The Awe-Inspiring But Tragic Story of Africa’s Festival In The Desert (2001–2012)
“Mali’s gifts to the world of music are lavish and legendary,” Nenad Georgievski writes at All About Jazz, though the world knew little about Malian music until American musicians began partnering with players from West Africa. In the 1980s, Stevie Wonder began touring with Amadou and Mariam, helping to popularize their form of Malian blues. In 1994, Ry Cooder recorded and released Talking Timbuktu with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, whose “desert blues… was unconcerned with boundaries,” freely mixing languages and instrumentation with playing that drew comparisons to John Lee Hooker.
While audiences around the world encountered West African music as “world music” on the festival circuit, fans on the continent knew it as homegrown traditional sounds and contemporary African rock and pop. In 2001 they got the chance to gather for the first annual “Festival in the Desert” (Festival au désert) in Tin Essako, a rural village miles from the highway, as the Bandsplaining video above tells it. This brief explainer of the Festival’s impact and its tragic end in 2012 begins with references to Bono. But his role in the story is rather small.
More central are the Tuareg, or Kel Tamashek, nomadic people of Berber origin spread across several West African countries whose musicians have refined the sound of desert rock and turned it into rebel music. The sound was born in struggle, notes World of Music, in refugee camps and battlegrounds. The band Tinariwen — who formed in 1979 and have become “global musical nomads” since the first Festival — met in “military camps set up in Libya by Colonel Ghaddafi to train young Tamashek men how to fight. During the [Tuareg] rebellion Tinariwen became the pied pipers of the rebel movement, and their songs galvanized the young dispossessed Tamashek youth.” Then they turned to seeking peace at the Festival in 2001.
Put together by Tuareg organizer Manny Ansar, the Festival was “based on a centuries-old tradition,” notes PeacePrints, “a meeting where the Tuareg tribes of the region meet once a year to play and share music.” By contrast, the modern Festival included ethnic and tribal groups from all over the country, and the world, and “focused on bridging the gap between tradition and modernity and also between local custom and international cometogether.” It was the only festival of its kind in Africa and attracted thousands of African attendees and a few hundred visitors each year.
Tragically, the festival came to an end in 2012 when Tuareg rebels took control of Northern Mali, renaming it Azawad, and were overrun by Islamic separatist groups. The country was placed under Shariah Law, and Ansar was exiled to Burkina Faso for a time. Outside of his own country, he continued to promote peace by co-founding a traveling festival called Caravan culturelle pour la paix.
The artists represented at Festival in the Desert tell stories of the fusion of tradition and modernity, of brutal conflict and the hope for peace through the sharing and fusing of cultures. Mali may be one of the poorest countries in the world when it comes to material resources, but it is one of the most musically rich. “Mali has many people, living in their districts,” say one musician in the trailer above for the documentary film The Last Song Before the War, “but everyone comes together in this festival.”
Or, at least, they did until 2012. The filmmakers unwittingly captured the very last Festival in the Desert before it was shut down by militants who “ruined the material, plundered the stage, burned instruments,” says Ansar. “I had to go on.… It was no longer a question of festivity, but about the survival of a culture.” See his statement at the time in the “Festival in the Desert — In Exile” video further up. For a totally different view of the Festival, read former MTV exec Tom Freston’s account of traveling there with Jimmy Buffett, Chris Blackwell (founder of Island Records), and a handful of other industry bigwigs scouting the next West African sensation.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch Wes Anderson’s Animated Music Video for The French Dispatch, Featuring a Track by Jarvis Cocker
The French Dispatch came out nearly two weeks ago, after having been pushed back more than a year by COVID-19. But delaying the release of a Wes Anderson movie surely counts among the least regrettable harms of the pandemic, which has caused millions of deaths worldwide. Among the lives lost was that of Daniel Bevilacqua, known in France as the chanson singer Christophe. Set in that country — and more specifically, the fictional city of Ennui-sur-Blasé — in the 1960s, The French Dispatch features a reinterpretation of Christophe’s 1965 hit “Aline” that now plays as something of a tribute to the late pop-cultural icon. Sung by Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, it comes accompanied by the Anderson-directed animated music video above.
Cocker has worked with Anderson before. In the director’s 2009 stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox he provided the voice of a singing farmer named Petey; in The French Dispatch he does the same for a pop star called Tip-Top, and has even recorded a full-length album in character.
