Since it first came out last year I’ve had Nas and Damian Marley’s concept album Distant Relatives on repeat. There are some lapses on the album, but I really like the track “The Promised Land.” Basically Marley and Nas updates Dennis Brown to big up Africa.   Nas doesn’t make much sense, but Damian Marley […]

An older song by The Funk League, but it comes with a new video. Featuring Brand Nubian’s Sadat X.

Last week we brought you the serious side of Burkina rapper Mokobe.  In this hilarious video he makes proper use of a beat made famous by 50 Cent:

The trailer for the new Denzel Washington-Ryan Reynolds feature “Safe House,” just got released officially on the interwebs yesterday. The film centers around rogue CIA agent Tobin Frost (Washington in Training Day mode again) on the run from a generic group of bad guys. Reynolds’ character, the CIA safe house’s caretaker in Cape Town, has […]

Nice video (Tiro Rose) and photographs (Ference Isaacs) of hip hop dancers from all over Cape Town, South Africa.

A lot of music we like don’t come from Africa. Like this one from Dengue Fever, the California-Cambodia combo: an Indonesian protest song “Gendjer Gendjer.”

Meklit Hadero (Ethiopia | US) – Singer + songwriter. Ethopian American singer, songwriter and recording artist working on bridging the Ethiopian Diaspora living in the United States with Ethiopians in Ethiopia, through her organization The Arba Minch Collective. 2012 TED Senior Fellows.

These guys remind me of Sunday afternoons at my great aunt’s house in Parkwood.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKyxDm_lCFQ&w=600&h=369]

A painting sits glowering on the wall of the Jack Bell Gallery in London. Figures daubed in bright colours stare out from the canvases against a dark background broken up by bits of newspaper cuttings. This is Les Fantômes, the work of Aboudia, a 26-year-old Ivorian painter whose stark images have recently been receiving some […]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-kUhrBGVS8&w=600&h=369]

How do Africans–ground zero for resource extraction by the world’s 1%–feel about the now global ‘Occupy’ movement? Thus far it’s mostly restricted to South Africa (according to OWS’s own data collection) and to small once-off protests by mostly white, middle class South Africans.*  But now they’re joined by Senegalese musician Baaba Maal. That’s Maal above–in the video sound bite–talking […]

One of the most exciting films to come out of the continent recently is the Congolese gangster noir, ‘Viva Riva!’ Sean already blogged about it here when it just started to attract a lot of hype. I saw the film at the Durban International Film Festival earlier this year, where it seemed to polarize the […]

Nice work by Tanzanian crew X Plastaz, with some help of Fid Q, Bamba Nazar and J4. The video comes with subtitles, and the lyrics speak for themselves. Curious how many recent tracks carry an explicit ‘Africa’ in the title.