Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 589

Music Break. Friday Bonus Edition

An eclectic one. Ethiopian and Ivorian pop, Philly neo soul, Swedish and South African rap and Brazilian jazz.

Philadelphia neo soul keeps it topical. One thing we could not figure out: Bilal–half breaking with the dress code of his hosts Kindred–does a guest verse and throws in a line about 'USA to Africa': "And your moving out cause the cost of living is sky high and you know we working on it but its no word from USA to Africa." What does he want?

In Ethiopia, pop is doing fine. Listen to Nigusu Tamrat:

Almost as poppy, from the Ivorian diaspora comes this song by Dobet Gnahoré and Manou Gallo which, they hope, 'will contribute to bring back together and reconcile all Ivorians':

Swedish rapper Ken Ring and Norwegian producer Tommy Tee went to record the video for 'Plocka Han' in Korogocho (Nairobi, Kenya):

From KwaMashu (Durban, South Africa) comes Zakwe:

And to end the week: Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay as seen through the eyes of French director Vincent Moon, Brazilian pianist Laércio de Freitas and his daughter, singer Thalma:

Found Objects No.18

First released in 2003, Rappin' Hood's (real name: Antônio Luiz Junior) 'Sou Negrão' is one long tribute to the black Brazilian musicians who have contributed to the country's 20th century music scene. The list of artists reads like a history lesson: Bezerra da Silva, Paulinho da Viola, Jorge Ben, Grande Otelo, João do Pulo, Raul de Souza, Pixinguinha, Cartola, Luiz Melodia, Milton Nascimento, Jackson do Pandeiro, Candeia, Aniceto, Martinho da Vila, Clementina de Jesus, Luiz Gonzaga, Jair Rodrigues, Ivo Meirelles, Jamelão, Dandara, Leci Brandão (that's her in the video), Jovelina Pérola Negra, Dona Ivone Lara, Djavan, Gilberto Gil, Tim Maia, Sandra de Sá, rap pioneers DMN and Anderson 4P. But also: football legends Leônidas da Silva and Pelé, and Zumbi ('the Malcom X from Brazil'). The non-Brazilians name-dropped are Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Bob Marley, BB King, Miles Davis, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and then maybe some I've missed.

The Nude Revolution in Egypt

So an art student named Aliaa Magda Elmahdy in Egypt decided to post nude photos of herself on her blog to "defy restrictions on freedom" and Twitter basically explodes. (Seriously – check the #NudePhotoRevolutionary hashtag and the tweets culled by this Lebanese site or Google her name.)

Anyway, she allegedly identified herself as a part of the April 6 movement (I wrote about them here for AIAC) and while the April 6 movement folks jumped to defend their morality (or something), she denied ever having claimed to be part of the movement. Regardless of whether she did claim to be part of their movement or not, the April 6 response is pretty paranoid (not to mention extremely offensive). A spokesman for April 6 stated,

The movement does not have any members who engage in such behavior and the girl is only an agent of State Security. They want to tarnish our image after our role during the revolution and the increasing support we get from the Egyptian people.

For real? Do you all not honestly remember the anonymous Egyptian general who defended  the army's "virginity checks" and torture of at least 17 female activists with this little gem?

The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs).

We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. He added: "None of them were (virgins)."

Looks like April 6 is totally cool allying themselves with State Security when it comes to being patriarchal jerks.

But some of the commentary about these photos from the West is equally perplexing. Fears of "Islamism" and 'women dressing more conservatively' (??) give way to some truly bizarre denials of the West's own patriarchy and conservatism. For instance, this, from the NY Daily News:

While placing provocative pictures on the Web rarely raise eyebrows in the West, in an increasingly conservative Egypt what Elmahdy did is an unprecedented act of defiance.

Oh brother. Doesn't anyone watch Egyptian music videos anymore?

Pizza aid

By Elliot Ross

What happens when humanitarian agencies ditch the tried-and-trusted fundraising method of splashing disaster porn across screens and news pages? What kind of images can possibly fill in for the altogether enthralling scene of non-white bodies wracked with overwhelming pain, images which express nothing but pure need? With Action Against Hunger's new ad campaign, we're beginning to find out what an alternative might look like.

As good students of Don Draper, we all know that advertising is based on one thing: happiness. According to Don this entails at least three things: smelling the interior of a new car, freedom from fear, and a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing is okay.

