Posts Tagged ‘angola’

Luanda-Paris / Angola-France / Kuduro-World

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

I’m becoming more curious about the unabated French love for Kuduro as a fresh Frédéric Galliano promo video lands in my inbox.  Last month he launched the second release as Kuduro Sound System.  Meanwhile, he’s prepping tracks for a Força Angola! record on Flamin Hotz to follow up last fall’s Força Kuduro! EP.

In light of a comment I dropped on Unfashionably Late’s global ghettotech conversation starter, I’ve also been curious about what adaptations have to take place for a nuwhirld sound to become popular up north.  The lead single on FG’s release might provide a clue –

Elle chante en français!  The easiest way to overcome the linguistic barrier is to smash it to pieces.  Dama S. is definitely Angolan — although whether or not and how long she’s lived in France is unclear to me — but sings so the audience can understand every word, and perhaps even earn some extra cachet with her accent (keeps it exotic, no?).  The chorus remains straightforward — “Danse with me, kuduro / Dance like this, kuduro / Move with me, kuduro / Grind with me, kuduro / Kuduro, kuduro, kuduro, now!” — and the images, other than the sunglasses exchange, mostly present snapshots of authentic kuduro in action.  It’s a deft act of translation, retaining enough of the source material but providing a linguistic entrée for a new audience.

Some Google.fr searching reveals a small but growing kuduro niche, with FG as the recurrent #1 kuduro hustler en France.  There are at least a dozen kuduro titles available on Amazon.fr, some of which I previously looked at.  I also came across this message board thread, whose exchange goes roughly something like this –

tisba972: i’m looking for the title of a song (ragga, soca, a little antillean carnival) without many lyrics and keeps repeating itself harder and harder.  I’ve heard that there’s a dance routine to this song at the west indian parties in bordeaux.

tiatia: the sound you are looking for is kuduro, and the song is the dança do tchilili [sic]

Nyabel: Lol kuduro is cape verdean, not antillean =) like buraka sound system for example

Sam-Fred: Hey, kuduro is angolan !!!  It was invented in 1997 by Tony Amado in Luanda.  It’s the only country that produces kuduro worthy of the name.  Nothing to do with Cape Verde or anywhere else.  For the right info, you can check out: http://kuduro-sound-system.blogspot.com and here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/kuduro.sound.syst­em?ref=ts And the track that’s gonna blow up this summer is surely a song with the Angolan singer Dama S. & Kuduro Sound System “Danse avec moi Kuduro” ["Sam-Fred" sounds very much like Monsieur Galliano himself]

SamFred: And Buraka Sound System is portuguese not angolan and not really Kuduro

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Confusion in the lusosphere aside, I also stumbled across a version “Dança do Tchiriri,” last year’s #1 kuduro smash en France, that shows just how far the dance&music (the two inextricably linked) has spread beyond the streets of Luanda.

Senegal, Morocco, Mauritania, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Porto, Miami, Martinique, Guadeloupe, [French?] Guyana, Cape Verde, Marseille, Bordeaux — it’s a roll call of diasporic and post-colonial echoes: francophone enclaves in Africa and the Americas, major European immigrant hubs, and an emerging luso-network (Brazil curiously left out).  It becomes abundantly clear from a video like this one that kuduro has resonated far beyond Luanda not just with bloggers and nu whirl connoisseurs, but the analogues of Angola: other African capitals, the cities where African immigrants congregate, the semi-colonies of African descent.

This is definitely kuduro far beyond the marketing capabilities of one Frenchman — no disrespect to Frédéric, to the contrary it’s encouraging to see it spread so far & wide.  Lisbon is becoming an increasingly important node as lusophone music takes the stage, but Paris remains an essential hub for Africa and the Caribbean.

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Another contender for “hit d’été 2009” (despite the above claiming it’s summer 2008) is “Mwangolé” (Umbundu for Angola) by Les Princes du Kuduro.  Their MySpace claims a Paris/Luanda connection on the location and the about reads, “Puto Milagre & Manu Le Boss sont 2 jeunes issues des ghettos angolais Venus pour représenter les vraies origines du kuduro, les princes du kuduro comptent imposer leur style musical à la France et au monde… (Puto Milagre & Manu Le Boss are 2 youths from the Angolan ghetto who have come to represent the true origins of kuduro, the kuduro princes are bringing their musical styles to France and the world).”

Les Princes du Kuduro - Mwangole

Unlike the French-tinged “Danse avec moi Kuduro!” — where the language and lyrics de-emphasize the country of origin — it’s straight Angolan pride as the title suggests (see also the Angolan flag in the back of their car) in uncompromising Portuguese and a driving beat a bit harder than the kuduro I’m used to hearing.  Who in turn is the intended audience?  I know FG plays mostly in Paris proper.  But Les Princes du Kuduro seem to be targeting more toward the banlieue, the kind of audience that would be in the Paris scene of the global dance video.  In short, this strain of kuduro is aiming for the success of coupé-décalé, which of course is bolstered by the huge Ivorian population in France.  But how big is the Angolan diaspora?  A cursory search doesn’t reveal many details.  And this is not a conceptual link, mind you.  Not if Kuduro Coupé Décalé Stars Compilation has anything to say about it.

I know Guillaume was recently on his native soil.  Perhaps he’s got a read on the situation sur la terre / sobre a terra.