Released on the very same day as The French Dispatch, Chansons d’Ennui Tip-Top contains a dozen covers of songs originally popularized by the likes of Serge Gainsbourg, Brigitte Bardot, Jacques Dutronc, and Françoise Hardy. (Attentive cinephiles, the core audience for all things Anderson, will also note the presence on the track list of Claude Channes’ “Mao Mao,” first heard in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise.)
Chansons d’Ennui Tip-Top exudes the retro-minded Cocker’s love of 1960s French pop music, just as The French Dispatch exudes Anderson’s love of… well, everything Anderson loves, much of which appears in the “Aline” music video. Its meticulously hand-drawn look comes from Javi Aznarez, who’d originally been hired to apply his art to the sets of the film itself. Following Tip-Top as he dances through an elaborate two-dimensional rendition of Ennui-sur-Blasé, it introduces not only the setting (in a stark cutaway manner reminiscent of The Life Aquatic) but all the major characters and the actors who play them. Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray: the gang, it seems, is all here — “here” being a certain idea of postwar France best realized, perhaps, by imaginations like Anderson and Cocker’s.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Hear Brian Eno’s Contribution to the Soundtrack of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)
Though released just a few weeks ago, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune seems already to have garnered more critical acclaim than David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of the same material. This comparison is, of course, unfair: Lynch was working under different conditions in a different time, not to mention with a markedly different cinematic sensibility. And in fact, Lynch’s version of the ambitious, saga-launching novel by Frank Herbert does have its fans, or at least viewers willing to praise certain of its aspects. Lovers of 1980s music, for example, value its score composed by the virtuosic rock band Toto — with the exception, that is, of a track from Brian Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois.
Brian Eno in particular is credited with popularizing ambient music, and “Prophecy Theme,” heard on the Dune soundtrack album as well as in the film itself, conjures up an atmosphere as effectively as any other piece of his work in the genre. “David flew me to Los Angeles to see Dune,” Eno recalls in a New York Times interview about his recently released compilation Brian Eno (Film Music, 1976–2020), which includes the track.
“It wasn’t finished then. And I don’t know whether his intention or his hope was that I would do the whole soundtrack, but I didn’t want to, anyway. It was a huge project, and I just didn’t feel like doing it. But I did feel like making one piece for it, so that’s what I did.”
Dune was indeed a formidable undertaking, and one that ultimately proved too big for Lynch. Some fans would argue, even after the successful first installment from Villeneuve, that it’s too big for any filmmaker. But the world Herbert created, one both sweeping and uncommonly detailed, has inspired many a creator to produce impressive work for projects both realized and unrealized. Perhaps it counts as a missed opportunity that the latest Dune film, with its apparent clean-slate approach to previous attempts at adaptation, didn’t commission a score from Eno, whose signature sonic textures could nicely have complimented Villeneuve’s instinct for the sublime. But then, a studio can’t go far wrong with Hans Zimmer either.
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Brian Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Soundtracks
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” Music Video Re-Enacted by Robots
When Microsoft released Windows 95, they didn’t skimp on the publicity. Their promotional campaign for the operating system even included television spots soundtracked with the Rolling Stones’ hit “Start Me Up.” The lyrics of its chorus neatly suited the product, which came with a re-engineered interface featuring a then-novel feature called the Start menu. Though hardly new even then, the song did also carry faint associations with innovation, having originally been released on August 14, 1981, just two weeks after the launch of a cable channel called MTV. Its music video thus received a great deal of airplay, proving to the public that the Stones could stay on the cutting edge.
By the 1980s, relevance was by no means guaranteed to any band formed in the 1960s. More than proven though the point may be today, the Michael Lindsay-Hogg-directed music video for “Start Me Up” demonstrated that even a group of rockers in or near their forties could perform with the same uncontainable vitality they always had.
Even now, forty years after that, the group’s surviving members show no inclination to retire, and the highest technology has only just begun to catch up to them. I refer, of course, to Spot, the model of robot dog previously seen here on Open Culture moonwalking and twerking to Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” In the years since then, it seems he’s learned to move like Jagger — as well as Richards, Wyman, Wood, and Watts.
