http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Deh07ZDF1aA Blitz The Ambassador talks about the initial reception of his music ("slow"), the musical Fela! ("it made the people more open and made the people understand the larger context"), his early records, his collaboration with Corneille for the track 'Best I Can' ("trying to express how I felt about where I'm at"), the future ("I don't know what it holds") and the internet.

http://vimeo.com/27758516 I'm looking forward to hearing Shabazz Palaces play during their European tour later this month. It seems like the live renditions of the new songs don't quite sound like the Black Up album versions. Via Gorilla vs. Bear.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers funk jam track Ethiopia came following "a life-changing trip Flea and Josh took to the African country." Josh says:

It was like a musical field trip. We had outings every day. It was like summer camp... and then Flea got lost and when he was lost, he went through a lot of emotions which is reflected on the album. It's the point where we were starting to really come together.

Flea recalls:

I got lost in a city called Harar. It was a really amazing experience that really changed everything. Damon Albarn had started African Express, basically a bunch of musicians go to a different country in Africa to jam with Africans, listen to African music and trip around. It was f***ing amazing. So we decided we'd go to Ethiopia. One day we got the bus and I got off the bus, walked down this little street, turned around and the bus was gone! I was lost. I walked around this little town for about an hour. No one speaks English and it's kind of crazy. I started getting scared. People were coming up to me and speaking to me but I didn't understand. Then one guy came up to me and he started speaking in broken English. He found my friends and helped me. So when I came home, I told that story to Anthony and he wrote that song. It's very special to me.

Serious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arve4ZB8jog Kinshasa-born rapper Youssoupha moved to France at the age of 10. Ever since releasing his first tapes he's been strident in his critique of the French media's lazy depicting of the festering banlieues. In 2009, columnist Éric Zemmour filed a complaint against Youssoupha after being name-dropped in one of his songs. Back then, Youssoupha reacted in an open letter in Le Monde. And now through this new video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lZmwWZUYUU New video for the Congolese AIAC favorite Lexxus, recorded in Kinshasa, featuring the Kinois rapper LeslyMan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82BifytoYY Easy listening. 'Bassa' is a song by the Côte d'Ivoire-born, Mali-raised and now France-based artist Fatoumate Diawara. We could use a translation -- because maybe it's no easy listening at all. Anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSIO_eAomrs French-Cameroonian rapper Lalcko released a strong record earlier this year: 'L’eau lave mais l’argent rend propre.' Ever seen this video he recorded 'between Yaoundé and Douala' for his 2007 track 'Lumumba'? It's dedicated "to all my Lumumbas born of aggression and cemented by the fight."

What do you do as a South African tourist industry when the promised surge in visitors after the World Cup fails to materialize? You move your aim, target the local ‘upcoming individuals, independent couples and families’, draw up an 'energetic, vibey and pacey' campaign, get some of those upcoming individuals on board -- and you turn the local into a daft trope. The BLK JKS, for example, take a left turn where the hitch-hiker's carton says ‘local’, meeting up with 'the original men: the San', shaking hands 'with their ancient selves'. South Africans are urged to get out of their 'comfort zone', 'get off the map, get out of the suburbs, keep moving', because 'sometimes you’ve got to loose your way, to find yourself again': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDNRW5y9-ZI Artist Mary Sibande undertakes a 'spiritual journey to Limpopo and Mpumalanga', pulling over at 'the cultural landscape' of Mapungubwe, the cycad forest of 'the other-worldly' Ga-Modjadji and meets up with Esther Mahlangu, 'the icon in African traditional art': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXuhG5PplyA And DJ Black Coffee flies low over KwaZulu-Natal’s Drakensberg Mountains: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b61WEGmXnLk You no longer need to be white to feel like a tourist in the country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgMKpaWG_E German-Ghanian singer Y'akoto's biography on her website made me look up the meaning of the word "hegira" -- a beautiful word, but maybe not the best translation of the original German 'Suche', as in: "search" (for herself). Great track, and a nice video. Live recordings show her playing with the Mighty Embassy Ensemble, Blitz The Ambassador's backing band. That makes perfect sense. Via Kweligee.

