album “Graceland” turned out to bring much-needed attention to African talent. But the decision to work around the cultural boycott, put into place due to the country’s Apartheid regime, was very controversial at the time.

The bass-solo in “You Can Call Me Al”, short as it is, certainly is one of the most iconic ones in pop history. Simon had taken extra care with all the bass lines on “Graceland” at the time. But with this solo, even though it’s not that long, they went another mile:

What we hear is actually double of what was originally recorded, with the second half being the palindromic result of playing the recording backwards. Genius. And so good, that I can even live with finding out that what I thought to know about the solo (embodying the notion that it was recorded in a telephone booth in the streets of Johannesburg due to conflicting schedules) turns out to be an urban myth…

Despite the controversies, Graceland would become Simon’s most successful solo studio-album and that it came at a bit of a low point in his life, with his relationships to both parter-in-crime Art Garfunkel and partner-in-life Carrie Fisher having deteriorated, fits the song just well, seeing how it tells the story of a mid-life crisis in general and his journey to South Africa in particular.

Paul Simon is the guy on the left.