Showing 6 posts tagged music

The African music on my ipod

Roving bandit recently made a few music recommendations, and Michael Clemens asked for more. I’ve been traveling in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi the better part of the last year and I’ve managed to collect a fair amount of African music from gospel to rap. Much of this will not be new to seasoned listeners, and I’m ignoring a lot of classics, but this is what I’ve been enjoying. I’ll list the artist, country, and a song that I really like:

Finally, I heard sawa sawa le, by Flavour, every day in Nairobi and frequently in Ghana. It was easily the song that I heard most in my travels and I became curious about it. The song is actually a dance remix of Nwa Baby, and Nwa Baby is a cover of an earlier highlife song (called sawa sawa le) by Rex Lawson. You can find more info and listen to the earlier versions here.

If you want more music, the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa has a large, otherwise hard to find selection of older music for download. Unfortunately, I don’t know the legal situation surrounding the tapes and I am quite sure that the artists aren’t getting any money out of it. I would also recommend the labels Analog Africa, Soundway, and Syllart productions. Honest Jon’s also has a great selection of African music for sale.

    lastgraph

    Lastgraph is a free service created by Andrew Godwin that generates beautiful histographs of your last.fm music history. I just recently rediscovered it and, having been jealous of Lee Byron’s personal graphs for around a year, I thought I would give it a shot.

    I entered my username, a date range (Dec 05 to Dec 07), and my email address (optional, used for notification) and within minutes I had an email (actually, for reasons unknown to me, I had two) linking me to this beautiful graph. Apart from the service being free and fast, the rendering is gorgeous. Lovers of music and stats (or either) should really give it a shot. Of course, you will need a Last.fm account with a worthy amount of information first.

    “I think that the time when music could change the world is past, I think it would be very naive to think that in this day and age.”

    Neil Young 

    [via FP Passport]