You've heard the news about Romelu Lukaku? The 18-year-old Belgian-Congolese striker signed a contract with his dream team Chelsea over the weekend. Lukaku's star rose fast since debuting for the national team in 2010. Football aficionados aren't surprised by the move. And Lukaku? He knew it all along. The above fragment* is taken from a series ('The School of Lukaku') that was aired on Belgian national tv last year. The series followed a class of youth living and studying in Brussels, doing a good job at showing the Belgian audience a part of the city most prefer to avoid -- and a reality they choose to ignore. The video shows Lukaku visiting Chelsea's stadium on a school trip. No doubt he will make it at Stamford Bridge, or so the fans say. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7JAF77w1c * Gotta love the use of Elbow's Lippy Kids.

An interview in a (South African) Sunday paper with a 'hopping mad' Caiphus Semenya (the South African musician* was surprised to hear his music was being sampled in the 'Murder to Excellence' track on the Jay-Z & Kanye West's Watch The Throne album -- without him being consulted) got us curious about the song used. Turns out it is 'Celie Shaves Mr./Scarification Ceremony', of The Color Purple soundtrack which Semenya co-wrote with Quincy Jones, Harvey Mason Jr., Joel Rosenbaum and Bill Summers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ci8KKr5zV0 Get them, Caiphus. In the meanwhile we'll stick to Zuluboy sampling another song of his ('Nomalanga'): [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNhkatwxLXo&w=600&h=373] *If you're wondering who Caiphus is: with his wife Letta Mbulu (fronting their family band) they built respectable careers out of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. (Click through for the videos of Letta on Soul Train with Caiphus on backing vocals and later in the early 1980s.) When he arrived in the US in the early 1960s, Caiphus started collaborating with Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa (listen to their Union of South Africa).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYngRIzG3Uk&w=600&h=373] “In South Africa,” anthropologist Jean Comaroff tells us in this lecture, “murder rates are held to be diagnostic of violence run amok, of governance haunted by a past of inequities that no constitutional reform, no right of reconciliation can fully dispel. Especially indicative is the failure of the police to protect the populace, to win the war between crime and punishment that for many has turned the post-colony into a Hobbesian war zone.” When this obsessive drama of crime and punishment grips the South African imaginary at all levels, it edges aside older fantasies like ‘the rainbow nation’, or ‘a people born in struggle’. South Africans believe their country to be exceptionally violent, “captured by images of law and disorder (the more dire the better)” but “the public fixation far exceeds the facticity of crime” (more people die of AIDS, traffic accidents or heart disease than of criminal violence -- thus making it a very unexceptional society in comparison to countries that share a similar past or transitional conundrum). But audacious crime fascinates, Comaroff argues, as does the figure of the ‘diviner-detective’ (think: renegade policemen like Jackson Gopane, or Kobus 'Donker' Jonker who combines a fascination for the occult with the ordinary police-work, or the now-disbanded ‘super-cops’ of the Scorpions) -- the ‘diviner-detective’ who seems to be an embodiment of the paradoxes of law, order, and sovereignty in places where faith in the ability to explain lawlessness is lost, and with it possibly the nature of society itself. Recommended listening, if you like a good dose of anthropology.

Not sure whether Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa's new novel, El Sueño del Celta (The Dream of the Celt), has been published in English yet -- so I might be spoiling it for some future interested readers if it hasn't -- but halfway through the story about the Irish diplomat-turned-nationalist Roger Casement, I already regretted coming across these photographs by Juan Carlos Tomasi (samples above and below) before reading the book. I couldn't help but picture Casement (who was sent to Congo in 1883, where he met H.M. Stanley and Joseph Conrad) as a nineteenth century Vargas Llosa on a field trip. Granted, the book is much better than Sir Vidia's.

Maybe not the most popular artist in Benin today, but the country's independence day is a good day to listen to Benin-born jazz guitarist Lionel 'Gilles' Loueke. This performance was recorded in Boston earlier this year: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nls0wvH1TTI&w=600&h=373] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVL5XWYQej8

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtZd2uimcuI&w=600&h=373] The other day, we were wondering where all the female African MC's were at. Give us some time to come up with a proper answer (serious, where are they?), but we think South African Zaki Ibrahim is one of the few. Beats for this track (and cameo in the video) are by Canadian house DJ and producer Nick Holder.

South African artist Spoek Mathambo gets the Tim & Barry treatment for their online music channel dontwatchthat.tv. (Watch it here.) Spoek will be playing in New York (Damrosch Park Bandshell) on August 7, by the way, as part of the 'Live from the Continent' line-up. Other guests are Blitz the Ambassador and Iyadede. DJ's for the night are Boima (if he can make it back from the continent in time) and the Ahficionados.