Which is all very well, provided an ad follows the underlying logic of advertising — lying to people to make us want something we don't really need.

But with humanitarian advertising something strange happens. It would appear that when humanitarian groups solicit money from consumers of mass media an altogether different transaction is being proposed, namely one in which an advertiser tells the truth and compels people to hand over surplus cash so that the real and urgent needs of others can be met. At least, that's something like how it should go.

Trouble is, the old consumer mentality dies very hard, and the two modes of advertising are all jumbled up. There aren't two different kinds of advertising space, one for commercial ads and another for humanitarian appeals.

(This is one reason why self-evidently anti-humanitarian companies like BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and others have lately gone to such conspicuous lengths to try to convince everybody that they're actually much more like groups such as Greenpeace, or Medecins Sans Frontières, or the Disasters Emergency Committee, than they are like the sort of oil-spilling, icecap-melting, Iraq-invasion-lobbying, Saro-Wiwa-murdering transnational shysters that we might otherwise have quite innocently supposed them to be.)

In any case, the suspicion has long lurked that gawping at pictures of starving children in Africa might have somehow crossed over into the Don Draper realm of advertising, and become a source of happiness for the kindly Western reader. (And this mix-up, it must be stressed, has nothing whatsoever to do with the noble tradition of racism in Western culture extending back to Hegel and beyond.)

In fundraising campaigns from the Biafran war onwards it became clear that the most effective way of raising money for starving (almost always African) populations was also the way that luxuriated in the vulnerability of the hungry, that enjoyed not only Western power to save but Western power per se. And it now seems that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that weaving images of some of the world's most vulnerable people into our ever brasher, crasser mediascape is not ok.

So what to make of Action Against Hunger's latest efforts to depart from all this? What is the face of hunger advertising that has decided not to show a face?

Well, as you might expect, there's nobody in the ads. Nobody black, nobody brown, nobody at all. Instead there's a tiny pepperoni pizza in a yawning pizza-box, and a string of seven (light brown) paper dolls, one of which is very thin. No jutting ribs or flies around the eyes, this is hunger imagined in a slimmed-down version of the universal symbol for the men's bathroom, and "universal" is indeed the buzzword the ad company return to when explaining the ad.

There's no arid Horn of Africa background, no crumbling shacks. Instead we're dealing with what Action Against Hunger describes as "abstract imagery", and these days that can only mean a plain white background and some tasteful drop-shadows. If anywhere's going to come out of this looking permanently desperate and crisis-ridden, it's more likely to be your Macbook than the continent of Africa, and that's got to be a good thing.

The "copy" itself is shorn of racial and national identifiers, and the emergency is conceived of as a norm graspable in steady annual figures: "3.5 million children die each year from acute malnutrition. Take action. Save a child."

Surprisingly, the New York Times decided to report on their own advertising and showed an approving interest in the new approach, despite having harbored for many years probably the most hardline fetishist of the African body in pain, Nicholas D. Kristof, whose work they continue to publish quite openly.

There are two weird things about the ads.

The first is the pizza, a miniscule aperitif drowning in a sea of cardboard packaging, the kind of meagre repast we'll surely all have to make do with when Herman Cain is sworn in. The pizza add has been attacked by NYU's Paul Light, who wants the ad "redesigned to focus on good food, not what many givers would see as a very unhealthy option." Light is understandably concerned that people will mistakenly suppose that Action Against Hunger is simply a lobbying group for more and bigger pizzas.

The second weird thing is that the whole appeal is sponsored by Ultimat Vodka (slogan: "Live Ultimately"), whose logo appears in the bottom corner of each ad and which professes to be "tired" of hunger.

And it's at this point, as we think about millions of acutely malnourished children, and then of a pizza the size of cookie, and then of a luxury Polish vodka made from both grains and potatoes, that we might feel compelled to wonder, like a character in a J.G. Ballard novel: "What sort of scenario is the mind quietly stitching together?"

* Here's a link to an archive of Elliot Ross's previous contributions on AIAC.

