Afropop's Sean Barlow recently traveled to Luanda, Angola for the program's first research trip.  He chose to go in early November at the time of celebrations for the 30th anniversary of independence from Portugal. 

Report and photos by Sean Barlow

Welcome to Angola!

Most world music fans hear the soulful, raspy voice of Bonga when they think of Angola.  A few other Angolan artists with international careers come to mind such as Carlos Burity , Paulo Flores, and Waldemar Bastos. But for the most part, Angola  is absent from the North American stage. The only artist who has toured here recently is Waldemar Bastos. So finding out more about what’s happening in Angolall was our mission for Afropop’s first visit in November, 2005.  This was the month Angola celebrated the 30^th anniversary of its independence from Portugal .

Luanda, the capital on the Atlantic coast, feels like a boom town. Offices and houses are going up all over the place.  Logos of multi-national corporations decorate glass skyscrapers downtown. City streets are clogged with blue mini-van group taxis and lots of late model SUVs, Land Rovers, and Jeeps.  The traffic here rivals the legendary “go slows” of Lagos, Nigeria, another African commercial capital where the old colonial infrastructure is being strained by the demands of an oil rich, independence economy--too many cars, not enough roads!

Ringing the city are the museques, comparable to the favelas, or slums, in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.  The museques have spawned a music genre called kuduru, high energy dance music built around programmed beats. Kuduru dance inventions disseminate rapidly through the museques, with new ones appearing constantly.  One of the top kuduru stars is Dogg Murras who looks like a hefty football player with a tattoo of Che Guevara on his arm.

The most recorded roots pop music of Angola is semba.  It’s an up-tempo dance music, not unlike coladeira from Cape Verde.  Many claim that semba is the mother of Brazilian samba (Angola was a major source of slaves that went to Brazil).  Angolans like to dance very close.  At nightclubs and parties, you hear a mix of semba, kuduru, Cape Verdean, Brazilian, American and other music. Couples glide around the floor in tricky patterns. (Not so easy for a visiting journalist to pick up!).  

I caught up with Banda Maravilha, the number-one semba band, rehearsing at Radio Vial which also houses Vial’s recording studio, where Banda Maravilha’s tasty new album Xungeira was produced.  Banda Maravilha was heading out to Houston the next day to entertain a substantial Angolan community in Texas on the occasion of the 30^th anniversary celebration.  I met Carlos Burity too.  He was heading to Bulgaria for celebrations there.  Quite a large diaspora for a big country of only 15 million people, but such is the legacy of protracted civil war.

Banda Maravilha’s drummer Mario Futado told me their story:  “In 1975 we got our independence (after 500 years of Portuguese colonial rule) but the Civil War started then.  The music industry just stopped.  No one had cash.  No one had time.  No studios.  No producers.  Musicians emigrated to other countries.  The music did not stop but there was very little recording.  When we formed Banda Maravilha in the early 1990s (during the civil war), the Angolan music market was being invaded by Cape Verdean, Brazilian, American and other foreign music.  It was a big fight to take back the home market for Angolan music.  The musical mix in is much more balanced now.”

It is mind-boggling to think that the Angolan Civil War lasted 27 years and only ended three years ago.  Think of the traumatic impact of the American Civil War, which lasted just five years.  Talking with Angolans, it soon became clear that their Civil War was the central life-shaping event of their lives.

Take the singer-songwriter Mig, for example. When the war started, he told us that he had to leave Luanda and go to the provinces with his parents.  He joined the military and lost his leg in an accident during battle (Angola still has millions of mines to be cleared.)  During his recuperation, he started to get serious about his singing.

When we arrived in Angola, Mig had just released his first CD, Xemuzenze (He has a number of cassettes on the market as well).  It’s a strong collection of songs—some up-tempo sembas and other songs with a slower, more reflective feel.  In “Aweyi m’vanga—que e que eu faco,” Mig talks about the misery of being in a hospital.  He says, “When someone is in good health, good spirits, good money, everyone comes to see you.  When you don’t have these things, people abandon you.  When I had this sad incident—loosing my leg—my family abandoned me.  My friends abandoned me.”

