The Music in My Head
(Stern’s Africa)
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So I had an Afropop-inspired dream–big deal, right? Well, when’s the last time you had one? Most of this music, if it comes to us at all, comes with a minimum of context, rarely sung in English, so that only the tune makes it through intact. It has a hard enough time insinuating itself into our CD changers, much less our subconscious; most of us who listen do so as contented outsiders, dutiful NPR subscribers, worldly cocktail-party hosts. But the adventures of Litch, who’s itching to get inside the music, provide a way in for the reader as well–a way to make those foreign sounds stick.
The book begins in the present, with Litch losing his cool at the airport in N’Galam (the capital of Tekrur) when he thinks no one is coming to meet him. Even though he’s been there dozens of times over the years, he anticipates “that something’s about to happen…to remind you that you’re white, that you don’t belong here.”
Once you’ve got the information, of course, the question is where to start listening. Conveniently Hudson has compiled a sound track to The Music in My Head, subtitled Indispensable Classics and Unknown Gems From the Golden Age of African Pop, which contains many of the tracks Litch specifically references. If you read Hudson’s liner notes closely, you’ll notice that half of The Music in My Head’s dozen tracks are pre-1981 and half are post-1993. It’s not about one “golden age,” then, but rather about ignoring an age that was not so golden in Hudson’s eyes: the world-music boom of the late 80s and early 90s. On the front end the comp focuses on the late-70s progeny of the Star Band de Dakar, including N’Dour’s Etoile de Dakar, then moves right on to the mid-90s, when King Sunny Ade and Keita got dropped from Mango and N’Dour from Columbia, Virgin divested itself of its interest in Earthworks, and, as Hudson writes, “African music was once more the province of the diehards and the nutters.” Like Litch.
