gender politics. Sometimes I think that myself, but I donât think itâs reducible to machismo. After all, Tzipi says this kind of thing on a regular basis. The question of racial objectification also seems to be threatening to rear its ugly head. I wonder if it will at all complicate things if I tell you that the paramour is the griot superstar, the international dreadlocked dreamboat, the Mick Jagger of Mali, Djeli Kouyaté?
Of course being a âWorld Musicâ rock star doesnât inherently guarantee that he wouldnât be capable of racial or ethnic exoticization, just as Tzipiâs being a woman doesnât inoculate her from sexism. Lest you think Santutxoâs a saint, think again. Or more nearly: itâs precisely because he kind of is a saint that he feels compelled on occasion to be this crass and selfish. What can you say about a babe-in-arms like Binh? He doesnât even realize what heâs doing yet.
âAnd what about you?â you may be thinking. âWhat makes you think a Midwestern white woman jetting off to Bamako is immune to any of this either?â Donât think I havenât thought about this myself.
Rolling Stone magazine sent me to do a story on Djeliâs homecoming in March of 2005. Actually, heâd requested me. As you know, heâd written me a few months before to thank me for that profile in The New Yorker . Iâd never met him, but Iâd been following his career for some time. His 2004 release, Ã Tierno
Bokar , was one of the most politically trenchant and yet poetically sophisticated albums of recent memory. I donât mean just among âWorldâ artists. You can see I keep putting scare quotes around the term, and I hope youâll understand that it has to do with the absurdity of the commercial bracketing of somebody as profoundly cosmopolitan as Djeli under a term which, despite its cosmic proportions, reads to the consumer as narrowly exotic. At this point, Djeli himself has had the conversation so many times heâs bored with it. Anyway, the brilliance of à Tierno Bokar , both lyrically and musically, was so self-evident, a lot of music journalists who usually covered other genres picked up on it â rock, jazz, classical. We were all talking about it.
I tend to write about jazz, but because my backgroundâs in literature, when I do deal with vocal music and original lyrics I pay a lot of attention. His earlier albums were also layered and complex, but I couldnât think of another disc that had such a novelistic intricacy. I did a very detailed reading. Heâd helpfully included his own cross-translations between Bambara, French, and English in the liner notes. Even these translations were tricky, attentive to his own assonance, punning, and percussive metrics. There was a little citation from Amadou Hampté Bâ about orature, and how â les hommes de lâoralité â were â passionnément épris de beau langage et presque tous poètes .â One may have oneâs doubts about all oral cultures being this rich, but Djeli, without question, is passionately in love with language. Heâs definitely a poet.
He said mine was the only critique heâd read that actually seemed to understand the full complexity of what he was trying to do. In fact, he said he wasnât sure heâd understood it himself until he read my piece. He can be kind of self-effacing like that sometimes.
Djeli comes from a family of griots, but he went to boarding school in France and then studied philosophy at the Ãcole Normale Supérieure. The one in Paris, not the one in Bamako.
He plays kora and electric guitar with equal virtuosity, and heâs extended the technique of both instruments correspondingly. He was twenty years old and living in Paris when the coup took place, twenty-one when the democratic constitution went into effect. There were some hopes for him to return to
Of course being a âWorld Musicâ rock star doesnât inherently guarantee that he wouldnât be capable of racial or ethnic exoticization, just as Tzipiâs being a woman doesnât inoculate her from sexism. Lest you think Santutxoâs a saint, think again. Or more nearly: itâs precisely because he kind of is a saint that he feels compelled on occasion to be this crass and selfish. What can you say about a babe-in-arms like Binh? He doesnât even realize what heâs doing yet.
âAnd what about you?â you may be thinking. âWhat makes you think a Midwestern white woman jetting off to Bamako is immune to any of this either?â Donât think I havenât thought about this myself.
Rolling Stone magazine sent me to do a story on Djeliâs homecoming in March of 2005. Actually, heâd requested me. As you know, heâd written me a few months before to thank me for that profile in The New Yorker . Iâd never met him, but Iâd been following his career for some time. His 2004 release, Ã Tierno
Bokar , was one of the most politically trenchant and yet poetically sophisticated albums of recent memory. I donât mean just among âWorldâ artists. You can see I keep putting scare quotes around the term, and I hope youâll understand that it has to do with the absurdity of the commercial bracketing of somebody as profoundly cosmopolitan as Djeli under a term which, despite its cosmic proportions, reads to the consumer as narrowly exotic. At this point, Djeli himself has had the conversation so many times heâs bored with it. Anyway, the brilliance of à Tierno Bokar , both lyrically and musically, was so self-evident, a lot of music journalists who usually covered other genres picked up on it â rock, jazz, classical. We were all talking about it.
I tend to write about jazz, but because my backgroundâs in literature, when I do deal with vocal music and original lyrics I pay a lot of attention. His earlier albums were also layered and complex, but I couldnât think of another disc that had such a novelistic intricacy. I did a very detailed reading. Heâd helpfully included his own cross-translations between Bambara, French, and English in the liner notes. Even these translations were tricky, attentive to his own assonance, punning, and percussive metrics. There was a little citation from Amadou Hampté Bâ about orature, and how â les hommes de lâoralité â were â passionnément épris de beau langage et presque tous poètes .â One may have oneâs doubts about all oral cultures being this rich, but Djeli, without question, is passionately in love with language. Heâs definitely a poet.
He said mine was the only critique heâd read that actually seemed to understand the full complexity of what he was trying to do. In fact, he said he wasnât sure heâd understood it himself until he read my piece. He can be kind of self-effacing like that sometimes.
Djeli comes from a family of griots, but he went to boarding school in France and then studied philosophy at the Ãcole Normale Supérieure. The one in Paris, not the one in Bamako.
He plays kora and electric guitar with equal virtuosity, and heâs extended the technique of both instruments correspondingly. He was twenty years old and living in Paris when the coup took place, twenty-one when the democratic constitution went into effect. There were some hopes for him to return to
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