Tinariwen

Amassakoul

World Village

            Bob Marley lying on an unlikely (and premature) deathbed, an assassin’s bullet having pierced his flesh.  Fela Kuti, the Black President:  Nigeria’s neo-fascist government’s most wanted.  Crass, The Clash, Angelic Upstarts, The Redskins: punk gigs punctuated regularly by the exclamation point of radical-right hooks and police batons.  Chuck D, Dr. Dre and Tupac Shukur’s FBI files: the modern-day COINTELPRO of a system terrified of the possibility of a black youth, let alone A Black Planet.

            Pop’s changes – not changes merely in pop music, but in culture – have always come as hotly contested as any political or social upheaval.  And more often than not from violence, pain and suffering.  So perhaps it is time to add to the list Keddou ag Ossad storming into Malian police stations with Kalishnikov in hand and guitar strapped to his back, with his band Taghreft Tinariwen producing the soundtrack to a generation of wars between their nomadic culture and an imposed, oppressive government.

            Perhaps victory is at hand, because there’s something downright liberating within Amassakoul, the sophomore worldwide release from Saharan griot-guitarists Tinariwen, rebel hypnotists of the Tuareg nomads.  Born of the Mauritanian refugee camps and Libyan cab stands to which the Tuareg fled when the Malian government declared war on the nomads, Tinariwen soaked in the tainted Western electric guitar sounds ubiquitous in Earth’s cities, and added the deep bluesy funk of camel breath and desert dub.  But rather than the aggressive, angry funk sub-Saharan neighbors such as Fela, or the clenched sounds of punk, Tinariwen’s Amassakoul comes across as a desert Junior Kimbrough, weaving dense clouds of droning guitars and ticking watch rhythms, all supporting call-and-response sing-chants of the group’s number.  (At least eight or nine performers grace most tracks.)

            Thirst is the common theme of Amassakoul.  The Tuareg thirst for their past freedoms, past glories, past commonalities.  Tinariwen has gone a long way toward reclaiming that for its people:  With the annual Festival in the Desert, the group helped recreate the gatherings of the Tuareg decimated by civil wars.  And by providing an internationally cultural focal point, perhaps this band of men and women, garbed in traditional dress hefting non-traditional instrumentation, will have done more musically than a thousand lives lost.  With more records like Amassakoul, revolution must be at hand.