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Strategic Inauthenticity

Timothy D. Taylor

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Youssou N’Dour: “A Modern Griot”

Youssou N’Dour (1959–) is one of a handful but growing number of nonwestern pop stars from the African continent born around or after the independence of their homeland. He is probably the biggest international nonwestern pop star appearing in this book and has been written about extensively by the US music press. N’Dour sings many of the typical stories of those who are trying to be subjects of modernity and not its objects: stories about the dangers of being overrun by tourism, the degradation of the environment, moving from the country to the city, and nostalgia for the ancestors and their wisdom. This modernization, however, in the form of the colonial machine, left N’Dour and his fellow Senegalese few options. The stories of modernization and colonialism/postcolonialism intersect time and again in his music, as, I have been arguing, they do in the “real world.”

N’Dour, like Rhoma Irama, expresses the desire to make a new popular music that incorporates elements of indigenous traditional musics and uses the local language. At the same time, N’Dour acknowledges the influence of musics from around the world on him. “It’s just a natural process of evolution,” N’Dour says. “My style evolves depending on what other musics I’ve heard.” He explains his mix of musics and sounds in explicitly politico‐historical terms.

The process of modernisation began relatively late in Senegambia. Ghana and Nigeria had developed their hi‐life and such styles much earlier. The hit sounds in Senegal in the Fifties and Sixties were still the Cuban dance songs of [Orquesta] Aragon and Johnny Pacheco. For those of us who wanted to form a purely Senegalese pop sound, this Cuban music was rhythmically acceptable, but harmonically foreign. And of course there was the problem of language. We wanted to sing in our own Wolof language. The Gambian group, Super Eagles, later called I Fang Bondi, who were pioneering their Afro Manding jazz, and the Senegalese groups, Baobab and Sahel, had already begun to translate local traditional songs and rhythms to the instruments of pop music. Perhaps I had more of what we call in Wolof, fit, or courage. When I started with the Star Band, we went even further, developing a dance music which I called mbalax. The dancers at the Miami [a night club in Dakar] were no longer content with the pachanga or the cha cha cha, but followed the tama drum and the other sabars [drums] into their own natural dances.

The traditional stylistic and musical aspects of mbalax, which means “the rhythm of the drum” in Wolof, are mostly concerned with rhythm.

That drum [mbung mbung], along with others like the talmbeut, ndende, bougarabu, djembe, nder, tunge, gorong and tama, creates the rhythm. When they say in Dakar, ‘C’est très mbalax’, they mean it’s got a very strong, distinctive rhythm. So the base of mbalax is the drums, collectively known as sabars. There could be up to eight in any traditional line‐up. In my group, I gave some of those drum parts to guitars and keyboards. The rhythms can change within songs – that is always a big attraction. This diversity comes from many tribal sources: Toucouleur, Peul, Bambara, Djola, Serer, as well as Wolof. We could make ten songs and they’d all sound different, unusual to people in the West. So I created this modern style, but the Senegalese quickly recognised it as their own popular music, and when it was recorded in France under favourable conditions it made even better sense to them.

The resulting sound brought N’Dour to the attention of western musicians such as Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon (both of whom recorded with him on some of their albums). N’Dour’s album The Guide (Wommat) of 1994 was nominated for a Grammy (ultimately losing to Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder) and features guest appearances by black British American pop star Neneh Cherry and American jazz great Branford Marsalis. “Leaving (Dem)” opens The Guide and is the most upbeat song on the album, although the melancholy tale of the lyrics might indicate otherwise. The trajectory of “Leaving” isn’t much different from a contemporary US rock song: a brief guitar introduction followed by the rhythm track, then the vocals in N’Dour’s amazing voice, supple, grainy, high, muscular. But the guitar sound owes more to South African mbaqanga than anything else; it may be très mbalax, but it makes use of African popular musics from all over, including soukous, highlife, Afrobeat, reggae, salsa, soul, and disco according to one commentator. Once the rhythm starts, the song inhabits an ecstatic groove, emphasized by N’Dour’s conversational yet melodic singing style, and the horns (saxophone, trombones, trumpet). N’Dour further adds to the effect produced by the song by stepping down from it with an improvised, metrically free harmonica solo at the song’s conclusion – bringing Stevie Wonder’s brand of joyous music to mind – and including applause and whistles, even though this song was recorded in a studio without a live audience. There is also a background chorus that vocalizes along with N’Dour near the end of the song, adding to the celebratory sound. […]

The lyrics of the song illustrate the kind of movement in the global postmodern that might take those at the traditional metropoles by surprise. Rather than becoming modern and moving, as did so many European moderns from the country to the city, N’Dour instead tells of wanting to move the other direction: he has had enough of modernity, thank you very much. He is interested in cultivating older ways of interaction, through one’s friends and family, rather than the faceless, impersonal postcolonial city. “I am a modern man,” he says. “I love traditional things, but I think African music must be popular. We have to go forward.” So he built a 24‐track recording studio in Dakar, naming it Xippi, or “eyes open,” also the title of one of his albums.

With songs such as “Leaving,” N’Dour’s music mounts a different kind of resistance – or different kinds of resistances – than those we have examined so far. The Guide does offer songs that rage against the European colonial machine, such as “How you are (No mele),” which incorporates a rap in English. At the same time, however, N’Dour addresses more local concerns, most of which sound familiar to western listeners: “There is a lot of joblessness here [in Senegal]. Many kids here have dreams, but the opportunities are limited.”

Although N’Dour is clearly a modern western musician of sorts, he evidently still views himself as a griot, or, a gawulo, literally, “the one who is always singing praises,” a Tukulor people version of the better‐known griot. One of the most revealing statements about him wasn’t made by the extremely private musician himself, but by an associate who refused to let Rolling Stone use his name.

