Mdou Moctar’s Guitar-Bending Cry for Justice

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In early August of last year, the Tuareg band Mdou Moctar was in the midst of a North American tour, the group’s biggest to date. Its punk-driven energy and transformative, sprawling displays of guitar showmanship had gained it a cult following in the U.S. The band was still touring on the back of its acclaimed 2021 album, “Afrique Victime,” its first on the powerhouse indie label Matador Records. Then, in the middle of the group’s U.S. tour, Niger, the native country of three of the four band members, experienced a right-wing military coup, leading to a stretch of violent unrest. The band—the guitarist, singer, and leader Mdou Moctar; the rhythm guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane; the drummer Souleymane Ibrahim; and the bassist and producer Mikey Coltun—had been scheduled to return to Niger. Now its members were stranded in the States and forced to raise money via GoFundMe in order to finance an unexpected stay. The group had already written and recorded its latest album, “Funeral for Justice,” before the coup took place, but it expressed a political anguish that felt all the more relevant in light of recent events. On the song “Modern Slaves,” Mdou sings in the Tuareg language Tamasheq, “Oh, world, why be so selective about human beings?” and then, after a half beat, “My people are crying while you laugh.”

Mdou Moctar has always had clear sights—on politicians, on corrupt governments, on all manner of devils and even on the devil himself. (“I’ll hunt down Satan, that vile coward,” Mdou sings on the new song “Takoba.”) The band’s music first travelled internationally more than a decade ago, through the Portland-based label Sahel Sounds. The label’s founder, Christopher Kirkley, had gone to Mali in 2008, looking to connect with the guitarist Afel Bocoum, a protégé of the legendary singer and multi-instrumentalist Ali Farka Touré. Kirkley ended up travelling in Africa for two years, spending his time in Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. When he returned, he started Sahel Sounds to release the songs he’d recorded or collected from the cell phones of musicians. The label’s compilation, released in 2011, featured a Mdou Moctar song called “Tahoultine,” with a sparse electronic drum track and distorted, electric vocals. The band was, at that point, entirely unknown in the States. Mdou has said that, when Kirkley called him to say that he had been looking for him, he thought it was a relative pranking him.

Mdou was raised in a Muslim family that disapproved of electric music. They wouldn’t get him a guitar, so he built one using bicycle cables as strings (a story that he is a bit weary of telling). He had no one to show him how to play, and no recordings to study, so he taught himself by watching local performers and then running home to practice. This freewheeling background is built into Mdou’s stylings as a musician. Mdou is often called the Hendrix of the Sahara, which is both high praise and a bit reductive. There is something of Jimi Hendrix’s style in the way Mdou’s notes can alternate between slow, tender bends and frantic but tightly woven bursts, the way the music can fall into chaos but still fall into place. He is drawing, though, from a legacy of Tuareg guitar, which is a fusion of heavy rock and the Saharan tradition of desert blues. Tuareg guitar can rely heavily on distortion, or layered, hyper-driven sounds. (If you need a Western analogue here, you can imagine Jimmy Page’s guitar trick in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” chorus.) It’s a sound that begins in the blues and then spreads outward to find accompanying elements. Mdou’s interpretation of this tradition is simply noisier than most, more adventurous than most, more in tune than most with the way the instrument can be versatile in its delivery of sound—delicate around the edges of a love song, ferocious around the edges of a protest hymn.

The specific ache at the heart of “Funeral for Justice” is the political relationship between Niger and France. Niger obtained independence from French rule in 1960, after sixty years of colonization, but France still exploits Niger, relying on the country to develop large uranium mines. As Mdou sees it, the scars of colonialism have hindered Niger’s ability to form a fruitful political and cultural identity of its own. The Tuareg people, a Berber ethnic group, are marginalized within Niger, and the band’s songs reflect not only the broader political frustrations of colonialism but also the internal frustrations of being a people at the margins of the margins. The new album teems with the band’s signature brilliant noise, with the ferocity of Mdou’s guitar playing as its backbone. But it also overflows with a sort of rageful questioning, with a series of direct addresses that make the listening experience feel like a form of bearing witness.

For Mdou Moctar, the band’s leader and namesake, the music sometimes seems like a mission unto itself.

In the winter, before the release of “Funeral,” I met Mdou and Coltun, the bassist and producer, at Haandi, a Pakistani restaurant on Lexington Avenue, in New York City. They were in town to do press leading up to the album’s release before the beginning of Ramadan, when Mdou Moctar goes on break for the month. The restaurant was awash in bright neon, which spilled out of pulsing lights and across the tabletops, creating the kind of ambiance that makes it seem like the hour is late no matter what time you’re actually there. The restaurant is of special significance to the band. “Afrique Victime” features a photo in the gatefold of the vinyl showing the four members of the group sharing a meal there, with the word “HALAL” flashing on a sign above their heads. This day, Mdou, tall and lanky, was wearing a long, flowing blue robe, brown jacket, loose pants of a similar color, and black sandals. He settled his large frame into a modest wooden chair.

