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;

He Is: Fela Ransome Kuti and the Highlife Rakers with "Fela's Special"

Today's random song is an early tune by an African and music legend, Fela Ransom Kuti, accompanied by The Highlife Rakers. A Nigerian musician and composer who played many instruments, Fela Kuti was a pioneer of Afrobeat. In 1958, Kuti was sent to London to study medicine, but decided to study music instead and formed his first band, the Koola Lobitos, who fused jazz and highlife music. After five years in London, he moved back to Nigera and reformed the Koola Lobitos but after a while, he decided to move to Ghana to try a different direction. It was in Ghana that he first started playing what would be called Afrobeat, a unique fusion of jazz, funk, highlife, psychedelia and traditional chants and rhythms of West Africa. In 1969, he spent 10 months in Los Angeles where he became acquainted with the Black Power movement, and this experience would influence his future music, as well as drive his human rights and political activities. He became not only a revered musician, but a political figure as well. He frequently decried Nigerian political corruption and mistreatment of Nigerian citizens and consequently was arrested over 200 times. Personally, he also believed in polygamy as part of a greater African culture, and participation in this practice may have led to his contraction of HIV/AIDS which was his official cause of death in 1997, although his exact cause of death remains controversial. His funeral featured a five-sided glass coffin for full public viewing. His music has since undergone a revival, helped by the Broadway musical Fela! which was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, and an annual Felabration festival in Lagos. You can find this song, Fela's Special, on the 2015 various artists retrospective Highlife on the Move: Selected Nigerian & Ghanaian Recordings from London & Lagos 1954-66, issued by Soundway Records.

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.