Remember, he knows how to use power but not how to give it away. That is a very hard thing for anyone, but especially an African, knowing who to trust and who to give responsibility to. The only people Youssou really trusts are members of his family and the friends he’s had since childhood. It’s a very insular world. And you also have to remember that first and foremost, he’s a griot.

Traditionally, griots are always supported by the king and the country and are paid to sing. The idea that he has to pay someone [to do sound or lights or to produce or accompany him] so that he can sing and perform is very confusing.

N’Dour is a Muslim, though, unlike Rhoma Irama, his music and lyrics have not taken on specifically Islamic issues. But his music is still informed by a strong sense of right and wrong. “You know,” he told interviewer Brian Cullman, “when you are walking with a girl, you have to make sure you walk along the right path, that you watch your step. You have a certain responsibility to be very proper.” The idea of “propriety” recurs throughout his songs, which exhort youths to behave respectfully toward their parents, caution the west to behave respectfully toward its former colonies, and ask tourists to treat his country well.

Because of his fame, N’Dour realizes the extent to which he, as an international star and local gawulo, can help his more provincial listeners understand the events in the larger world. “In my society where there are those who cannot read or write, I was able to tell them in song just what was happening in South Africa. My own mother had seen pictures on TV but she didn’t fully understand the situation. I could make a link between the situation in South Africa today and a famous, bloody battle in our own history – the battle of N’Der in the nineteenth century.”

The international success N’Dour has achieved leaves him mindful of his roots in the family tradition of musicians and gawulos. “Before the radio,” he says, “griots gathered the people together and gave them the news, the information from the king. He helped them understand the world, he was their voice. That’s what I am, a modern griot.” Before that he was a premodern griot, singing for various traditional rituals, including circumcision ceremonies. N’Dour’s current duties are thus those of a griot: telling stories, giving admonitions, keeping watch. […]

N’Dour doesn’t use his status just to educate people from the African continent, however; much of his music is aimed at the west. Just as “Leaving” might turn some westerners’ ideas about Africa upside down – it is a song about leaving the city for the country, not the other way around – N’Dour is also bent on demonstrating to his growing worldwide listeners that Africa is modern already.

I’m really defending a cause: the cause of a new image of Africa. For me, the measure of success is more than anything how well I arrive at exposing my music as a representation of not only African music but of African life and the whole image of Africa.

I think Americans are more and more interested in Africa but they have a long way to go. The day that people in the West understand how much we understand about the workings of the rest of the planet will be a happy day for us.

Like so many stars outside the North American/UK rock music circuit, N’Dour was “discovered” by an influential western musician, in this case, Peter Gabriel, resulting in much collaboration since they met in 1984 and leading to other collaborations, such as on Paul Simon’s Graceland, as well as with Sting, Bruce Springsteen, and Tracy Chapman. By 1990, N’Dour dropped his musicologist manager Verna Gillis for a New York lawyer, Thomas Rome, symbolizing his departure from mbalax to pop/rock. (His latest album, however, lists Gillis as the manager and executive producer, a switch back that has not yet been commented on in the music press.) He lives in London and drives a BMW but hasn’t cut ties to Senegal, or his hometown of Dakar, the capital. “I love Dakar, but I am very visible here, I am an example. Everything I do, it’s seen.”

Now, as a star, N’Dour realizes the role he may be able to play in the globalization of African popular musics such as mbalax: “The new generation of African musicians really has a chance to have an impact on American audiences. That has not yet happened, but I think it will, soon.” His artistic advisor, Canadian Michael Brook (known for his own syncretic musics), seems to have gotten into the habit of filling in the silences of the taciturn N’Dour.

What’s exciting for me is that the band is right on the edge of establishing a personal music. It has traditional African and Senegalese elements in it, and it also has pop elements in it, but it feels like they’re going into a new stage of musical maturity, one where the influences become less relevant. They’re Africans making music, but you wouldn’t necessarily label it African music. It’s something altogether new.

As his fame and popularity have grown, N’Dour has had to face criticisms that his music, which was, early on, a conscious attempt to re‐Africanize Senegalese music, has become too slick, too commercial, too western. “Well,” N’Dour says, “it was first made Senegalese and then opened to show the side of modern Africa, of towns like Dakar and Abidjan. I think my music has really evolved. It’s true that it’s lost a bit for older people but then it’s gained popularity with younger people. That’s life. I don’t make music for such and such a person; I do it because it’s me – what I feel.” […]

N’Dour, in the meantime, continues patiently to explain his position. “In Dakar we hear many different recordings. We are open to these sounds. When people say my music is too Western, they must remember that we, too, hear this music over here. We hear the African music with the modern.” […]

Whose Authenticity?

Given western listeners’ concern for authenticity and the desire of musicians from around the world to be stars and make it in the global music industry, N’Dour’s and Kidjo’s clear lack of concern with authenticity is striking at first. It seems to me there are two reasons for the lack of interest in authenticity by these musicians. One, more prevalent in the west, is aesthetic: these musicians, like Peter Gabriel, are artists, they make art, and in art, anything goes: the aesthetic is by its very nature, voracious. But N’Dour and Kidjo view western demands for authenticity as concomitant with demands that they and their countries remain premodern, or modern, while the rest of the globe moves further toward a postindustrial, late capitalist, postmodern culture. N’Dour and Kidjo are concerned with becoming global citizens and do this by showing that their countries and their continent are neither backward nor premodern, that they can make cultural forms as (post)modern as the west’s. They hear many sounds – in Kidjo’s case, she grew up with lots of sounds, lots of musics – and pull these into their music, to the chagrin of some western critics. […]

Note

  1. Original publication details: Timothy D. Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 127–28, 129–30, 134–35, 142–43. Reproduced courtesy of Taylor & Francis Group LLC Books.