Everyone is dancing: African Music in London

Everyone is dancing: African Music in London

12 August, 2011
by: Kix

Despite the trials and tribulations of London's cultural melting pot, African music keeps gettting stronger.

This September the Southbank Centre is hosting London's ninth African Music Festival celebrating musicians from across the country. The other day I made a note of this year's artists and headed down to Deptford High Street to see if such a worthy celebration of African culture has caught the local community’s imagination. 

It's a Saturday and the High Street is its usual mash up of African, Caribbean and Asian stands overflowing from the second-hand market. Heading into in a shop called 'Streetflava' which sells African clothing, I talked to a woman from Sierra Leone to ask her if she knows any of the artists that are playing at this year’s African Music Festival and she slowly shakes her head. Sadly this is the kind of response I get from most of the people.

Broadly speaking, African music encompasses North, South, East and West African traditions,  which are as stylistically different from one another as ska is from bhangra. Like most other diverse ethnic groups, London has smashed the African culture into one amorphous blob with three major scenes encompassing the whole shebang. There are high culture events hosted in venues like the Southbank Centre and the Barbican which try and promote 'World Music'. Then, on the other end of the scale, you get community events mostly around Peckham, Hackney, Lewisham, and Leytonstone where you can find a large number of the African 'community' enjoying music by artists like the Congolese Koffi Olomide, P-Square, and King Wasiu Asinde. 

Then, somewhere in the middle there are the trendy East London venues like Passing Clouds, Favela Chic and Rich Mix who host gigs by the likes of Afrikan Revolution, Asheber and Kalakuta Millionaires. Going to these venues is fun, but I can’t help but feel a little cheated. My feet are dancing to Afro-beats yet I'm being charged £4 a beer, the interior decoration seems like a pastiche of shabby-chic and my fellow dancers seem to come from white, middle class backgrounds by and large. It’s a theme-park version of Africa, yes, and it begs the question: is the Afro-pop that I listen to 'authentic' or just a trend I'm following?

The first thing that bothers me is the 'World Music' tag. I mean, Balkan folk is hardly the same as Congolese pop music, and yet here they are, all lumped together in the ‘World’ section of our local HMV. Seb from World Circuit Records explains that the term 'World Music' was coined as a marketing term back in the eighties and has outlived its usefulness. “It's the opposite of useful now. The term has negative associations. People think of pan-pipe dreams, deep forest records, dream catchers and bad dancing. Also the term is vague: it's used to describe a huge number of styles and genres from hundreds of countries.”

People here in the West are probably more familiar with Western African musicians like the widely recognized Youssou N' Dour. However that 'Seven Seconds' hit from back in the nineties is a neat pop track that’s about a million miles away from what much Western African music actually sounds like. This leads me to on to another slice of our dilemma; is the exposure to western music diluting or washing out Africa’s traditional sounds? Seb isn’t convinced that it’s a problem: “some artists will mix in western influences deliberately to make their sound more accessible; [at times] though an artist’s style will have just naturally evolved into a mixture of styles, which would also give you that impression.”

This is perhaps the secret to Afro-pop's success in modern times. With the ability to continuously evolve, mould and incorporate a variety of styles, it’s gobbled up the globalised pop format and thrown back sounds that have begun to seep into western indie music. But as KMT, Afrikan Revolution's promoter explains, genres have always meant little to bands: “Afrikan Revolution has a created a new style, genre and a movement all of its own. Labels like 'African', 'world' and 'ethnic' will constantly be used by people who wish to describe Afrikan Revolution in ways they deem appropriate. All labels serve a purpose but Afrikan Revolution is not exclusive to any. We do music which transcends genres.”

I find this quite true. Take a look at ‘Afro-pop'  and you’ll find a genre in continuous flux, constantly exploring different ideas and styles by playing with ethnic instruments like the kora, sitar and didgeridoo and mixing them up with electric guitars, drums and piano. KMT excitingly tells me, “I love it when Afrikan Revolution are performing a track and people are just getting used to hearing African sounds and then bang! the electric guitar kicks in. Afrikan Revolution simply do Afrikan Revolution.”

That’s just the thing. When musicians write and perform, they don’t do it in complete isolation, and just as western pop music has had an influence on African pop music, the reverse is true also. Whilst they’re both windows into the cultures that spawn them, that’s all they are: windows. After all, trying to get a feel for living in Mali through an Amadou and Miriam song is as stupid an exercise as listening to Lady Gaga and trying to imagine what LA is like.

That being said, this cultural hybridity is allowing two worlds to speak to each other in a meaningful way. Koichi, promoter of Kalakuta Millionaires sums it up brilliantly: “Music has such a powerful aspect in getting people together, so hopefully this will trigger people to open their minds”. In these days of racial tension and political scaremongering, that can only be a good thing, right?

To see African Music happening near you, check out our World tag. Yeah I know! 
 

Kix