Self-Reflection: Ana Tijoux and "1977"

In today's random song, French-Chilean musician Ana Tijoux takes a reminiscent look back at her life and what influenced her in her life's path. We often have to look at those events and occurrences in our lives that may have had a big effect on what we have become to understand why we are the people we are. I have done a lot of this type of reflection out of necessity. I came from a dysfunctional family, and without self-reflection and examination, I would still be flailing about in the shadows of uncertainty and doubt. Luckily, while I sometimes still find myself struggling in the deep end of the pool of life, weighed down by guilt and at times a poor self image, my examination of my life through counseling and therapy, through creative outlets such as writing and music, and through the loving attentions of my wife, close family and friends, I am a better and more self-aware person today than I have ever been in my life. I am also more at peace with myself.

That's the place that I perceive Ana Tijoux is coming from in 1977. The lyrics tell her story in the first person, starting in 1977 in the Year of the Snake. She remarks that she is like an open book to others, but also that there is small text in the margins, that she learns that some people want damage (to self, to others?), and that she learns by watching her father and others and learns both her own competence and impotence. She then tells about her adolescence, framed by her awareness of the military domination of her home country of Chile (her parents were Chilean exiles in France) and how she learned to channel her adolescent anger ("a girl who only sizes swords" and who is "looking pissed") until she found her "first rhyme that sounded and wrapped me up." At least that is what I pick out of the words - there is more that I am still trying to understand in her song but I can hear the self-reflection and, as a critic argued, the maturity in a person who is looking backwards to understand and interpret what is now.

Ana Tijoux is a French-Chilean musician who was indeed born in 1977 in France, just as she raps. She first traveled to Chile in 1983 and moved there for good in 1993. She then became involved in the country's nascent rap and hip hop scene. In the late 1990s she became famous across Latin America as the female MC of the rap group Makiza. After a successful eight years, the group broke up in 2006 over creative differences. Tijoux went solo and began to move away from rap and hip hop and more toward the Chilean pop scene, and did some work in that genre that was well received. In 2009, she returned to her rap roots with her album 1977. Thom Yorke of Radiohead urged his listeners to listen to the title song 1977 and listed Tijoux and the song on a list of artists and songs that were his favorites. 1977 was also featured on the award winnning TV series Breaking Bad in its fourth season.

Cosmopolitan and Sophisticated: Italy's Mau Mau and Venus Nabalera

When I first heard Venus Nabalera, by the Italian group Mau Mau, I wasn't really very versed in world music. I believe that I started listening to what is commonly labeled as world music or global music as the result of a happy accident. I was living in New Orleans in the early 2000s, and my journalist wife was tasked to write some entries on a series exploring the places where New Orleans musicians had lived. I forget which musician, a trumpeter who lived in the early 1900s, she was writing about when we headed to the Bywater neighborhood to look at an address, but we made the acquaintance of the woman who lived in the house that he had lived in for a little while. The woman turned out to be the wife of Dan Storper, the man who founded Putumayo World Music. They had bought the house and were in the process of restoring it. She gave us three or four Putumayo CDs, and I believe one of them had Venus Nabalero on it.

I remember being surprised that 1) this was an Italian band and 2) that I liked it, along with the rest of the music she had given us. I shouldn't have been surprised. In the 1990s I had become turned on to Celtic music at Milwaukee's Irish Fest when I sat in the audience as a new group named Capercaille played and blew me away with their modern take on traditional Scottish/Celtic music. My naive idea of Italian music involved accordions and violins and probably some mixture of Dean Martin and Louis Prima ("When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie..." or "Buona Sera Senorita Buona Sera...") song by a guy in a checkered apron. So hearing a group like Mau Mau do a song that was vaguely reminiscent of Brazilian music I had heard by chance, but sounding so modern, made me rethink my stereotypes and preconceptions. I listened to that Putumayo album, and the others, over and over. For the first time in my life, I felt sophisticated - like I shouldn't be privy to this type of music but I was. I also felt cosmopolitan, and vaguely like I had discovered a secret nobody else knew about.  I still feel that way sometimes.

In the years since, whenever I hear a new group that really captures my fancy, I have that same feeling that Venus Nabalera and other new world songs give me for a fleeting moment.  There is nothing more satisfying when you feel  like you've discovered something.  And there is nothing more wonderful, after you've savored it, to share it with others in the hopes that they will find it just as amazing as you have.

So, here is Venus Nabalera by Mau Mau, one of the songs that started me on this world music adventure so many years ago.  Just a few words about Mau Mau.  They are a group that formed in Turin in 1991, and they have released six albums to date.  Their name, in the Piedmont region dialect, can mean "one who comes from afar."   The name also references the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya that challenged the British colonial rule.  Venus Nabalera is from their 2000 release Safari Beach.

The Touré Raichel Collective - Hawa - The Tel Aviv Session

Sunday is, for a great many people around the world, a day of rest and worship, and often that rest and worship is accompanied by music.  For me, when Sunday rolls around and it happens to coincide with music that appears from nowhere and puts me in a reflective mood, it is as if Sunday came into its own and rose into its own and into what it is supposed to be.

Today's musical highlight does just that.  Hawa is a song from the Touré Raichel Collective.  Beginning with the vaguely reminiscent blues style of Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré, it eases into a lazy beat and rhythmic rise and fall that all but forces your mind into reflective submission.  While that description may seem discordant, you don't really feel the pull.  All of a sudden, you realize that you are in reflection when ethereal voices begin to chant to the newly introduced piano of Idan Raichel and you briefly come back to reality before the guitar sends you falling back into an almost spiritual reflection again.

What luck that the great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré didn't manage to discourage his son Vieux Farka Touré from taking up music, and that Vieux Farka Touré enrolled himself in music school in Bamako! What luck that When Vieux Farka Touré wanted to release his own solo album, and his producer had to get permission from the village elders including Ali Farka Touré and the great Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté, that they allowed the album to move forward! What luck that Idan Raichel, a highly successful backup musician in Israel, decided to pursue his own solo projects!  What an amazing coincidence that these two highly talented men met each other by chance in an airport in Germany, became deep and lasting friends, and after a session of music together decided to form the Touré Raichel Collective!

One could say that it might seem like the hand of a higher power was involved.  And on this Sunday, where many people will take a day to reflect and tend to spiritual matters, music like Hawa can only aid us in those endeavors.

Hawa is from the Touré Raichel Collective's album The Tel Aviv Session (Amazon, iTunes), released by the Cumbancha label in 2012. Here is an excerpt of the song performed live.