Black France

By Alain Mabanckou*

A few months before the presidential elections in France appears this 'beautiful book', La France noire, Trois siècles de présences ('Black France, Three centuries of presence' (eds.) Pascal Blanchard, Sylvie Chalaye, Eric Deroo, Dominique Thomas & Mahamet Timera, La Découverte, 2011). Since immigration has become an issue of politics and demagogues, many black people in France believe they would be better off in the English-speaking countries — the situation of their "brothers" living there seems to them more bearable… Yet, before the French Revolution and, to some extent, during the colonial period, it was better to be a black person in France than anywhere else. One sees it with the massive arrival of African-American intellectuals in Paris, victims of racial segregation in their home country. "It wasn't until the 1980s that this feeling, this attraction to France declined, and that a black person would think himself more free, more accepted and more recognized in Britain, the United States or in Johannesburg, even if his citizenship was a fully vested right in France."

The presence of black people in France spans the last three centuries.

Three centuries during which the people of Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the United States have contributed to the building and preserving of the French nation. The black person's 'status' has obviously changed over time: he has changed from being a 'freedman' to being a colonial subject; from being native to being a 'Senegalese soldier'. He became the "Negro", and then simply "le Noir" ['the black person'], before being considered an immigrant and, in the 1990s, "a Black". Since 2000, the debates focus on the citizenship of the "Noirfrançais" ['the Black French'], those visible minorities who no longer wish to be relegated to the Republic's margins — as in 'I, too', the poem by Langston Hughes where "the darker brother" who ate in the kitchen before he rebels and yells that he is America too and that when company comes, he'll be at the table. France can no longer turn a blind eye to these "voiceless people" that are present throughout its whole territory.

We're convinced that La France Noire will soon become a book of reference. The clarity of its content assures it a wide audience. Several leading thinkers and researchers (Achille Mbembe, Pap Ndiaye, Dominic Thomas, Elikia M'Bokolo, Françoise Vergès, François Durpaire …) have contributed the results of their experiences. The book is remarkable, with more than 750 documents, photos, press clippings and iconographies that show the contributions of these indisputable "black presences" whom you'll not necessarily find in the manuals that tell the official history of France.

*Alain Mabanckou (who also wrote the foreword to La France Noire) is the author of six poetry collections and ten novels, two of which have been translated into English (Black Psycho; Broken Glass). His latest book, Demain j'aurai vingt ans, came out last year. This post is translated and republished here from his blog Black Bazar.

Music Break. YaoBobby ft. Fredy Massamba

There's a fast growing collection of cross-over hip hop songs produced by Central and West African artists making a living in the diaspora (especially in French-speaking hotbeds like Marseilles, Paris or Brussels), lyrically reaching back to the countries they've left. This collaboration between Togolese artist YaoBobby (rapping in Mina) and the prolific Fredy Massamba (singing in Lingala) on '(R)Evolution' is another example. (You recognize the shirts.)

What's a parody of a parody of a parody?

And with this, we hope to close our current chapter on Die Antwoord.

Bruce Lee and Rolanda Fisher, 'outraged by the copying of their style and demand[ing] recognition and money,'  decided to mock Die Antwoord's appearance on Taxi Jam* from a while back.

* Taxi jam is a South African "series of intimate acoustic gigs shot in the back" of the minibus taxis common to South African streets. The acts in the series are mainly based in Cape Town.

Anton Kannemeyer's Africa

By Lily Saint*

Die Antwoord skirts–and often dabbles in–homophobia and racist depictions in their videos and lyrics. Ostensibly to shake white South Africans out of their "middle class stupor." Most of the time it does not work. Which is why we wondered what the what the large portraits of Yolandi Vi$$er and Waddy Jones (Ninja) were doing in Kannemeyer's exhibit "After the Barbarians" that just finished (last weekend) at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.

Kannemeyer's other portraits of well known figures tend to deride their subjects, as in the portrait of Jacob Zuma which appears in the show with the words: "King Klepto My President" emblazoned across it.  The absence of textual commentary in the portraits of Yolandi and Ninja, however, prevents any straightforward interpretation.  Is Kannemeyer giving them such grandiose proportions to compare their performances to those of the politicians he criticizes, or are the portraits laudatory? Kannemeyer's cryptic representation seems uncharacteristic, though it wouldn't come as a great surprise to discover he admires their brand of irreverence.

The rest of works in the show are more directly message driven—as in the mock-anthropological "Fair Maidens of Africa" featuring women with severed hands, presumably referencing atrocities by the "barbarian" colonizers of the former Belgian Congo (recalling also the amputations of Sierra Leone's civil war).

