Once student and teacher at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind and now grandparents celebrating 37 years together, Mariam Doumbia and Amadou Bagayoko are the original Awesome Tapes From Africa. The blind Malian couple began releasing cassettes in the late 1980s and have since become iconic international African stars who count Damon Albarn, David Gilmour, and TV on the Radio as fans and collaborators. Despite charges that Western influence has infiltrated and diluted their sound, they have become an African power couple, two of the continent’s most prominent cultural exports.
But just what does Africa mean to the outside world in 2017, five years on from their last album, Folila? The American president praises “Nambia,” a nonexistent country, in a speech at the UN; some DJs pay a small country’s GDP to collect original Nigerian boogie albums; and Drake and Ed Sheeran ride the charts on lightened and brightened African beats. These are minor issues compared to the true crisis facing Amadou & Mariam: Since 2012, northern Mali has been in and out of the hands of Islamic extremists who have imposed Shariah and banished music (and musicians) from parts of their homeland. It’s hard to pick a more apt word to describe the world’s current predicament this year than La Confusion, the title of the duo’s new album, recorded in Paris. “Nothing is what seems, and you have to get a lot of patience to understand what is really going on,” Amadou said in a recent interview. But even capturing such tumult, the couple radiates beauty and confidence on the title track, with producer Adrien Durand buoying the song with a shimmer befitting an early-’80s pop hit.
Their ninth album eschews the guests that swelled the ranks of their recent recordings; this time, their principal collaborators are African musicians like kora player Djeli Moussa Diawara and ngoni player Youssouf Diabaté. Opener “Bofou Safou” boasts a rubbery, buoyant bass sound redolent of early African house, full of clanging cowbells, canned claps, even a snatch of vocoder. If it had come out in the late ’80s or early 1990s, it would doubtless be fetishized by contemporary DJs. When it reaches the chorus, the song bursts into full bloom, making good on the type of dancefloor confection that the couple’s remixes have always hinted at. (As the album’s first single, it’s been reworked by Henrik Schwarz, Africaine 808, and Fatima Yamaha.) But behind the feel-good house beat, Doumbia also sings: “It is necessary to work in life/One must not cross one’s arms in life”—hardly a message of dancefloor escapism. “Fari Mandila” boasts horns reminiscent of Bagayoko’s former employer, the Malian big band Les Ambassadeurs. The lyrics here similarly urge strength instead of hopelessness in trying times. Were it sung in English rather than their native Bambara, it might well serve as a theme song to the #Resistance.
Even with a slick bassline and bit of saxophone and flute to smooth the song out, Bagayoko’s spangled guitar, entwined with the ngoni, gives “Filaou Bessame” a nervy feel; most of the songs’ silky surfaces are belied by worrying concerns. The ambient bird calls and swelling synths of “Femmes du Monde” accompany lyrics about gender inequality, and the percolating polyrhythms of “C’est Chaud” underpin a song about the uncertainties of migrating to another continent. But despite such subject matter, the duo nevertheless remains optimistic. Midway through “Massa Allah,” a gentle, twinkling instrumental interlude of synth and hand drum, Bagayoko’s unadorned guitar drifts across the song. The title is an expression of gratitude addressed to God, even in the most trying of times. It’s a sentiment that resonates broadly: La Confusion offers uplift in a time of global insecurity.