Mig’s album benefits from a tasteful production, recorded and mixed in Luanda and drawing on musicians handpicked from several ensembles.  Unfortunately, I often found the aesthetics of the production of Angolan CDs disappointing.  For the potential world music audience in North America and Europe, this is definitely an obstacle.  There is too much reliance on keyboards and programmed sounds.  Of course, you have to start by pleasing the home market, but I think there is a lot of learning and horizon-expanding for Angolan producers to do.  The singers are there, the compositions are good.  But when it comes to export, a cheesy sound can kill a good song.

One example of a beautiful production is Paulo Flores’s Xe Povo.  (You can find it as a pricey import at amazon.com, but if you love Central African music, it’s worth it!)  Paulo is a sophisticated, soulful singer and the arrangements and sound of this acoustic album are superb. During the Civil War in the 1990s, I’m told he spent a lot of time in Lisbon and he made zouk-inspired pop hits.  But since he’s returned to Luanda, he’s embraced semba.

I saw Paulo Flores perform for Angola’s President, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, at the National Arts Awards where an upscale audience absolutely swooned.  Paulo is the favorite of many music cognoscenti I spoke with in Luanda, and he is sure to receive wider recognition in the future.

Representing for the active hip hop scene in Luanda was the very popular group, Kalibradas—three, twenty-something rappers and a DJ.  When I met them at my hotel, they were mightily disgruntled because the American rapper Busta Rhymes, who was performing for the 30^th anniversary independence celebration for a reported $300,000.00 fee, while Kalibradas received $5,000.  A familiar story: the visiting American star sucks up all the resources and attention and the local artists are left to pick up the crumbs.

Kalibradas wanted to talk about the song “ Luanda ” from their most recent album.  Like African hip hop acts throughout the continent, they earn street credibility with their hometown youth audience by telling it like they see it. “ Luanda ” paints a gritty portrait of the capital where poor people in the slums suffers from lack of infrastructure, dependable electricity, water, and roads.  It talks about the problems of society—the street kids, the robbers, and said one rapper, “Everyone now has a satellite dish.  And everyone is living in other people’s cultures.  And they are forgetting our culture.  They’re just watching Brazilian soap operas, MTV, American movies, news from everywhere.”

This is somewhat ironic when you see the way Kalibradas present themselves.  Their album cover has a picture of the guys smoking cigars and counting money out of a suitcase.  Their current video has them arriving in a yellow Hummer at a party where they stroke the ladies.  Despite these predictable borrowings, Kalibradas’s critique of globalization in “ Luanda ” rings true for many listeners, and of course, plenty of other African societies that are dealing with the same issues.

The guys from Kalibradas were on the same flight with me from Luanda to Lisbon where they were going to open for—guess who?—Busta Rhymes.  I hope they got paid decently when they were the visiting team.  Though big stars in their own right, the artists were not pretentious at all.  In fact, I found people in Angolal generally friendly and curious about the world.  They even tolerated my pidgin Portuguese.  If you speak some Kikongo, you’re golden.

If you go to Luanda, check out the upscale Miami Beach club (owned by the daughter of the President), especially on Sunday nights when several bands play.  Kilamba is your destination for Monday night when Banda Maravilha plays semba for a more working class crowd and other musicians drop in to jam.

I left Angola thinking that it has a lot of potential musically, impressive for a country with such a difficult recent history.  There are several artists that deserve broader international attention.  The music industry is maturing—there are at least two major recording studios and several smaller ones.  The radio stations by law must play over 50% Angolan music content, which promotes local artists.  New producers are testing their wings.  The music community is still finding itself.  One must always remember that only three years ago, Angola ended a brutal 27 year civil war, so to find all this activity shows that the music community has come a long way in three years. Afropop Worldwide will keep you tuned in to Angola’s progress.

 Afropop Worldwide would like to thank Chevron for their support of our research in Angola. Thanks to Fernando Paiva, Zelia Gomes, Joe Lorenz and Luddy Hayden. Thanks to Mauro Almeida, our translator/driver/production assistant in Angola. And thanks to Claudio Girardi for his assistance.

Learn about Angola's rich musical culture.

For more information on the artists mentioned above, google them!

All the best from Angola!