World Rock: Putumayo presents African Groove (Various Artists)

This is a post for last weekend, coming in late partly due to the fact that my wife and I were out of town for a couple of days, camping at Devil’s Lake State Park in Barboo, Wisconsin (not far from Madison and Wisconsin Dells). Not surprisingly then, this post is inspired by our experience on our trip.

We decided on Friday afternoon to head back into civilization and go see a movie. We saw the Coen’s brothers’ newest, The Ladykillers. Don’t listen to the reviews; this is another classic from the Coens, reinterpreting an old film and bringing their over-the-top charm to it. Irma P. Hall is incredible, and the music is outstanding. This soundtrack hopefully will generate as much interest as O Brother, Where Art Thou?

However, we saw the movie at a fairly new theater that is in Wisconsin Dells, the Disneyland of the Midwest. The theater is part of a new resort complex called the Kalahari. It features hundreds of hotel rooms and suites, a huge conference center, a wildlife entertainment park, and both indoor and outdoor waterparks. The entire theme of the resort is Africa. Yes, the theme is that general, claiming to provide a “rich educational experience” and “an authentic African theme.”

Well, there are pictures of Africa. Those I suppose are authentic. But really, we found that the resort has simply renamed things with African sounding names, but there’s really no sense of these African names meaning something outside of kitsch. There’s the Kenyan Room and the Zimbabwe Zipper (a water ride). All of the place names come out mixed up together, as if the large continent of Africa is homogeneous.

The resort is striving for authenticity, yet, there’s no Sudanese Civil War Game Room or an AIDS Epidemic Fantasy Suite. I also looked for The Heart of Darkness Reality Ride, but I’m not sure it has been built yet. Plus one of the restaurants can only hope to appeal to diners by being the place where “Italy meets Africa.” Apparently, African cuisine wouldn’t attract enough customers, so they had to go with good, old spaghetti.

This brought us back to the car to return to our campsite. I reached into the console and pulled out the album, African Groove, from Putumayo. Here was the authentic collection of African music that countered all of the Kalahari Resort’s attempts at giving me that rich, educational experience. Putumayo World Music is great at putting together compilation CDs of music from many different genres, cultures, and places around the globe.

While African Groove has the sounds characteristic of African music—beats, languages, and structures, it also shows that Africa is a contempoary continent. We run the risk of expecting that Africa is still the Africa that early white explorers found. Yet, this collection of music is electronica and hip-hop, contemporary music that bridges both traditional tribal rhythms with modern music.

Additionally, while the title of the album is rather ambitious, to present an entire continent (would we accept North American Groove as an actual sound to be collected in one album), it does present the artists as actually being from different countries—Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Senegal, South Africa. This isn’t the blender effect of the Kalahari Resort; this is music from multiple corners of the continent, from multiple perspectives.

Putumayo gives us the chance to hear this music that would otherwise be difficult to find. I’m not sure that many of these artists, Issa Bagayogo, Hardstone, Madeka, or Julien Jacob, could be found in your local record store. This album makes me want to find African radio stations over the Internet to hear what kinds of music is climbing the charts in various cities.

For now, this album occupies the World Rock section of the Spectrum which is a catch-all (like World Folk). That’s way too simplistic, and counter to everything I just said. However, it is kind of a temporary holding area until I see of what world music I start to own multiple albums. Soon there could be an African Rock section, because African Groove makes me really interested in expanding my collection to include more of that beautifully rich continent.