Back in the 60s, the template for a protest singer was set as an earnest fingerstyle folkie, regaling a cross-legged audience in a Greenwich Village coffee house. 5,000 miles away, and a half-century later, Mdou Moctar didn’t get the memo (in fact, as the African guitarist tells us today, almost no Western media whatsoever made it to his childhood city of Arlit, Niger). As such, seventh album, Funeral For Justice, finds him chronicling the travails of his devastated nation with a fiery, feedback-soaked Stratocaster, revving up the musical traditions of his Tuareg ancestry and, critically, making audiences dance like there’s no tomorrow…
Told through a French translator, his backstory takes some beating. Having built his first guitar from stray wood, bicycle brake-cables and tuners fashioned from the keys for opening sardine tins, Moctar shrugged off the disapproval of his Muslim parents (“They thought I would drink alcohol or take drugs”) to perform at local weddings. But it was 2008’s debut album, Anar, that changed his trajectory, its songs proliferated via Africa’s cellphone music-trading networks, and later included on an influential compilation by Oregon-based record label Sahel Sounds.
Moctar has travelled far since then, commanding audiences across the world and feted in the pages of the transatlantic music press. But on , it
