The great Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar employs modes not all that different from the blues and pentatonic scales that have typified rock guitar for more than half a century now. It is the touch; the distinctive hammer-ons and pull-offs in surprising places; the stinging but lithe, treble-heavy tone; and the phrasing—the shape of the noodle, as it were—that gives “exotic” to western ears. African electric guitar styles have been feeding back into the instrument’s global dialect since at least the early ‘70s, but there is something idiosyncratic and genuinely otherworldly in the approach of this master from Niger.
The nearly hermetic absence of two-and-four backbeats in the rhythms moves us in ways some of us didn’t necessarily know we could move, even while the standard guitar rock ensemble template keeps us rooted in something deeply familiar. The melismatic, connected vocal lines weave through this swirling electric counterpoint in a way we can feel but not count, crossing Western bar lines as freely as they cross geographic and political boundaries. And yet we can “go there,” comfortably, naturally. Compositional forms and time signatures may be cultural, but pulse is universal. The rest can be learned.
Even now, six or seven years into my familiarity with the sound of Mdou Moctar, it remains a heady, complex, and delightful musical confusion to me, complete with all the cultural paradoxes inherent in the very idea of a genre called “World music.” When Peter Gabriel famously said that by “World music,” he means Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, too, he was gently chiding himself and Western audiences (who were ecstatically receptive to non-Western pop for a spell in the Graceland ‘80s) for an indiscriminate, naïve, and self-serving embrace of all music emanating from non-Western, non-white, generally non-privileged global points. Just as there is no Earth in astrology, “World music” was implicitly received as something orbiting and decorating an assumed core of western pop, which is not world music, itself. Gabriel, Simon, Byrne, Eno and the rest were not insensible to the inherent paradoxes of their own global fusions, systemic paradoxes that words and individual intentions alone can do nothing to soothe. One way they dealt and deal with it was to champion the real-deal stuff.
The questions only get more tangled and irresolute the smarter we get about it. For instance, even if his latest incendiary release were not titled Funeral for Justice, we would likely hear the music of Mdou Moctar as political and incendiary. Why? Is it because we assume that musicians and poets from war-torn and exploited places have more important things to write about than pickup trucks and pretty girls in red summer dresses? Yes, of course, but therein lies yet another problem of cultural imperialism—we project a default virtuousness onto non-western art that does our own experience of it no favors. We assume a purity of intent and a cultural “representativeness” that we would never trouble Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell with, artists whom we allow as much eccentricity and individuality as they care to indulge. To put it a little simplistically, our guilt flattens the complexity of the art.
The solution PG offered was simple and sound, as far as it goes: keep listening and listening to the music of the world, and when you find something you don’t like, you’ve arrived or at least begun to. The point at which an authentic, earned aesthetic understanding and valuation begins to govern your response, rather than a political/cultural declaration of values, is the point at which you begin to take your humble place in the real real world.
Well, the search for something I don’t love will have to wait, because I love Mdou Moctar without reservation. In fact, the way that Funeral for Justice most challenged me was by sounding a little too familiar. A time-honored and wonderful characteristic of electric, post-colonial African music has always been a sound and production style that could be said to lag a few decades behind state-of-the moment, in-your-face, big budget western pop. That latency (technological or aesthetic as it may be) places the post-colonial African style right in the middle of what many of us consider to be the heyday of authentic rock and soul recording—spacious, live, roomy, real, dynamic. It is the blessed relief I feel every time I compare a vintage ‘70s recording to plush modern productions where the pop-star personality lives right on the lips of my ears.
Funeral for Justice, however, is completely in your face or, more aptly, at your throat. It is bottom-heavy, loud and thick, almost metal in its aggression. And its second track, “Ímouhar,” plays knowingly with this contrast. “Imouhar” begins sounding a little distant, a little “anthropological,” referencing the expected conditions of its tradition. But at exactly 1:20, the modern world comes crashing in with all of its intensity, heft, and violence. It is an exhilarating move. To be perfectly honest, I prefer the more naturalistic and open sound of his previous records, but there can be no doubting the urgency and efficacy of Funeral for Justice’s appeal.
When Mdou Moctar performs at the Bearsville Theater, it will not be his first visit to the mid-Hudson and the Catskills, not by a long shot. We probably owe this deepening relationship originally to Mike Amari, long-time booking agent at BSP in Kingston and a tireless global music aficionado and advocate. Along with other thought leaders like Isabel Soffer at The Local in Saugerties and the Bearsville Theater’s Mike Campbell, who also led the booking revitalization of Colony down the road, Amari is a huge reason why a savvy and enthusiastic audience for non-Western music exists here.
Checking his records, Amari confirms that Mdou Moctar played BSP in 2017 and 2019, bookings, he emphasizes, that owed a lot to the effort of the Kingston musician and producer Eli Winograd. “Eli and Anna Hafner did a performance arty thing to open,” Amari remembers, “And Drew from the Beverly and now Tubbys DJ’d. Mdou had done his Tuareg Purple Rain thing the year before and we used that to try to create interest. I did a number of shows with West African artists in 2015, 2016. There was/is a definite local crowd that’s hip to it and comes out for it. The other thing I’ll add is that Mdou credits this group Etran De L’air as being the first to play electric guitar like that in his area, and with teaching him how to play, and I got to bring them to Opus 40 last year (and they just played Woodsist this summer).”
“I’ve booked Mdou in Woodstock before,” says Mike Campbell, who has been helming the booking at the Bearsville Theater since Peter Shapiro and Dayglo Productions (or Brooklyn Bowl fame) took over operations there this year. “He and his band are sort of a singular example of musicians rooted in the traditions and melodies of Nigerien music, while equally influenced by American guitar royalty like Hendrix and J Mascis. It’s no surprise that this blend has seen the band break through to mainstream-indie, and earn the NPR Tiny Desk stamp of approval. I’m also incredibly excited that The Messthetics are opening the show. They include Joe Lally and Brendan Canty, formerly of Fugazi and one of the greatest rhythm sections of all time.”
Mdou Moctar and The Messthetics performs at the Bearsville Theater on Saturday, October 5. Doors open at 7:00 PM. For tickets and additional information, visit bearsvilletheater.com.
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