This selection was chosen by Gen Z son.

Gen X dad says…

Afrique Victime is the second album by Mdou Moctar (real name: Mahamadou Souleymane) with a full band. It is his sixth album overall and follows 2019’s Ilana (The Creator).

Souleymane is a Tuareg musician and is originally from Tchintabaraden, Niger. He is credited as one of the first musicians to perform modern electronic adaptations of Tuareg guitar music. He got his start through a trading network of cellphones and memory cards across West Africa. Eventually he reached an international audience through the compilation Music from Saharan Cellphones: Volume 1 (Sahel Sounds, 2011).

Tuareg guitar music is often referred to as desert blues. It is a style of music from the Sahara region of northern and west Africa. Also known as Tishoumaren, it is a fusion of blues and rock music with Tuareg, Malian or North African music.

Souleymane has been called the “Hendrix of the Sahara.” Like Hendrix, he is a left-handed guitarist and plays Fender Stratocaster. It is a fair comparison, but somewhat lacking. Souleymane can easily mimic the style and sound of Hendrix and other well known Western guitarists, but his own songwriting and playing is informed by musical styles and traditions far beyond American blues and rock and roll. There’s a powerful and dynamic trancelike quality to many of his tracks with layers of percussion, repetitive vocals/chants, and Souleymane’s alternately fluttering and hammering guitar style all weaving around each other.

The entire album is great, but highlights for me were: Taliat, Tala Tannam, Asdikte Akal,and the epic title track.

Gen Z son says…

I think the first time I heard about Mdou Moctar was in 2019, when Gen X Dad went to see the Nigerien musician at the Revolution Oktoberfest festival in Chicago (Me and Gen X Mom also showed up later to see New York post-punk band Parquet Courts). Despite being aware of the artist for a while, I actually did not listen to him, and had sort of forgotten about the project until now.

Born Mahamadou Souleymane in either 1984 or 1986, Mdou Moctar first gained popularity through a network of West African cell phones. This would later land him a spot on the Music From Saharan Cellphones compilation put out by Portland, Oregon record label Sahel Sounds, which has been heavily sampled by experimental hip hop collective Death Grips. He also appeared in the short film “I Sing The Desert Electric” and wrote the score for “Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai.”

This is a review of his most recent album, Afrique Victime, which was released by Matador records this May. The lyrics, which are sung in Tamasheq, range from Islamic beliefs and traditions and love to African politics. The first side kicks off with Chismiten, a fast-paced, guitar-driven number that, right from the start, shows Souleymane’s ideal skills with the titular instrument.

This formula is repeated throughout most of the album, but he’s also good at writing slower numbers as well. For example, the fourth track, Tala Tannam, is a more intimate love song with mellow acoustics. At the climax of the title track, the instrumental starts to speed up and the guitar parts start to become more rampant and hectic, forming a sort of cacophony that eventually subsides in order to close the song. The album finishes with Bismilahi Atagah, where Souleymane states “I begin in the name of God/at this moment in time/in the hope this invocation can save me”.

In short, Afrique Victime is a well-formed record. It isn’t afraid to be powerful and at times poignant, and that’s a sign of a good album for me. The only downside is that now I regret not checking out his 2019 album Ilana: The Creator, but I probably will soon.