European pop music gets a taste of African influence, writes Dave Simpson.
Pop is reverberating to something different at the moment: the exuberant and often polyrhythmic sound of African hi-life. However, these uplifting and colourful sounds aren’t being brought to us by Congolese multi-instrumental bands in African robes, but by indie kids in skinny jeans clutching guitars.
Hi-life, which originated in Ghana and Sierra Leone in the Twenties, is a fusion of indigenous dance rhythms and melodies with Western sounds, played on African drums, brass instruments, harmonicas, guitars and accordions. Bands such as the Tempos and the Black Beats popularised it in the Fifties before it devolved into Afrobeat and juju.
Now, bands all over the world are picking it up. The debut album from Sweden’s Suburban Kids With Biblical Names — confusingly titled #3 — is informed by hi-life. Balloons, the first single from the hotly tipped British group Foals, has a distinctly hi-life (or at the very least African) riff. And another United Kingdom band, the Courteeners, are bringing an African twist to Arctic Monkeys-type shouty indie rock.
Leading the highest life of the lot is Vampire Weekend from New York, whose indie grooves, plonky keyboards and joyful guitar lines accompany rhythms partly derived from Congolese soukous, a type of rumba. Claiming to be influenced by ‘preppy music”, Squeeze and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Vampire Weekend mischievously describe their sound as ‘Upper West Side Soweto”. They may look more like the Pastels or the Beach Boys than Ladysmith Black Mambazo, but experts seem to think they assimilate the music rather well.
‘There are definitely strong suggestions of African sounds,” says Simon Warner, a senior teaching fellow in popular music at Leeds University, England, as he listens to Vampire Weekend’s wonderfully titled Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa. ‘West African and also Southern African sounds, possibly Zimbabwe. In hi-life, the relationship between the guitar and the drums is important and their drumbeats have a hi-life feel.”
African hi-life is not exactly the every -day listening of the modern indie musician. In fact, its flowing rhythms are often seen as the perfect template for experimentation. Talking Heads, Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel (whom Vampire Weekend name-check on Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa), took African rhythms into mainstream pop more than 20 years ago.
This is not the first time African music has influenced indie, either.
In the Eighties, the British radio DJ John Peel played Bhundu Boys records alongside The Wedding Present, and British indie guitar bands from Red Guitars to James began experimenting with African guitar patterns. The latter are much beloved of the Courteeners and it is their songs — rather than African originals — that have influenced the band. Similarly, Suburban Kids’s Johan Hedberg, who owns several hi-life compilations, points out the African influence in his indie favourites Orange Juice — whose drummer, Zeke Manyika, was born in Zimbabwe.
Simon Warner believes that whenever the indie scene becomes constraining, bands will be drawn towards African music in search of more exotic sounds, though ‘what they then do with it might be rather different”.
For Suburban Kids, whose airy music has been dubbed ‘tweepop”, this point is crucial. They’re not seeking to replicate hi-life, just to experiment with elements of it alongside their predominant influences, which are Sixties pop and American indie.
‘We like the idea of African music and the rhythms,” says Hedberg, who is working on an EP, titled #4, for release next year. ‘But we’re not standing around discussing different hi-life bands. The music sounds good because it’s extremely energetic and it’s not rock.
‘I think we make our own version based on the feel more than the sounds, but it’s just one of our influences from all over the world.” And even though their most recent reviews have mentioned African music, he insists they have no plans to go on stage in robes. —