I used to hate "World Music" as a genre, since it reminded me of everything I hated about squishy, far-left liberals. For one, lumping everything from Andean pan flute music and Saharan vocal chants into one corner of the record store is both useless from a browsing perspective and reminiscent of '70s visions of a "Global South," replete with all sorts of colonial guilt, mau-mauing by strongmen and the type of misunderstanding through generalization that is so loathsome on the other end of the political spectrum. Music from around the world deserves to stand in categories based on what it sounds like, just like western music.
In recent years, this has become more and more common with the fusion of world cultures. Baile Funk is hot amongst the downtown crowd thanks to popularizers like Diplo and M.I.A. Punjabi M.C. made sorority girls dance to Bhangra for one shining moment in the spring of 2003.
What does this have to do with Ghana Soundz? For years, all I knew about African music was that I didn't like Upper West Side bookstores that played Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It existed to most of the people who listened to it as outside the bounds of western music, part of a culture that needed to be "preserved" in much the same way that an 8-year-old will trap a lightningbug in a jar until it runs out of oxygen and dies.
As it turns out, Africa has far more to offer than what Paul Simon is willing to take on tour with him. This particular album, a collection of funk, fusion and afrobeat from 1970s Ghana, shows a culture borrowing from and adding to the global musical dialogue. Many guitar players could have come right out of Studio One from across the Atlantic. Jazzy horns seem to be borrowed from smoky New York clubs. But these songs aren't knock-offs of music from elsewhere. From the call-and-response chants of Oscar Sulley & The Uhuru Dance Band's "Bukom Mashie" to the drumming earthquake that pervades the entire album, it's clear that Ghana has a lot to offer, even within the "strictures" of western song forms.
So yeah, it's good. And you can shake your booty to it. Actually, you can't help but shake your booty to it.
7.5/10
Haven't I been telling you about African music all along? Guess you just had to figure it out on your own. Don't forget Gilles Peterson in Africa, btw. That man in a gee-nee-us.
c986t