The show draws on several series of Kannemeyer's, and as such, seems tailored as an introduction to the range of Kannemeyer's work rather than as a thoughtfully curated ensemble.

But one theme connecting many of the pieces is Kannemeyer's expanded interest in matters no longer strictly confined to South Africa. In addition to his exploration of other colonial atrocities such as the amputations of the Congo, the show features portraits of Barack Obama and George W. Bush (in his continuing Alphabet of Democracy series) as well as a reference to the Abu Ghraib scandal. For me, the most interesting new works in the show were the collages entitled "Made in South Africa" which in meticulous arrangements juxtapose newspaper and magazine clippings with advertisements and Kannemeyer's own drawings. Among other things the works suggest a newfound interest in exploring how the meanings, symbolism, and narratives of "other" places and commercial products shift when contextualized within and against South Africa.

* Lily Saint is an occasional guest blogger at AIAC. Her last post was on Evil Boy. She teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh. She researches and writes about popular culture and literature in South Africa.

Parachute Journalism

By Jonathan Faull

In my previous life as a South African political analyst, I would spend long hours on the telephone to a 'political risk analyst' in New York, working for a major international investment advisory group.  The conversations were not always easy, and much of my time was spent rebutting base assumptions that South Africa was the incarnation of the North's flawed understanding and projection of 'Big Man' politics and 'clientalism' in West Africa.

Sample questions would include "Is he a Zulu?" or "Is he from KZN? [KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma's home province]" with regard to anyone associated with Jacob Zuma, and complete incomprehension with regard to the nuanced machinations–however flawed–of the ruling tripartite alliance.  I was constantly asked to divine the outcomes of leadership squabbles, business deals, and court cases, because–naturally–the tea-leaves of African ethnicity, patronage, and inter-connected corrupt activities trumped the irritations of independent institutions, profit motive, and constitutional democracy.

Such blind clichés, projections and stereotypes mark an outrageous piece of parachute journalism masquerading as analysis published on Foreign Policy's website this week. It is written by Karen Leigh, Time Magazine's correspondent for West Africa.

The crux of the piece focuses on Jacob Zuma's recent cabinet reshuffle and concurrent dismissal of two cabinet ministers and the National Police Commissioner, and the suspension of Julius Malema from the structures of the African National Congress (ANC).  That the former was the direct result of reports submitted to the President of the Republic by the Office of the Public Protector–a Constitutionally defined and mandated body–and the latter, the result of a decision by the ANC's National Disciplinary Committee– a body the President of the party does not sit on–appears to elude the author entirely.

Instead the readers of FP are subjected to a speculative, and ill-informed representation of a Zuma bent on "revenge" and "fighting tooth and nail against an angry opposition," in a government characterized by "notorious corruption" and "gross incompetence".  While it would be naïve to argue that Zuma's leadership of South Africa's economy, state apparatus, and the ANC, has been rosy, even this blog–a consistent critic of Zuma–would shuffle its feet in embarrassment at such black and white analysis.

That it is parachute journalism is evident from a quick scan of the article: Karen Leigh appears to have fathomed the deep complexities of the ANC, it's trajectory, and the state of South African governance through her reading of one opinion poll, some statements on a blog by Helen Zille (the leader of the opposition) who possesses no special access to the inner workings of the ANC than the average citizen, another actual South African (David Lewis – the former head of the Competition Tribunal, and now head of an anti-corruption watchdog loosely associated with COSATU), and a Chatham House, London-based scholar (Thomas Cargill). She strangely could not find any black opinion makers or analysts to speak to. Or if she did, none said anything she deemed newsworthy.

Apparently this is enough to get published in a relatively well regarded American publication on international affairs, and Time Magazine.

She did speak to another Saffer: a "South African businessman" who drove her back to the airport.  "It's a good day to be getting out of Jo'burg", he said.  Perhaps, he just wanted to see the back of her.

Music Break. Rattex

Long after midnight, once the tourists and the party-goers have left Cape Town's Long Street, the city's darling hub looks pretty vacant, apart from the accidental taxi-driver — it forms the backdrop for South African rapper Rattex's new video 'Ewe Nje'. With an album and a mixtape under the belt, but hard to find in the local music stores; a lot more more videos recorded, but hardly played on South African TV, Long Street's 'Waiting Room' club does seem a fit location.

* Re-read Mikko's story about 'RATTEX: Labour of love & hard entertainment'.