Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 586

Paris is a Continent, N°5

Not sure what it says about France that Dominique Strauss-Kahn (he is portrayed as a victim of a conspiracy) and David Beckham (a 36-year-old player is entrusted with bringing back gloss to French football) dominate the headlines there this week.

Meanwhile, a mix of French hip hop and smooth R&B continue to dominate my instalments of music from there.  This week is a short offering since I am going on vacation today.

First up,  Tunisian rapper Sniper featuring Sexion d'Assault with "Blood Diamondz." You may remember that Sexion d'Assault was, until recently, known more for their homophobic outbursts than their music. They claimed to have left hate behind.

I promise to do an all-women post at some point.

For now, here are two: first, Marseille-born singer Kenza Farah featured on the song "Tous de la Fête" by Dibi Dobo (his family comes from Benin). Kenza Farah's family is Kabyle from Algeria. This, btw, is the only actual music video I am featuring this week.

And second, Evanz, a singer discovered by La Fouine, with "Ton Silence." (The song features rapper Soprano.)

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Music Break. Friday Bonus Edition

tUnE-yArDs cite Barrington Levy, Odetta, Woody Guthrie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Ruth Garbus, Bertolt Brecht, Björk, Todd Rundgren, Fela Kuti and "you" as their influences:

Tanya Auclair (from West London, "via Canada and Rwanda" – citing influences Bongo Joe Coleman, Juana Molina, The Staple Singers, Laurie Anderson, Matthew Herbert and E.S.G) sings and plays 'Origami':

Trust Shabazz Palaces and Kahlil Joseph to do it again:

Oskido and his production team (behind much of the staple kwaito videos over the last year) do something different with Nokwazi (or maybe not that different — not citing Cleo):

While we're in South Africa, I'm feeling this guitar band from Cape Town: MacGyver Knife. (There aren't that many corners in Woodstock left where they haven't shot a music video, sprayed a graffiti or did a photo shoot):

And to end, the new School is Cool video comes a year early:

GAL draws Africa

71-year-old GAL draws a weekly cartoon for the Belgian magazine Knack.* More of his 2011 work related to Africa below. All speak for themselves, except maybe for the last one in which Belgian politician Bart De Wever (leader of the country's biggest party) tells the man at his feet to "take his own responsibility" (a favorite line of his).

*We've featured some of GAL's cartoons before.

Found Objects No.20

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From an episode of American comedian Drew Carey's sketch comedy show, "Whose Line is it Anyway." In the video from the show, Carey introduces a regular feature, "African Chant" (the sketch involves the actors making up "an African chant" based on the name of an audience member. Some of you may recognize Wayne Brady in the clip.)

Carey inadvertently blurts out that Africa "is a big country."

The edited clip (above) highlights how throughout the rest of the episode cast member Greg basically reminds Carey of his gaffe. Carey gets him back by the show's end.

Here are two more instances of the "African chant" from the show: examples one and two.

Poor White Photography

The proliferation of photographers documenting poor whites in South Africa is something to behold. This is significant since poor whites are only a fraction of the total white population — 450,000 out of  4.5 million live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive. We'll spare you the numbers on black South African poverty. Of the recent ones, Finbarr O'Reilly's series on Coronation Park is probably the most celebrated. It has been splashed all over mainstream international publications and websites. Less well-known is the work of Kim Ludbrook, Ben Krewinkel's Toe Witmense Arm Was, Riaan Labuschagne, Lisa Skinner, Jordi Burch's Poor Boers, Dean Saffron's Poverty has no colour, Susanne Schleyer and Michael Stephan's Bitter Fruit and Nadine Hutton's I have fallen. There are probably some we've missed. Not all of them went to Coronation Park.

Further back, there's the work of David Goldblatt (his "The Afrikaners" and "The Afrikaners: Revisited") and Roger Ballen.

But every time we see a new project on poor whites we're taken back to a post done a while ago by John Edwin Mason –he writes one of the best photo blogs– on work made by South African Constance Stuart Larrabee on poor whites in late 1940s Johannesburg. We keep returning to the post because of Mason's take on Larrabee's photographs. Her work appeared in an "illustrated magazine" aimed at white readers and is probably still the best and most original series on the subject.

Photographs on poor whites were usually presented as straightforward commentaries on their welfare. But as Mason points out, there are larger issues at stake. He quotes E.G. Malherbe, a rising social scientist at the time (who also took photographs), writing in 1921 that poor whites were

a menace to the self-preservation and prestige of our White people, living as we do in the midst of the native population that outnumbers us 5 to 1. (…) a skeleton in our cupboard, raising questions about the capacity of the ruling white race to maintain its dominance.

Mason argues that the photographs, especially those with black and white subjects in the same frame, captures too well the anxiety that white South African elites felt when they contemplated the "poor white problem."

Like these two: in the first, above, a black woman looks down at a white man "with revulsion, pity, or some combination of the two" (in Mason's words); in the second, a black man brings "aid (…) to whites":

The original captions for the photographs which appeared in Libertas in 1947 make no mention of the black subjects. One caption reads: "Homeless man, 1947-48." Another photo of the same man reads:

On a bench in the heart of Johannesburg a hobo lies sleeping. Little can be done to make him useful to society. But by influencing the young child and curing his personality defects, social welfare workers can prevent this waste of human material.

The caption for the second photograph reads:

Although food and other assistance are given under poor relief scheme, the poor are helped to help themselves.

As Mason writes:

From the point-of-view of mid-twentieth-century white South Africans, this photo is less fraught –nobody here is physically defenseless, incapacitated by drink– but it would still have been troubling. Black is again positioned above white; a black man is bringing aid and succor to whites. The fact that the man is dressed in laborer's clothes would have lessened the tension only a bit.

Mason wonders "how aware Larrabee was about making images that captured so precisely the anxieties that poor whites evoked. My guess is that she knew exactly what she was doing."

Read the whole post, which also discusses Larrabee's contemporaries and her other work in the Libertas series here.

Massalia

French IAM member Akhenaton and Faf Larage (brother to other IAM rapper Shurik'n) clearly had fun producing their We Luv New York album this year. They make videos too. We'll give you a full translation of the lyrics another day; let's say they puncture the glary images of the French Riviera nicely.

The French Riviera

French IAM member Akhenaton and Faf Larage (brother to other IAM rapper Shurik'n) clearly had fun producing their We Luv New York album this year. They make videos too. We'll give you a full translation of the lyrics another day; let's say they puncture the glary images of the French Riviera nicely.

Tumi's Tête Savante

We presume you've had Tumi and the Volume's latest album, Pick A Dream, as much on repeat as we had this year. This the video for its opening track. Directed by filmmaker Khalid Shamis and 340ml member Tiago Correia-Paulo. Graphics are by French artist Hippolyte.

'The greatest issues in Africa'

If you are to ask me what are the greatest issues in Africa, I would say it is that people love, people fuck, people kiss, people speak.

Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina talking to The Guardian Book Podcast.

Photo Credit: from Zed Nelson's series of "the people helping to create the world's newest country" (that's South Sudan to you).

Mashup Maghrebi

L'Avion, one of the many fruits from the Beyond Digital mega project in Morocco this past summer, is a breathtaking collaboration between Nettle and Imanaren's Hassan Wargui.

Imanaren's self-titled album is out now on Dutty Artz, and Nettle's album El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai is out on Sub Rosa.

If you're in New York, you can catch Nettle at their album release party and performance this Saturday night at Vaudeville Park in Brooklyn, featuring guest DJ Lamin Fofana.