CARDRUNNERS

One of the aspects that I enjoyed most in owning my African art gallery for 12 years was playing African music all day. It was one of the great joys and comforts for the long hours I spent waiting on customers to walk in and enjoy the art. It's been 11 months since it closed and I've hardly played any African music since its closure. Tonight, I was wandering on You Tube and decided to pull up a couple songs to share with members. Consider it a cultural immersion into something very different from the normal music you listen to. There is such a variety of different music styles throughout Africa. What has always struck me about the music is that it was often sung in language I didn't know and yet it still conveyed tremendous feeling and emotion.

While I have over 100 cds in my collection, the samples I could choose from on You Tube were quite limited. I chose one from my favorite singer in Zimbabwe - Oliver Mtukudi. He is the most popular artist in the country and has an incredibly soulful voice.

The second video is a montage of several Malian artists. It also shows some of the beautiful landscape of Mali. It is much more mellow guitar based music from artists like Habib Koite and others. I'll share some more music and videos in the future if people enjoy them.

A quick thanks to those who gave helpful suggestions for my trojan computer problems.  I did some more research and found a program called ComboFix that helped improve the situation and I've been continuing to comb through it with some of the other suggestions people made.

Tonight, I wanted to give some love to a satellite channel that I receive, WorldLink TV.  While I don't watch it regularly, they have some great world music videos that introduce so much wonderful music that never makes it into the mainstream.  So much of the TV and music programming we are exposed to is so homogenized that it's refreshing to hear something different.  The episode that I caught tonight featured African artists.  They had videos by K'naan (a Somali rapper), Michael Franti and Spearhead (reggae fusion), Balance (Cape Verde songstress), Shaluza Max (South African dance music),and a couple personal favorites that I've seen live multiple times Angelique Kidjo (Benin soulful songstress) and Habib Koite (Malian guitar maestro).  They each have a unique sound and very catchy pleasing elements to their music.  I recommend you click through their names to view their videos on WorldLink, if you are curious about hearing new good music.

I've embedded a couple Michael Franti and Spearhead songs because I couldnt' find any on their website.