Thanksgiving, blah, blah, blah. Inevitably, there are things that we are grateful for, but blogs are not the ideal forum to fulminate. Or maybe they are. Tucker Max had a movie made based on his sordid chicanery. Diablo Cody turned a season of stripping into stardom. Starting in January of 2010, Passion of the Weiss […]

As though to justify my recent rave about their archival efforts, Now-Again strikes uh, again, with the announcement of the Nigerian Fuzz-Funk anthology, a compilation that promises to succeed in being both categorically awesome and sounding like the name of a rare Equatorial disease. Partnering up with Uchenna Ikonne of the phenomenal With Comb & […]

Since it is widely accepted logic around these parts that Fela Kuti is the G.O.A.T., I’d be remiss not to mention the Felabrations being held in 15 cities across North America over the next month. According to the flacks, “the original Felabrations date back to the early 1970s when Fela and his band took over […]

Poor “Jacobim” Mulatu Astatke–the man rivals Haile Sellassie for popularity in his native Ethiopia, and domestically, he’s still mistakenly conflated for the designer from Zoolander whose fashion aesthetic resembled a gay Colonel Sanders. I imagine I am the only one who thinks this. Regardless, it’s been a good year for the father of Ethio-Jazz, with […]

When I first heard Fool’s Gold in May of this year, I pigeonholed them as trend-hopping Echo Park poseurs who decided to play afro-pop following a weekend of smoking cotton candy kush, snorting Dexedrine,  and listening to “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” on repeat. As you can see from the video above, they seemed too happy, […]

Off their new album, Imidiwan, another classic aptly described by guitarist and vocalist Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni as “a faithful record…a good rendition of our sound at its most natural and most ‘easy’…but a difficult album to make. We wanted to record in the desert because that’s where we feel most relaxed and happy. “But it’s […]

My ardor for Ethio-Jazz is well–documented, so it’s little surprise that I find Oh No’s latest sampledelic opus sensational. Not only is this preaching to the choir, it’s serving it kitfo, tej, and injera. Like his last album, Dr. No’s Oxperiment, the greatest Michael Jackson still standing excavates ultra-rare samples from the crates, in the […]

Fridays are for Fela. Download: MP3: Fela Kuti-“Kalakuta Show” (Left-Click)

For those whose knowledge of African hip-hop is limited to K’Naan and that song where ?uestlove samples Fela Kuti, this absolutely awesome and extensive overview of the first ten years of Nigerian hip-hop is essential reading. This is the sort of stuff the Internet was made for–that and pictures of rotund cats wearing tuxedos. Download: […]

Sach O thinks more emcees should spit over Afrobeat  Want me to write about your new movie? Make it a Franco-African neo-Blacksploitation flick featuring a killer soundtrack, hilarious starring turn by a shit-starting French emcee, tons of explosions and a trippy psychedelic action sequence on the back end. You get all of that and more in […]