Buy Local: Baloji and L'Orchestre de la Katuba with Kuku and "Buy Africa"

Baloji, along with L'Orchestre de la Katuba and Kuku, brings us the random tune for today called Buy Africa off of the Red Hot + Fela album from 2013. Born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Baloji is a Belgian rapper, MC and hip hop artist who got his start as a founder of the hip hop band Starflam in the early 1990s where he was known as MC Balo. The band's second album went platinum, but differences with the other members led Baloji to leave the group and quit music in 2004. However, after discovering a letter from his estranged Congolese mother, and after winning a poetry contest in Paris, he took up music again in 2006 and released an autobiographical solo debut album which included a response to his mother - the album went gold and won numerous awards. L'Orchestre de la Katuba appears to be an orchestra that he put together, and features Congolese guitarist Dizzy Mandkeku. Kuku is a Nigerian-American singer-songwriter living in Paris. Buy Africa was originally released by Fela Ransome Kuti and his Africa 70 in 1971, and is an exhortation to Africans to buy African-made goods rather than foreign goods. The album Red Hot + Fela is a tribute to Fela Kuti's musical work, the second such tribute by the Red Hot organization in a series of albums meant to raise money and awareness of global HIV/AIDS (Fela Kuti died of AIDS related complications in 1997).

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baloji_(rapper); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fela_Kuti;