In “Spot Me Up,” four Spot models together replicate about a minute of the “Start Me Up” video. That each robot really does seem to convey traces of the personality of its particular Stone — even the one tasked with replicating a glance from the late Charlie Watts, a force of subtlety behind the drum kit for more than half a century — speaks to the engineering skill marshaled by Boston Dynamics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff where Spot was invented. Not everyone has warmed to the lifelike movements of their robots, a lineup that also includes the formidable humanoid Atlas. But dance videos like these serve as a form of public relations for its products, which were designed for not the stage but factories, mines, and power plants — places where they can do what any fan of the Stones in the 80s would surely call the dirty work.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Hear Hans Zimmer’s Experimental Score for the New Dune Film
If you have not yet seen the first installment of Denis Villeneuve’s reimagining of Dune, you will find no spoilers here, though if you’ve read Frank Herbert’s cult classic novel and/or seen David Lynch’s film adaptation (or even the forgettable TV miniseries from 20 years ago), you are familiar with the story. You can, however, hear Hans Zimmer’s complete soundtrack above. If you love it, and if film critic Mick LaSalle is right, you’re in for a treat: “If you like the music here, you’ll probably like the movie,” LaSalle writes in a San Francisco Chronicle review. “If you hate it, you can’t possibly enjoy Dune.”
The film’s music is relentless and creates a “sense of something strange and unfamiliar,” making sure “we never forget we’re watching an entirely alien universe.” Veteran blockbuster composer Hans Zimmer created this sonic atmosphere with studio effects and nontraditional instrumentation, though one familiar element remains, as he tells Indiewire:
I kept thinking, wherever you are in the future, the instruments will change due to technology, and we could be far more experimental, but the one thing that remains is the human voice, which there is a lot of.
Those voices include that of singer Lisa Gerrard, formerly of Dead Can Dance, who “came up with this language that is all her own. It could be from the future, it could be from a different world.”
Zimmer’s approach almost mirrors that of his first big break, the score for 1988’s Rain Man, of which he said in 2008, “The Raymond character doesn’t actually know where he is. The world is so different to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don’t we just invent our own world music for a world that doesn’t really exist?” Villeneuve’s Dune gives us an entire interplanetary civilization for which to invent music that didn’t exist before. “I felt like there was a freedom to get away from a Western Orchestra,” Zimmer told The New York Times, in a major understatement.
One piece of music, played as the Atreides family arrives on Arrakis, involved 30 bagpipers, recorded together in Edinburgh while socially distanced. “Along with synthesizers,” writes The New York Times’ Darryn King, “you can hear scraping metal, Indian bamboo flutes, Irish whistles, a juddering drum phrase that Zimmer calls an ‘anti-groove,’ seismic rumbles of distorted guitar” and “a war for that is actually a cello.” The result “might be one of Zimmer’s most unorthodox and most provocative” pieces of work, and a far cry from the music that accompanied David Lynch’s beautiful failure of a film in 1984.
Zimmer claims never to have seen Lynch’s film nor heard the soundtrack by soft-rock superstars Toto, unwilling to compromise the Dune he’d been imagining since he first read the book. “I’ve been thinking about Dune for nearly 50 years,” he says. Lynch has been trying to forget his film for almost as long. The dense, complicated mess of an adaptation so confused film execs and test audiences that the studio added introductory exposition, above, and handed out glossaries to audiences at the first screenings (though not, presumably, flashlights).
The choice of superstars Toto, of “Africa” fame, brought audiences of Lynch’s film a “luxuriant and peculiar soundtrack,” supplemented by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and a composition by Brian Eno. But it also integrated familiar 80’s rock touches (as in “Desert Theme,” above), giving the alien world Lynch imagined both a familiar sonic texture and a dated sound. Thirty-seven years later, science fiction films need no such comforting apparatus to make them palatable. As both Villeneuve and Zimmer realized in their work on Dune, a film about a totally unfamiliar future civilization — even one filled with humans who look like us — can look and sound as strange as technology and imagination will allow.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Metallica Teaches a New Masterclass on How to Build & Sustain a Band
Since its launch in 2015, Masterclass has not only expanded the variety of its online course offerings but sought out ever-bigger names for its teachers. Names don’t come much bigger than Metallica in the world of heavy metal, and indeed in the world of rock music in general. Hence the broad title of the new Masterclass “Metallica Teaches Being a Band.” Having been a band for 40 years now, they presumably know more than a little about everything involved in that enterprise: not just recording hit albums like Master of Puppets and songs like “Enter Sandman,” but also weathering dramatic changes in both the music business and popular culture while cooperating for the good of the group.
Not that, to the men of Metallica, such cooperation has always come naturally. “There’ve been times when it’s been fractured and it looks like we were on the verge of breaking up,” says guitarist Kirk Hammett in the trailer for their Masterclass above.
