M'dou Moctar
Wrapped in a litham and wielding a leftie Stratocaster (like Hendrix) in their hands: they are M'dou Moctar and his band. The band, in fact, takes its name from the stage name of Mahamadou Souleyman, the founder, frontman, and lead guitarist of the Nigerien group. Currently, the band is touring America and Europe—with a show scheduled even in Milan on August 22nd at Circolo Magnolia—to promote their latest EP, "Funeral of Justice," released last May 3rd. However, the beginnings for Moctar and his bandmates were certainly not easy.
In today's talent-show-driven music industry, the story of Souleyman's early days seems almost unreal. The 40-year-old Nigerien, in fact, narrates how he plucked his first notes on a self-built guitar using a bicycle’s brake cables as strings, and how his music began to circulate among people thanks to a network of trading cell phones and memory cards in West Africa. The band would later form, with their first stages being traditional weddings, where with broken amplifiers turned up to the maximum, somehow the party involved the entire city. Europe and the world, then, almost happened by accident, with a phone call from the other side of the globe.
What is most striking about this group is their ability to establish themselves in the global scene by refusing any possible compromise. Their music tells a story of a long series of choices as strong as they are unpopular: they don't even sing in Arabic, but mostly in Tamasheq—a Berber language mainly spoken by Tuaregs—and sporadically in French; they still adopt a fluid compositional approach, minimally structured and loosely tied to rigid timings or arrangements, typical of great improvisation masters like Hendrix or Reinhardt. Every performance is a unique piece in some kind of way, where instrumental elements and Takamba guitar virtuosity take a leading role in a project that brings the good old Rock back to life, cradling it among the desert dunes; finally, they have chosen discomfort.
Their relationship with the old Western colonizer, their target audience, is one of ruthless criticism. Their language is sharp and unyielding, reminding old France of its guilt, "France's actions are frequently veiled in cruelty / We are better off without its turbulent relation / It’s high time we grasp the endless lethal games it plays," they sing in "Oh France."
Their anti-colonial political commitment is more than a choice; it's a condition of existence. Identity is not a tradable commodity, with simpler fame and its assertion being a mission. "They're starting to forget their own language. We feel like in a hundred years no one will speak good Tamasheq, and that's so scary for us," they declared.
"Funeral of Justice" tells, in an aggressively political work, the socio-economic decline of Niger, following the coup d'état of 2023 and the glaring contradictions of a country that, despite its vast natural resources, suffers from the spread of terrorism and poverty, also due, once again, to the role of a French colonizer who never really left but effectively abandoned the territory he relentlessly plundered. The group unequivocally denounces the great internal inequalities and the subservient conditions of Nigerian rural workers, dedicating in particular “Modern Slaves”—the concluding single of the EP—to them. The latter being a masterpiece of musical syncretism which manages to sew up Folk blues nuances with the Nigerian tradition, gathering sweet and rapid acoustic lines with a redundant and choral singing that returns to American black music its ancestral origins, framing them with the typical percussion of the Sahel.
Courtesy of Dustin Aksland via Esquire
The strong bond with their own origins of the group is neither a return to roots nor an attempt to escape from a painful and an ungrateful homeland obtained by becoming a merchant of exotic goods—after all, despite tours in the U.S. and Europe, they always return to the red walls of Agadez—but an indispensable tool to fulfill the primary task of every artist: to tell the zeitgeist of their own world, inwardly and without getting lost, maybe seduced by easy commercial strategies. Perhaps, not everything is lost yet.
