Boomerang!
Last Friday I went down to check out the "All Over the Map" Harbourfront Festival and the opening show at the CIBC stage by the "Sengalese Scorchers" Daara J was pure pleasure. The group's latest release "Boomerang" is currently topping Europe's music charts and it's easy to understand why after seeing them on stage on Friday.
Alhadji Man is tall, lithe and easy on the eyes. Dreadlocks swinging, beads of sweat bathing him, he and the other two, Faada Freddy and Ndongo D, were able to get the reserved-Toronto-the-Good crowd up and moving, no small feat. They wooed the crowd in an easy-flowing mix of Wolof, French and English, and no-one cared at all that so much of the lyrics were completely foreign to them. The beat of the music and the charisma of the three carried everyone along on a good ride.
The name Daara J (pronounce the J as a G) loosely translates as "school of life", and their lyrics (for those who can understand them) tackle enough issues to make their songs into textbooks in that school. They speak out about poverty, corruption, and the importance of voting, among other things. Between numbers on Friday, Freddy, the group's spokesman, tells the audience that as far as they are concerned rap is not something new. "'We're saying that rap travelled out on the slave ships and grew up in the plantations of America. Now it's coming back." Man tells us that they do think they are the best among Senegal's current crop of 3,000 rap groups. Listen to them for a while, and you'll be inclined to agree with just about anything they might say.
Alhadji Man is tall, lithe and easy on the eyes. Dreadlocks swinging, beads of sweat bathing him, he and the other two, Faada Freddy and Ndongo D, were able to get the reserved-Toronto-the-Good crowd up and moving, no small feat. They wooed the crowd in an easy-flowing mix of Wolof, French and English, and no-one cared at all that so much of the lyrics were completely foreign to them. The beat of the music and the charisma of the three carried everyone along on a good ride.
The name Daara J (pronounce the J as a G) loosely translates as "school of life", and their lyrics (for those who can understand them) tackle enough issues to make their songs into textbooks in that school. They speak out about poverty, corruption, and the importance of voting, among other things. Between numbers on Friday, Freddy, the group's spokesman, tells the audience that as far as they are concerned rap is not something new. "'We're saying that rap travelled out on the slave ships and grew up in the plantations of America. Now it's coming back." Man tells us that they do think they are the best among Senegal's current crop of 3,000 rap groups. Listen to them for a while, and you'll be inclined to agree with just about anything they might say.
1 Comments:
Yup, they were definitely impressive. I like the following line from Jason Richards' review of the band in NOW: "You may not be able to understand most of it, but it's still 461 times more flavoury than whatever new gold-tooth crunk bullshit CD just came out."
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