He joined the band in 1983, which means he has very nearly as long a standing in the band as its founders, lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. All of them, along with bassist Robert Trujillo, appear here as teachers to share their accumulated wisdom, have to do as it may with songwriting, performance, interpersonal communication, or the management of time and anger.
Like all Masterclasses, Metallica’s course is divided into many easily watchable video lessons, most with a practical slant. Musically inclined viewers, even those with no interest in becoming heavy-metal icons, will benefit from learning to work “From Riff to Song,” the principles of “Putting Together an Album,” and the art of “Navigating Egos.” But for Metallica fans in particular — whom, collectively, the band consider their fifth member — few lessons in any Masterclass could be as gripping as the deconstructions of “Enter Sandman,” “Master of Puppets,” and “One.” They do all this in a calmer, more reflective psychological place than the bitter, near-dysfunctional one in which the 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster found them — but not so calm and reflective that they can’t finish the course off with, as Hammett puts it, “a bad-ass performance.”
When you sign up to become a Masterclass member ($180 per year), you will have access to Metallica’s course plus 100 others.
Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch the New Trailer for a Kurt Vonnegut Documentary 40 Years In the Making
When Kurt Vonnegut first arrived in Dresden, a city as yet untouched by war, crammed into a boxcar with dozens of other POWs, the city looked to him like “Oz,” he wrote in his semi-autobiographical sixth novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After all, he says, “The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.” When Vonnegut and his fellow GIs emerged from the bowels of the pork plant in which they’d waited out the Allied bombing of the city, they witnessed the aftermath of Dresden’s destruction. The city formerly known as “the Florence of the Elbe” was “like the moon,” as Vonnegut’s “unstuck” protagonist Billy Pilgrim says in the novel: cratered, pitted, leveled…. But the smoking ruins were the least of it.
Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners spent the next few days removing and incinerating thousands of bodies, an experience that would forever shape the writer and his stories. Whether mentioned explicitly or not, Dresden became a “death card,” writes Philip Beidler, that Vonnegut planted throughout his work. Death recurs with banal regularity, the phrase “So it goes,” peppered (106 times) throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, which Vonnegut credited to the French novelist Celine, whose cynicism tipped over into hatred. Vonnegut may have gone as far as generalized misanthropy, but his dry, wisecracking humor and his humanism stayed intact, even if it had picked up a passenger: the horror of mass death that haunted his imagination.
Vonnegut, like Billy Pilgrim, became “unstuck in time,” a condition we might see now as analogous to PTSD, his daughter Nanette says. “He was writing to save his own life,” as news from Vietnam came in and Vonnegut, a pacifist, found himself “losing his temper” at the television. “He saw the numbers, how many dead,” she adds, “that these kids were being conned, and sent to their deaths. And I think it probably set a fire under him to have his say.” A new documentary on the writer titled Unstuck in Time shows how much impact his “say” had on the country’s readers. Vonnegut wrote unbridled satire, science fiction, and social commentary, in thin books with irreverent doodles in the margins. As director Robert Weide says in the trailer above, holding a copy of Breakfast of Champions, “what high school kid isn’t gonna gobble this up?”
Weide, like most lovers of Vonnegut, discovered him as a teenager. At 23, the budding filmmaker contacted his literary hero about making a documentary. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, Weide– best known for his work with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm (and as a meme) — filmed and taped conversations with Vonnegut until the author’s death in 2007. The resulting documentary promises a comprehensive portrait of the writer’s life, LitHub writes, from his “childhood in Indianapolis to his experience as a prisoner of war to his rise to literary stardom to the fans left in the wake of his death, all through the lens of Vonnegut and Weide’s close friendship.”
As the relationship between filmmaker and subject became part of the film itself, co-director Don Argott joined the project “to document the meta element of this story,” says Weide, “as I continued to focus on Vonnegut’s biography.” Forty years in the making, Unstuck in Time, evolved from a “fairly conventional author documentary” to what may stand as the most intimate portrait of the author put on film. Perhaps someday we’ll also see the publication of an 84-page scrapbook recently sold at auction, a collection of Vonnegut’s wartime letters, news clippings, and photographs of the ruined German city that he never fully left behind.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...When The Who Saved New York City After 9/11: Watch Their Cathartic Madison Square Garden Set (October 20, 2001)
A little more than a month after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, with the nation and world still reeling from that day, Madison Square Garden hosted The Concert for New York City. A benefit concert of the first order, it was also a thank you to the sacrifice of NYC’s fire and police departments, which had lost many members during that day. (The former had lost 343 firefighters.) But like a lot of things about that day twenty years later, it has sort of vanished down the cultural memory hole.
