Author: Yvonne Mitton
Various Artists – Rock The Kasbah (EMI 864 7912, 2004)
Compilation albums can sometimes be a bit of a risk, and in parts Rock the Kasbah will be downright scary to some ears. But what else could you expect or even want from a collection of tracks brought together in the name of Joe Strummer. Nor should it be totally surprising that disenfranchised musicians should claim The Clash as mentors.
The subtitle, Songs Of Freedom From The Streets Of The East, is rather a loose description for this disparate collection of music; as well as the usual suspects there are tracks that originate from the Ivory Coast, South Africa, Jamaica and the U.K., but who wants to be pedantic – a good half of the artists on this album are worth following up. It has plenty to intrigue and grab the attention of those prepared to be open-minded, with the album veering from the romantic drama of Baghdad, the anthem of Kadim Al Sahir, Radio 3 World Music Audience Award Winner 2004, to the acerbic in-your-face Fortress Europe from the London based collective, Asian Dub Foundation, and just about everything else in between.
The album kick-starts with the loudest claimant to The Clash’s formative influence, the raffish Rachid Taha rolling into his own, much vaunted, stylish homage version of the pithy title track; he was about to record with Strummer before Strummer’s untimely death. But if you really want to rock and roll, this is followed through with an arse-shaking, belter of a live performance of Lela, an unlikely duet between the old funk-meister himself, James Brown, and Egypt’s hugely best selling sha’abi singer, Hakim – the album is worth it for this track alone. Tracks from Blend and Junoon, for all their worthy and understandable pathos are leaden with heavy metal angst, and sit depressingly side by side on the album – I recommend you operate the shuffle/random mode on your kit to re-sequence the tracks which may make them separately more tolerable.
For the faint-hearted there are more conventional offerings, but other tracks that stand out for me are the kwaito singer, Mandoza, with the exuberant Nkalakatha, the sweetly gentle Alamduilillah from Malaysia’s hip-hop duo Too Phat with Yasin, Paris Du Nord from Cheb Mami and K-mel, and also Alpha Blondy’s reggae, Veto De Dieu, chorusing John Lennon’s leitmotif – ‘give peace a chance’.
But in the end what really hits the spot is the final track – Strummer himself with a simple, poignant and heartbreaking performance of Bob Marley’s anthemistic Redemption Song, from his last album, Hardcore, with his band the Mescaleros. More than anything Rock The Kasbah begs the question, where are all the Joe Strummers of the western world now, where music, certainly in the U.K. is suffering a major infection of transient, party-piece performing clones and easy listening pseudo-jazz?
Buy Rock the Kasbah.
Author: World Music Central News Room
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