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Posted in Africa, FHZ, diaspora, euro, francophonie, globalization, immigration, lusofonia, viewtube | 5 Comments »

KGV (Kuduro Avec Grande Vitesse)

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

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I have had an abstract notion for some time that kuduro had really taken off in France.  Of course, I knew that Frédéric Galliano (a Gallic name if there ever was one) has been the nu whirld’s man-in-Luanda for some time now.  He is working with Flamin Hotz on a kuduro comp and alerted us to some recent releases in France.  In turn, I was astounded by the degree of major label success.  If you want to make the contrast with its cross-Atlantic contemporary, kuduro is light years past being a trend-ish platitude, “the next baile funk.”  In France, it’s a veritable KGV that has zoomed to popularity.

The CD/DVD Kuduro Connection came out just a week ago on Sony France (check the DVD on Amazon.fr), with every ounce of marketing muscle such backing entails.  The official website is a nu media site to behold — chiefly, it boasts an online game (!) of keyboard-DDR where you pick one of three danceiros (busty Bonita, one-legged MC Costuleta, or feisty street kid Joao) and bust moves to the “Dança do Tchiriri” (also spelled Tiriri and Xiriri).

Virtual recreations are very revealing in how they choose to reconstruct their source material.  Online marketing firm Virtuadz, who created the “advergame,” present an unsurprisingly generic simplification of kuduro.  Both the “beach” and “street” setting do not suggest Angola or Luanda in any tangible way.  The beach is an interchangeable idylic beach scene — more vacation getaway than urbanized beach — while the street is a conventionally straight, uncrowded, and populated by boxy architecture.  There is a truck of some kind that enters the frame at bottom right, missing an opportunity to insert one of the communal vans that circulate the capital and have incubated the kuduro culture by blasting it out of their stereos in Luanda traffic jams.

Now take a look at the Xiriri music video for some comparison.  Bonita is a typical over-sexed cartoon who barely moves but to emphasize her moneymakers.  She dances lethargically compared to her real-life counterparts and is noticeably whiter than the Angolanas strutting their stuff on camera — as are the women on the cover of the album.  There is an obvious effort to whiten the image of kuduro as it is marketed to a European crowd that is very much multicultural, but for whom white Western beauty standards prevail in advertising.

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It’s almost surprising that the cover images aren’t oversexualized black figures, like we’re so used to seeing from the days of Favela Booty Beats.  But maybe part of mainstreaming is also bleaching out the African overtones, making kuduro into generic tropical music, like in the palm trees & bikini of Kuduru System.  However, I must at least give credit to Kuduro Party where the Angolan motif is stronger — the red lettering, embedded hammer & sickle, and concrete towers suggesting a Luanda cityscape — and the cover female a bit darker toned.

João, meanwhile, is the loveable street kid, with an unflapping smile that reeks of nothing short of virtual minstrelsy as his feet fly.  While Bonita moves slower than the music vid dancers so you can focus on her curves, Joao is on warp speed.  It is exaggerated dancing so that you don’t think about the archetype — poor, hungry — that he represents. (Doesn’t the asphalt get hot, João?  Too bad your creators didn’t provide you any shoes.)  Costileta is the MC, and indeed missing a leg, so at least he has some grounding in reality.

There are serious euros behind Kuduro Connection and they’ve at least succeeded in getting Xiriri, apparently a big club hit in France last year, endlessly stuck in my head, like any good ad should.  Maybe Pancadão do Morro would be sold out by now if we had hired Virtuadz to make a “baile funk virtual” — choose between Sany, Cabide, and Sandrinho DJ and bang the MPC on beat to keep the crowd dancing while the cops and bandidos shoot it out?  Bonus points for proibidão, but make sure you big up the right faction!

Of course I’m old-fashioned — booklets and liner notes and a quaint notion called “context.”  Whether Kuduro Connection will sell well, whether it will lead to a glossed understanding or spur some serious Google research — that all remains to be seen.    But it’s undeniable that something is lost in translation from hard, hot Luanda streets to keyboard-jockey dancing.

Mass marketing is far from a bottoms up (”hard ass” puns notwithstanding — and note the baffling mutual exclusivity in that article, “Forget baile funk” right off the beat) distribution model.  But I don’t want to give the impression that kuduro in France is all in the hands of the music industry — there’s plenty of music industry too.  In their one year reflecton on kuduro, le Masala mentioned that it was kicking in France at the hands (& feet!) of Cape Verdeans.  As the following video declares, here’s another take on kuduro arrives in France.  But this time the only fancy tricks come from creative use of joints, not pixels.


Le Kuduro débarque en France
Uploaded by Bondy_Blog

The video refreshingly keeps the commentary light and the dancing on full blast.  The amateur danceologist in me saw the first group routine and wondered if it was the banlieue immigrant answer to techtonik (without the fascist overtones).  But in the end, it reminds me a lot more of juke, although I think the kuduro dancing runs a little more fluid than juking, which gets caught up on the relentless drum beats.  The footwurk is there, though, and lest we forget juke has gone through its own commercial decontextualizing:

Hopefully a cell phone named “kuduro” is a long ways from appearing in French stores, but Kuduro Connection could very well be the beginning.

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Posted in Africa, Uncategorized, euro, viewtube, virtual | 5 Comments »