A Tale of Two Angolas: Old and New, Semba and Kuduro, Weird and Weirder

"Angola's a really weird place." That comes not from a tourist, not from a xenophobic businessman, not even in an unguarded moment from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who just visited the southwestern African coastal country. It's from an experienced traveler, someone who's spent much time in a wide range of situations in Africa and elsewhere.

"This was quite different from any trip I'd gone on to Africa," says Benjamin Lebrave, intrepid voyager and proprietor of the adventurous Akwaaba Music label, some of whose previous treks were recounted in an Around the World installment last year. "It's so hard to navigate."

Take his word for it.

But at least on a recent stay in Angola, there was a consistent and fitting soundtrack for the weird navigation pretty much from the moment he landed in the capital city of Luanda.

"There are minivans, those buses all over town, and every other van has a pretty messed-up subwoofer," he says. "So you hear it wherever you are. You don't have a choice. Traffic there is horrible. Imagine being stuck in a crowded bus, hot, smelling like diesel gas, with this enormous bass in your face. You'd think people would get fed up. And they do. But they hum the tunes."

A couple of vans are pictured on the cover of 'Akwaaba Sem Transporte,' a collection of recent recordings by artists Lebrave sought out on that trip. As is clear in 'Sucesso,' a track by the duo Vagabanda (pictured above on a rain-flooded street near their home), it's a stark, even brutal sound reflecting a gritty life:

Vagabanda, 'Sucesso'


But another Akwaaba release that grew out of that trip portrays a very different scene, almost as if it came from an entirely different place. The music on 'Historia de Casa Velha,' by Carlos Lamartine, has a lilt that evokes the lush tropics, with the percolating guitars and swaying horns of such songs as 'Jesus Diala Ya Kidi,' the first track on this Lamartine anthology:

Carlos Lamartine, 'Jesus Diala Ya Kidi'


Well, arguably it is from a different place, or a place hardly recognizable from the current Luanda. Angola, Lebrave notes, gained independence only in 1975 after half a millennium as a Portuguese colony. But most of the post-independence time has been beset by horrible civil wars and deprivations. Real peace came about only in 2002, but the nation is largely unrecognizable from what it once was. And these two albums are clear pictures of now and then.

"After decades of war, so much infrastructure is gone," Lebrave says. "Luanda didn't have much fighting, but there was no maintenance. And the city had 500,000 people before the war and now is 6 million. There's been no real construction for that, just ghettos. It's been peaceful since 2002, and they already had oil, but now in peace. So Americans and French and British are all over trying to pump out as much as they can. In that sense, there's a lot of money coming up. There's a whole part of the city that's like Arizona -- condo complexes. That's where most of the white people life. But it's a pretty dire situation. I saw more poverty than I saw even in Mali.

"A lot of Angolans moved abroad during the war, Portugal or even the U.S. A lot to South Africa or the Congo. Almost all of them came back. Their life is often more difficult now, but they still came back. People who had decent life before now live in the ghetto. But they came back."

So in that context, the Lamartine album contains sounds familiar to all those who remember Angola before and during the war. In the '40s, Lebrave says, Portugal sent many of its citizens to work in Angola, putting many locals out of jobs and creating a lot of tension. A musical sense of that can be found on 'Angola Freedom Songs,' a 1962 Folkways Records collection of Union of Peoples of Angola rebel songs and chants recorded at the outbreak of the Angolan War for Independence in 1961. The song titles tell the story: "Portuguese, Go Away!," "We Are Going to Fight," "The Country Belongs to Us" and so on.

It was in that setting, with the Portuguese influences and cultural struggles both in play, that semba music rose to prominence, with considerable influence from Brazilian rhythms and Caribbean zouk. It remained popular through independence and the war years, though to some extent under the control of the ruling, Marxist-rooted MPLA (in English: The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), though it was a powerful vehicle for social messages from all sides of the conflicts, with the government and opposition forces alike vying to claim the allegiance of semba stars, notably the music's leading voice, the singer known as Bonga.

"Semba still exists today and a lot of people there say it's their national music," Lebrave says. "But today it lacks something. I really fell in love with the old stuff."

This semba by Lamartine, he says, had been only barely available outside of Angola and Portugal. For the singer, who today works for the Angolan embassy in Brazil, this album represents the first time this music has been officially released in the U.S. and most of Europe -- and is also, Lebrave says, the first time a collection devoted to one Angolan semba artist has been available in those regions. (There have been a number of compilations, notably Buda Musique's series from several years ago, though it seems to be out of print now.)

Kuduro, which Lebrave first encountered a few years ago via some YouTube videos, is considered an extension of semba.

"It's a similar idea to semba," he says. "They just re-adapted the rhythms, made them grimy because the studios are crap. But it's really African. Hard to copy. I've tried messing around on my computer, but it doesn't sound the same."

At least on the surface there seems little relationship between the tropical sounds of the older style and the urban mechanics of the newer, though. The name itself, Lebrave explains, sets a very specific tone: It means "hard-ass," or more accurately, something a bit cruder and more anatomically specific -- and a real contrast not just to the classic semba but to the slicker ballads of perhaps the best known Angola-born artist of recent years, Waldemar Bastos.

"Kuduro is the music you hear the most today," Lebrave says. "It's dance music that you hear everywhere, sound systems blasting it. It's interesting -- nothing like it anywhere else in Africa."

The sound emerged first in the mid-'90s, as some Angolans latched on to some electronic dance hits -- the electro-dancehall twitcher 'I Like to Move It,' by Reel 2 Real, now ubiquitous thanks to the 'Madagascar' movies, was a particular favorite.

"The beat is similar to the Angolan beat," he says. "Tony Amado, who is considered the founder of kuduro, tried to copy that, and that's how it started. It spread its wings instantly. Ghetto music. There was still war then, no market. You couldn't hear it on the radio, but little by little it caught on. It's pretty harsh, but the reality was harsh there."

(Watch this video of Amado explaining the origins of Kuduro and the unlikely connection to Jean Claude van Damme!)

Perhaps in part because it is so tied to that local reality, real Angolan Kuduro has not traveled much.

"There are blogs leaking it, but that's it," Lebrave says. "Some of the sound has been picked up in Europe. In France, all the major labels are trying to make it a big summer jam. You go to the beach towns and you'll hear watered-down kuduro that's harmless. This real stuff is pretty harsh."

So on the ground there, he set out to round up a representative slice of the style.

"Some of the artists on the album are pretty established," he says. "A third of it is huge hits from the last three or four years. Another five tracks are by newcomers starting to make a name. And another five are unknowns I just randomly found. I wanted to show a little of all of it. There's little information on some of this. Some names people already know about. But a lot of DJs I talked to who thought they knew all the music were like, 'Who the hell are these people?'

And frankly, that's part of the appeal to Lebrave -- finding music that is undiscovered and culturally distinctive.

"I used to DJ a lot and was interested in electronic music, but as it became more and more complex a lot of artists could do whatever they wanted. If you want to sound like a rock band, you can. If you want to sound like 1978 disco, you can. But a lot of artists lost the essence. Kuduro artists don't care about that. They want to say what they want and the beat is their place."

A place that's hard to navigate but musically rewarding.