The Hollywood Highlife
When Vampire Weekend arrived in a bluster of blog-hype and near-instantaneous backlash, piles of self-important pundits took it upon themselves to take a stand against these privileged Ivy League kids robbing the world's poorest continent, Africa, of its hooks.
Aside from being embarrassingly reminiscent of those noxious virtuous-white-man-helps-the-hopeless-blacks movies like Blood Diamond —and forgetting the subtext that suggests cultural exportation must always be from the first-world down to the third, never the other way around— these self-important screeds missed the obvious point: music is a dialogue, an ongoing exchange of ideas. There is no acme model to stay true to; no style forever frozen; no fixed form for personal expression.
As the digital revolution makes the ideal of the 'global village' the music realm's compressed-audio reality, the idea of fidelity is starting to feel like stone cold conservatism. Punk and hip-hop are still stuck with their stick-in-the-mud style police who dogmatically decree what’s “real,” but, thankfully, generation broadband thinks little of devouring sound from across the world's musical smorgasbord.
Which leads us to Fool’s Gold, a crew of LA hipsters who began life as a communal jam-band, where players —from members of Foreign Born to Brazilian visual artists and Argentinean pop-stars— could drop in on sessions steeped in the sounds of West African guitar-pop. They soon evolved way beyond genre homage, and started sprinkling in countless other styles; stirring up a polyglot stew in the cross-cultural melting pot.
The Hebrew Jammer
Fool’s Gold’s self-titled debut is a dizzying, dazzling blast of pan-cultural big-band jams. Featuring a core crew of ten members, the ever-changing ensemble build big, busy, brassy shrines to polyrhythm; huge arrangements in which cascading parts almost seem to topple over each other as the songs march forward.
Lead-off track/lead single “Surprise Hotel” is the most African of the bunch; with highlife-styled guitars spangled over Ghanaian percussion colliding with Eritrean meters. What’s curious, though, is that vocalist Luke Top isn’t singing in English —a language that, on the continent, can be tied to both conquering colonialists and battles for independence— but his own historical mother-tongue, Hebrew.
For many, listening to foreign-sounding music sung in a foreign tongue won’t seem strange, but Top’s singing forges connections across continents; from the Middle East to the Horn to Cape Vert. And, as Fool’s Gold bash out their Afro-Islamic-Hebrew hybrid, they don’t sound like just some world-music revue. The LP's giddy grooves evoke, at varying times, New York acts ranging from Talking Heads to James White and the Blacks to Antibalas. Hell, “Yam Lo Moshech” sounds something like Tel Aviv’s answer to the Style Council.
Which leads to the invariable bottom line: when music hits a groove this good, worrying about cultural plurality —or, even, this recent tidal wave of African-influence indie acts— seems like unnecessary woe. Let the defenders of ethnomusical purity stomp their feet in protest; everyone else can just put on their dancing shoes.
Record Label: Iamsound
Release Date: September 29, 2009
