Culture Club Clash

The infectious Bambara périphique of Amadou & Mariam

This week came news of the passing of Amadou Bagayoko, in his native Mali, at age 70. As a duo with his wife Mariam Doumbia, Amadou & Mariam toured the world for decades. In 2005, when they were promoting their first international hit, I met them in the afternoon at their hotel in New York City before a performance, and spoke to them in my broken French. They were gracious, charming, and very patient. That evening, they rocked the joint. Explore their discography if you don’t already know it - in addition to well-known collaborations with French, British and American artists, I recommend their earlier, more spare recordings produced for a domestic market.

Originally published by the Boston Phoenix (September 9, 2005)

Amadou & Mariam in Bamako, 2012

On stage, at a packed media showcase at Joe’s Pub in New York City, the Malian duo Amadou & Mariam stand largely still, and unusually close. Which seems natural: they are married, after all, and they’re both blind. At times Mariam, who sings without an instrument, rests a hand gently on Amadou’s shoulder. Or Amadou, who has his hands full with an electric guitar, leans even closer toward Mariam, brushing against her.

Around this still and tender tableau, the world is swirling; in fact, much of it is dancing. Amadou & Mariam’s new Dimanche à Bamako has gone gold in France on the back of the hit track "La réalité." At the beginning of August, the album was released in the US by Nonesuch. "La réalité" is the type of song that might be greeted by shrieks at high-school parties, or perhaps Riviera discothèques. It’s like a disco-era standard: a simple but propulsive intro beat is kicked into higher orbit with the unexpected entrance of a police siren, and by the time you hear the sweetly gentle voices of Amadou and Mariam, people are already making silly dancing faces and spilling their drinks. The lyrics bewail the sadness of life while urging us to dance: "While some are being born others are dying/And while some are laughing others are crying/Ups and downs/It is life in this world… It is the sad reality/But… let us dance together." What more could you ask for from a hit?

That melancholic sentiment, and the bluesy electric-guitar riff that animates it, are pure Amadou & Mariam. But the siren, the tempo somewhere between punk rock and disco, and the je ne sais quoi fairy dust that turned this West African song into French gold come courtesy of Manu Chao, the skinny, frenetic French/Spanish musician who produced the album, and who wrote or co-wrote a few of its tracks.

Chao says he first heard Amadou & Mariam on the radio while driving the périphique, a ring road around Paris that divides the city from its suburbs. (The périphique is Paris’s Route 128 — maybe ring roads just make for good radio listening, as Jonathan Richman taught us all in "Roadrunner.") The symbolism of the anecdote is clear: the périphique cuts through many of the poorer, immigrant, and African neighborhoods of Greater Paris; and Chao — the French child of Spanish artists — has himself always stood on liminal ground. His first band, Mano Negra, blended punk rock, Gypsy music, French chanson, and a half-dozen other influences into an idiosyncratic mix that defines "worldbeat." Despite the success of that band (and his subsequent solo career) in his native France, Chao has chosen to live in Basque country.

For all his outsider status and persona (or because of them), Chao knows how to quicken a French pulse, and thanks to his input, Dimanche à Bamako is in Europe a crossover hit that has drawn comparisons to Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club. Like Cooder, he makes artists sound both more and less exotic than they are. More, in the way he anchors every song on Dimanche à Bamako to Amadou’s snaky West African guitar lines. Less, in the clever, computer-driven mix that demands your constant attention through a very First World phenomenon: overstimulation.

At Joe’s Pub last month, I heard a few indie grumbles about the authenticity of Dimanche à Bamako vis-à-vis Amadou & Mariam’s previous albums — which weren’t produced by Chao. The backing band didn’t help, an unfortunately dressed and grimacing collection of French musicians who threatened to drain Amadou & Mariam’s considerable charisma and charm. Not so with the album: it’s as infectious as advertised. As for its authenticity, there’s more to this duo’s musical background than the traditional sounds of Mali. When I ask Amadou about that, he lists what he and Mariam heard growing up in Bamako, on Radio Mali: "Cuban dance music, French songs, James Brown…"

"Pink Floyd," interjects Mariam. "Led Zeppelin. Deep Purple. Bad Company."

"Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton…," continues Amadou.

"Beatles," says Mariam.

Here Amadou starts singing, "Don’t Let Me Down."

Yet when asked to name the type of music they play, they both answer without hesitation: Bambara. "After our own fashion," adds Amadou, not without pride. Call it Bambara périphique.

Compilation of Amadou & Mariam’s early recordings, portrait by Malick Sidibé