“Funeral for Justice” vibrates with a kind of frantic energy, but in person both Mdou and Coltun seemed calm and immensely at ease. About a year and a half prior, I’d asked the band to play in a series I curated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Their performance was intimate and transcendent. During an electric set, it was hard to tell where one song ended and the other began. Mdou remained largely still onstage except for the frantic movement of his arms and fingers along the guitar. It was, to me, almost hypnotizing, to lock in on the intentional small motions that were producing so much sound. For an acoustic set, the band members sat down in chairs, huddling closer together. Afterward, Mdou stood at the edge of the stage, looking out at the audience, which by that point was standing and applauding; he kept repeating, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” both overjoyed and bewildered as he drowned in the noise of gratitude. Mdou’s demeanor at Haandi was similar. He was joyful, patient, and thoughtful when he was speaking, and he often bookended his sentences with smiles. Mdou speaks English, but in conversation he tends to drift back into his native French. (To facilitate our conversation, we had a translator on speakerphone.) “I knew you were Muslim,” Mdou told me in English, placing a hand gently on my shoulder. “You have a Muslim name.”

Coltun, the only American in the group, and the only white member, came up in the legendary D.C. punk scene, playing in the band Les Rhinocéros. He first heard Mdou Moctar’s music on Sahel Sounds, in 2014. Enthralled, he connected the label with a booking agent, and the agent brought Mdou Moctar to the U.S. for the band’s first tour, during which Coltun and Mdou connected. Now Coltun is sort of a Jack-of-all-trades for the group. In conversation, he and Mdou present a contrast in styles. While Mdou is soft-spoken and prone to ruminative detours, Coltun is direct and analytical, with a brain that seems always to be putting together multiple things at all times. The band recorded “Funeral for Justice” in a largely empty home in upstate New York, during sessions that would begin late at night and run all through the next day. Part of the group members’ goal was to seclude themselves in the name of slowing down. The band was not on a studio’s clock, and so there was freedom to play. “Mdou feels a lot of pressure in the studios of, This is the start time, this is the end time. And, unlike in Niger, there isn’t much of a schedule other than to pray,” Coltun told me.

Coltun has produced all of the band’s past few records, and on “Funeral” he leans into his punk influences. Chunky guitar riffs and rhythms are buoyed by smacks of snare drums and power chords that shout repetitively, creating a sonic structure that doesn’t seem so far from what you might hear at a hardcore show. “When I went over to Niger for the first time, and Mdou and I were playing three weddings a day for almost a month, it was like a punk show,” Coltun told me later, when we spoke again by Zoom. “Then there’s a specific dancing structure to Tuareg weddings that is very controlled—it’s two people across from each other. Then, at the end of the wedding, kids can go crazy, and it turns into a mosh pit.”

“Funeral for Justice” ’s political frustrations are lived frustrations for Mdou, particularly. Leaning forward over his meal, he talked with exhaustion about borders, about power imbalances. “If we want to create justice, the stronger one has to help the weaker one,” he said. “If the strong one hurts the weaker one, and then says, ‘The weak one, he’s the one attacking me,’ then the world is going to accept it.” He differentiated between help and manipulation; on the continent of Africa, including in Niger, outside offers of aid too often come with ulterior motives. (“Someone is going to come to say to you, ‘I come here to help—you have a lot of gold here, I want to help.’ ”) The fact that three of the four members hold passports from an African nation has had a material impact on the band’s ability to navigate the world. Coltun, Mdou said, can get through any border, but when the other bandmates show their I.D.s at the airport they often get detained.“ It makes me feel like I have to stop playing music, like I’m not human,” Mdou said.

“Funeral for Justice” is, in many ways, an album of protest, of resistance, of displeasure, but it is not an album of giving up or giving in. Its thrilling sonic energy, propelled by rage, operates against defeat. Mdou is also a man propelled by faith. He told me, “I’m not just Muslim—I’m very religious. I pray all the time.” At the restaurant, he anxiously checked his watch for the correct prayer time. There was some conflict, he said, between his faith and his art. Among devout Muslims, the kind of music he makes is frowned upon. “But I help a lot, with the music money,” he said. “I don’t drink, I don’t do bad stuff.” Back in Niger, he has bought rice and meat for entire villages, including the one in which he grew up in and still lives. He has built mosque and schools. The music is, in some ways, a vessel through which he can provide for others, to the point where he seems to sometimes view the music itself as a mission.

“What I call famous is very different from what artists around me call famous today,” Mdou told me. “If you look at my own home at the moment, you’ll see twenty people inside, eating as much as they need. And I have a responsibility to a lot of families. So that’s what I call success. Having the capacity to help those who are weak and to bring a smile to those who aren’t happy. That’s how I see success.” I asked him, at one point, whether he felt pressure to follow up one critically acclaimed and commercially groundbreaking album with another one. Mdou, thankfully, read my shallow question as a deeper one. “I make the people happy, but my own community is crying behind me,” he said. “I feel so sad sometimes when I am in the concert. I play, but I’m not here. I feel like they need my support. Then I close my eyes. I understand this is my work.” ♦

Sourse: newyorker.com