However, if you need reminding, the Who came out of retirement and delivered what some considered the set of the night. Tom Watson, writing in Forbes magazine, called it “The Night The Who Saved New York.”
The concert was free to any firefighter or policeman who came in uniform. Watson describes the vibe thus:
“To say that occupancy laws were stretched that night is to undersell the size of the place. Picture a Knicks game, then double the crowd. From the start, the building ran on a river of emotion and beer, which, if you wore a uniform — or your late loved one’s cap — was free. The thousands of cops in attendance studiously ignored thousands of other cops and firefighters lighting up a little reefer. Large bottles of high proof spirits were produced. The Garden was the biggest Irish wake in history.”
In a moment like this, a lot of the artists headed towards jingoism. It was understandable. Songs about America (David Bowie), songs about New York City (Billy Joel), songs about freedom (Paul McCartney), songs about heroes (also Bowie). But, what the crowd wanted that night was catharsis, and that’s what the Who brought.
The set is the Who at their most anthemic, but also the most representative of the classic rock radio these uniformed men and women and their families grew up with: “Who Are You,” “Baba O’Reilly,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and ending with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” However the line “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” is quietly deleted. Not this time, cynicism.
The concert was exactly what was needed for the grief of the community. And death hangs over the whole event, as camera cut to family members holding up photos of lost loved ones, while the World Trade Center rubble still smoldered.
And then there’s what nobody knew at the time: this would be bassist John Entwistle’s last gig before his fatal heart attack eight months later. So many of the remaining first responders would die from the toxic chemicals breathed in on 9/11, and still they fight for some recompense from the government that honored them at first. Mayor Giuliani…well, we know what happened to him. And that ass whoopin’ we promised the Middle East wound up kicking America’s economy in the butt instead.
Twenty years later the performance still holds up, a moment in time just before we all got fooled again.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...The Human Brain: A Free Online Course from MIT
From MIT comes The Human Brain, a series of 18 lectures presented by Professor Nancy Kanwisher. They’re from a course that “surveys the core perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human mind and asks how they are implemented in the brain. Key themes include the representations, development, and degree of functional specificity of these components of mind and brain. The course will take students straight to the cutting edge of the field, empowering them to understand and critically evaluate empirical articles in the current literature.”
Watch all of the lectures above, and find them added to our list of Free Biology Courses, a subset of our collection 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Read More...Play a Kandinsky: A New Simulation Lets You Experience Kandinsky’s Synesthesia & the Sounds He May Have Heard When Painting “Yellow-Red-Blue”
Wassily Kandinsky could hear colors. Maybe you can too, but since studies so far have suggested that the underlying condition exists in less than five percent of the population, the odds are against it. Known as synesthesia, it involves one kind of sense perception being tied up with another: letters and numbers come with colors, sequences take on three-dimensional forms, sounds have tactile feelings. These unusual sensory connections can presumably encourage unusual kinds of thinking; perhaps unsurprisingly, synesthetic experiences have been reported by a variety of creators, from Billy Joel and David Hockney to Vladimir Nabokov and Nikola Tesla.
Few, however, have described synesthesia as eloquently as Kandinsky did. “Color is the keyboard,” he once said. “The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.”
That quote must have shaped the mission of Play a Kandinsky, a collaboration between Google Arts and Culture and the Centre Pompidou. Enlisting the compositional services of experimental musicians Antoine Bertin and NSDOS, it gives even us non-synesthetes a chance to experience the intersection of sound and not just color but shape as well, in something of the same manner as the pioneering abstract painter must have.
As explained in the Listening In video above, Kandinsky heard yellow as a trumpet, red as a violin, and blue as an organ. An image of sufficient chromatic and formal variety must have set off a symphony in his head, much like the one Play a Kandinsky gives us a chance to conduct. As an interface it uses his 1925 painting Yellow-Red-Blue, each element of which, when clicked, adds another synesthetic layer of sound to the mix. These visual-sonic correspondences are based on Kandinsky’s own color theories as well as the music he would have heard, all processed with the formidable machine-learning resources at Google’s command. “What was he trying to make us feel with this painting?” Play a Kandinsky asks. But of course he didn’t have just one set of emotions in mind for his viewers, and making that possible was perhaps the most enduring achievement of his journey into abstraction.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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