“Né So” means “home” in Bambara, Mali’s primary lingua franca. The album, Rokia Traoré’s sixth in a career spanning almost two decades, hangs loosely around that same theme. The concept of home has long been fluid for the Malian singer/songwriter, who grew up traveling the world with her diplomat father and who today splits her time between Bamako, Brussels, and Marseille. Before that, not long after the Mali conflict erupted in 2012, she relocated temporarily to Paris but continued to grapple with personal difficulties that had pushed her to consider quitting music. As a result, on Né So, home encompasses the personal and the political, from refuge and nostalgia, to love and freedom.
Né So opens with a benediction. On “Tu voles” (“You fly”), Rokia Traoré sings in French, “You fly/ From every hurt/ You release yourself/ And you swim through the air/ You fly…” Her raspy, quavering voice floats untethered over a spritely reggae guitar and lilting blues figures. By all accounts, she’s trying to sing you, and herself, to a freer place, where, “Body and soul are aligned” and “You glimpse your ideal.”
Working with producer/musician John Parish (PJ Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Eels), who also produced her last album Beautiful Africa, Rokia keeps Né So intimate and minimalistic. Her music is, as ever, mainly a mix of Mandingue and Western pop/rock influences. But this time around, she sounds tired, even as she doubles down on giving moral lessons throughout. On “Ile,” Rokia sings in Bambara over lithe Afrobeat guitars and a drum kit imitating calebasse rhythms: “You there/ Why inflict on others what would be woe for yourself?/ I don’t like violence.” And on “Kolokani,” she sings a soft lullaby reminiscing about her hometown of the same name while paying her respects: “Those who stayed at the source give meaning to our past.”
Most of the textural differences from song to song on Né So are slight, so they tend to bleed into one another. “Kenia” is the most dynamic track on the record vocally, as Rokia switches her airier singing style in for a more strident Wassoulou-esque sound à la Oumou Sangaré or Fatoumata Diawara. The guitars buoying her alternate between Tuareg and American blues. But Traoré herself has pulled this off before to similarly charismatic effect, so while it’s a perfectly good song, it remains unremarkable outside the context of the album. It’s telling, actually, that the one standout track here is a cover. In Traoré’s rendition of “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday, a solitary bass lumbers beneath a guitar line that bends and wavers like heat over asphalt. Her voice aches and shudders, giving way in the end to a ngoni solo that hovers in the middle distance, like a ghostly reminder of ancestors past.
This is the album’s turning point; the remaining two tracks are less songs than they are speeches set to music. On the title track, Rokia says (in French), “In 2014 another five million five hundred thousand people fled their homes/ Forced to seek refuge in towns and countries far from home.” It’s an important message, to be sure. But the track comes perilously close to feeling like the soundtrack to a TV fundraiser special, of the kind where important people appear on screen reciting statistics and platitudes about the human condition over melodramatic background music.
It doesn’t help that label-mate Devendra Banhart joins in to represent the voice of the displaced, delivering lines like, “Where to place my dreams/ Where to hold a heart opened to joy/ Opened to hope.” It only gets worse on the album’s closer, “Se Dan,” which sits somewhere between TED Talk, overwrought spoken word poem, and a lecture from your mom (who loves you but is concerned and wants you to learn some respect). On it, Rokia is joined once more by Devendra to pontificate, this time in English, about how we all have, “One world/ One destiny/ One aim/ One thing to never forget: respect." The sentiment is heartfelt but it verges on the trite, which can be said of the album as a whole.
